In most of the U.S., there are two ways to broadband: The Cable Monopoly, and the Bell Phone Company Monopoly. (Which may actually be an independent, non-Bell company in some areas)
In some rural areas, the Bell Phone Company doesn't even offer DSL, because it figures the few, far-between customers wouldn't offer enough return on investment to extend the DSL loops.
In some densely populated areas, the Bell Phone Company has competition from Competitive DSL companies like Covad and Speakeasy. They provide service using the Phone Company's copper lines to your house, but connect to their own network on the other end.
So depending on where you live, you might have - Cable only - Cable or Bell DSL - Cable or several DSL providers
The Bell Phone Company often requires you to maintain a landline telephone connection, whether you use it or not, if you want a DSL connection. That's what TFA is about.
With cable, they will usually sell you just broadband if that's what you want. It might not be worth it, though. my cable company charges $10 for "basic" TV (around 12 channels) and $40 for broadband-with-existing-TV. Or you could pay $60 for broadband-only service.
A lot of the crap in employment agreements is legalese nonsense that it would take a team of lawyers to interpret
More importantly, it probably doesn't matter anyway. For the most part, your boss/company can fire you, for just about any reason, so long as it's not because of your race, gender, religion, etc. "You're not a team player." "You're not an asset to the company." "Other employees don't like your attitude." Simple as that.
Network Associates are not the government, and could not force anyone to give up their first amendment rights through contract.
The question is, does firing employees who publicly criticize their employer count as an impingement of free speech? The NA agreement basically said that you could never, ever publish anything about NA's software without permission. There was no way out of that licensing agreement.
Now, IANAL, but I can see two perfectly legal ways that an employer could retaliate against an employee. First, fire them. (See above.) Second, sue for libel/slander, assuming that the employee's statements were provably false and damaging. Neither of these relies upon any fancy legal wording.
in Aqua you have to really quit the applications by selecting [Application name] -> Quit from the bar on top of the screen, even if you closed all the windows that this application had open. I think that's just plain stupid and very non-intuitive.
Consider editing a series of Word docs on both machines. On a PC 1. *double-click Word document* 2. *hourglass appears* 3. Microsoft(R) Office(R) Word(R) 2003
Copyright 2002 Microsoft Corp. All your base are belong to Bill. 4. *document appears* 5. *edit edit edit* 6. *save* 7. *close*
(repeat 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 for each successive document)
- or - 1. *double-click Word document* 2. *icon bounces* 3. Microsoft(R) Word(R) 2004
Copyright 2003 Microsoft Corp. All your base are belong to Bill. 4. *document appears* 5. *edit edit edit* 6. *save* 7. *close*
(repeat 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 for each successive document)
Removing operations from a loop enhances performance.
You press return to select the default (Save). Command-D selects Don't Save. Command-. (period) selects cancel. (The origins for which are shrouded in antiquity.)
Compared with Windows, where (depending on the whims of the developer) you might get either
Do you want to save this document before closing? [YES] [NO] [CANCEL] or Are you sure you want to close this document without saving? [YES] [NO] [CANCEL]
As something becomes more popular, existing but previously unknown vulnerabilities are more likely to be found.
Yes, indeed. Actually, this sounds kind of familiar...
More appropriately, there may be a relationship between the popularity of a codebase and the likelihood that any inherent vulnerabilities will be discovered. Whether this is good or bad for the users of the software depends entirely on whether any discovered vulnerabilities are fixed, or allowed to fester so that they can be exploited.
Vulnerabilities are a product of mistakes on the part of the people who write the code. The number of bugs in a piece of code is a function of the experience, skill, and coding/QC practices of the programmer(s) who wrote that code.
There is no relationship between popularity and vulnerabilities in software. Period.
There may be a relationship between popularity and exploits in code (hackers targeting the biggest slice in the pie.) But this wasn't about exploits, it was about vulnerabilities.
More appropriately, there may be a relationship between the popularity of a codebase and the likelihood that any inherent vulnerabilities will be discovered. Whether this is good or bad for the users of the software depends entirely on whether any discovered vulnerabilities are fixed, or allowed to fester so that they can be exploited.
DSpace solves only a small portion of the archiving problem.
Where does the metadata come from? And more importantly, what happens when the bitstreams are dumped into the repository? You'll end up with a bunch of well-organized, but completely unreadable, binary data. Unless you convert everything into XML, which is probably a $300 million project right there.
I wasn't talking about New Orleans. I was talking about protection from tornadoes in the midwest. Where they use safe rooms (new houses, rich people) and storm cellars (older houses, lower income people). Please follow the thread of the discussion before commenting
vim will execute because it has HFS metadata that tells OS X that to run it using Terminal. This metadata is lost if you try to send the executable by eMail. Just like any other type of Mac executable, be it.app bundle or CFM app.
Feel free to try eMailing vim to yourself. You'll end up with a generic document.
The lack of metadata will neuter an executable every time.
So the people so poor that they're living paycheck to paycheck, unable to build a "bank vault" to protect themselves in, or even have the common decency to own a car and be able to fill it with expensive gas didn't care enough to live?
Those people live in older houses. Which, in "tornado alley" anyway, were equipped with storm cellars. Without fail.
The reinforced "safe rooms" in newer houses are intended as substitutes for storm cellars.
Here we have the promising beginnings of a company that could revolutionize the business market with personal computers. Why, then, did it end up being someone other than Apple that did so?
Because Apple didn't have the single feature most desired by busines buyers:
The IBM logo.
Apple was a tiny company in California. Who would bet a company on a tiny company run by California hippies? IBM was a huge, century-old corporation in New York. It's salesmen wore suits. It's products were used by the government and by big financial institutions. Given the choice, which would your average pointy-haired MBA choose?
The only companies (besides Apple) that succeeded after IBM entered the market were those that could offer "100% IBM Compatible" systems.
It's not just downtown New Orleans. Millions of people were affected by the storm, and hundreds of thousands, in Mississippi, Alabama, and the rest of Louisiana need food, water, and medical supplies. The people evacuated to the Astrodome in Houston need help now. The hundreds of thousands already in shelters need help now. After the people still in New Orleans get evacuated, they will need help too. Many will get these things from the American Red Cross before FEMA can even get down there.
Yes, the people stranded in the Superdome and Convention Center need immediate help that only the government can provide. But those people are not the only victims, despite what CNN might have you believe.
The US Government does not pay for, staff, or organize these shelters on its own, and it does not feed these people solely out of our tax money. I don't know where that FEMA budget goes, but it only comes into play days after a disaster. The government bureaucracy is reactive; private charities like the Salvation Army and Red Cross are proactive.
After Hurricane Hugo, it took a week for FEMA to get off it's collective ass. The Salvation Army was there. The Red Cross was there. The state and local governments were pleading for federal assistance. I was living there at the time, and I luckily did not need any aid. If it'd been up to FEMA, hundreds would have died before getting help.
It's your money. Give it to whomever you want. Keep it. Use it to pay your taxes, I don't care. But don't tell people that donating money to private charities won't help. It may not drain New Orleans or airlift those people out of the Superdome, but that doesn't make it a scam
As it happened, the court's approach seemed to invalidate the copyrighting of a broad "look and feel" of a piece of software, though this was not decisively stated in the court's ruling. The fact that Apple and Microsoft had entered into the licensing agreement for Windows 1.0 made a large part of the case a mere contractual matter rather than a matter of copyright law -- much against Apple's preference -- so it was not necessary for the court to set a precedent in its ruling. It remains unclear what would have happened if Apple had acquired a software patent purporting to secure the "look and feel" of the Macintosh user interface as an invention, and had then pursued Microsoft and HP under patent law.
I'm just speculating, (like almost everyone else here) but anyway...obviously the dikes have to be patched before any drying-out action takes place.
Afterward, though, there's a heck of a lot of water to be moved out, and the existing pumps aren't up to the task. More pumps will need to be brought in, but there are only so many mobile pumps in the world. Besides, they need long hoses to carry that water out over the levees.
An absorbent material could be used anywhere, and then placed into any container (doesn't have to be watertight, so a pickup or dump truck could work) and driven out. No, it wouldn't solve all New Orleans' problems, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the stuff was used in some capacity. Again, I'm just speculating.
Dragging and dropping was indeed invented by Apple. It wasn't present in the Xerox Alto/Star or any previous mouse-driven system; it appeared for the first time in the Apple Lisa.
The drag-and-drop gesture (yes, it was the first mouse gesture) allowed Apple to eliminate the "move" button on the mouse. The double-click behavior allowed it to eliminate the "activate" button, meaning Apple could use a single-button mouse to achieve all the functions of a three-button mouse (at the time.)
I doubt anyone would have called it obvious or intuitive in 1983. If it were, we might all be using single-button mice.
For that matter, I believe that sliders, and radio buttons as features of a GUI were introduced by Apple at one time or another. (Xerox had buttons, scroll bars and popup menus, and maybe some other thing's I've forgotten.) Whether any of these GUI controls were ever worthy of patent protection is debatable, of course.
To be truthful, things like cell phones, wireless data networks, and satellite links are luxuries in any time or circumstance. All a human needs is food, water, and shelter, right? So why does anyone have a cell phone or computer?
Speed and accuracy.
Moving rescue personnel, evacuees, water, food, medicine, and other supplies around is a logistics nightmare. Especially when the roads and airports are covered in debris. Coordinating everything, and getting it out there before the victims die of exposure, is exactly the sort of things communications and computers are built for. Only here, it's lives on the line instead of money.
Ham radio is great, but just try keeping up-to-date supply inventories using pencil and paper. Or keeping a conversation confidential, so that a hungry mob doesn't swarm the relief trucks before they get to the distribution point.
As I understand it, "astro-turfing" is a similar concept used to support a political cause. For example, a politician might send anonymous campaign workers to pose as "activists" at a rally, where they would spread the candidate's message. (Deliberately vague, but I don't want to get political.)
Viral marketing is the same thing done by companies, for money. See also "slashvertisement."
The problem is, there is no university level program to teach professional software development.
"MIS" or "Information science and technology" at most universities is taught so that people don't have to write much code. There might be two programming courses in Visual Basic or something, just to "get a feel for it." The rest of the student's time is spent learning specialized business and accounting topics.
Software Engineering is taught as a subset of computer science. The line on the diploma says "Computer Science," just like the kids who specialized in machine learning, algorithm analysis, and computability.
HR people, looking for highly qualified programmers, make "Computer Science" a requirement, since everybody with the requisite skills has a CS degree (though not everyone with a CS degree may have the skills or interest to become a programmer.) This perpetuates the cycle. Had I paid more attention in my theory classes, I might try to analyze this loop, but I'm just a lowly programmer.
I rather doubt that the bus ever makes it up to ~65MPH in typical use, though. Most city busses spend there time in the 30-40MPH range, I'd guess. Maybe charter/tour busses?
Busses and Toyotas aside, the "new Concorde" still compares poorly to ordinary aircraft. A Boeing 747-400, at 416 passengers and 0.85 Mach, yields 489 passengers/mach.
On the other hand, the more useful Mach*passenger metric, as proposed by someone else in this discussion, would put the 747-400 at 353 passenger-Machs, making it less, umm, "efficient" than this new jet (600 passenger-Machs) but more than the old Concorde (100 passengers at Mach 2, or 200 passenger-Machs.)
Apple has neglected or actively discouraged game developers over a long period of time -- starting with a refusal to produce a joystick standard (so there is still no standard joystick interface after 20 years)
Under the Classic Mac OS, Apple had I calledGame Sprockets. It wasn't perfect. Many Mac game companies used it.
I don't know if you've dealt much with the Mac userbase, but here's how we tend to deal with device drivers:
We don't.
We bought Macs because Apple takes care of that for us. Apple either writes its own drivers, or tests third-party drivers, and bundles them with the OS.
Rarely do Mac users install drivers. Even if manufacturers provided them on CD or for download, it would detract from the "plug and play" philosophy that, well, makes OS X more than just a pretty-colored Unix. Changing this would make a number of loyal customers very angry, even as it makes 1337 software pirates very happy.
Slashdot Mirror
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In most of the U.S., there are two ways to broadband: The Cable Monopoly, and the Bell Phone Company Monopoly. (Which may actually be an independent, non-Bell company in some areas)
In some rural areas, the Bell Phone Company doesn't even offer DSL, because it figures the few, far-between customers wouldn't offer enough return on investment to extend the DSL loops.
In some densely populated areas, the Bell Phone Company has competition from Competitive DSL companies like Covad and Speakeasy. They provide service using the Phone Company's copper lines to your house, but connect to their own network on the other end.
So depending on where you live, you might have
- Cable only
- Cable or Bell DSL
- Cable or several DSL providers
The Bell Phone Company often requires you to maintain a landline telephone connection, whether you use it or not, if you want a DSL connection. That's what TFA is about.
With cable, they will usually sell you just broadband if that's what you want. It might not be worth it, though. my cable company charges $10 for "basic" TV (around 12 channels) and $40 for broadband-with-existing-TV. Or you could pay $60 for broadband-only service.
A lot of the crap in employment agreements is legalese nonsense that it would take a team of lawyers to interpret
More importantly, it probably doesn't matter anyway. For the most part, your boss/company can fire you, for just about any reason, so long as it's not because of your race, gender, religion, etc. "You're not a team player." "You're not an asset to the company." "Other employees don't like your attitude." Simple as that.
Network Associates are not the government, and could not force anyone to give up their first amendment rights through contract.
The question is, does firing employees who publicly criticize their employer count as an impingement of free speech? The NA agreement basically said that you could never, ever publish anything about NA's software without permission. There was no way out of that licensing agreement.
Now, IANAL, but I can see two perfectly legal ways that an employer could retaliate against an employee. First, fire them. (See above.) Second, sue for libel/slander, assuming that the employee's statements were provably false and damaging. Neither of these relies upon any fancy legal wording.
Nahh, the days before Quantum Link...Apple users had BBS's, and Commodore users couldn't even communicate....
in Aqua you have to really quit the applications by selecting [Application name] -> Quit from the bar on top of the screen, even if you closed all the windows that this application had open. I think that's just plain stupid and very non-intuitive.
Consider editing a series of Word docs on both machines.
On a PC
1. *double-click Word document*
2. *hourglass appears*
3. Microsoft(R) Office(R) Word(R) 2003
Copyright 2002 Microsoft Corp. All your base are belong to Bill.
4. *document appears*
5. *edit edit edit*
6. *save*
7. *close*
(repeat 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 for each successive document)
- or -
1. *double-click Word document*
2. *icon bounces*
3. Microsoft(R) Word(R) 2004
Copyright 2003 Microsoft Corp. All your base are belong to Bill.
4. *document appears*
5. *edit edit edit*
6. *save*
7. *close*
(repeat 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 for each successive document)
Removing operations from a loop enhances performance.
You press return to select the default (Save).
Command-D selects Don't Save.
Command-. (period) selects cancel. (The origins for which are shrouded in antiquity.)
Compared with Windows, where (depending on the whims of the developer) you might get either
Do you want to save this document before closing?
[YES] [NO] [CANCEL]
or
Are you sure you want to close this document without saving?
[YES] [NO] [CANCEL]
As something becomes more popular, existing but previously unknown vulnerabilities are more likely to be found.
Yes, indeed. Actually, this sounds kind of familiar...
More appropriately, there may be a relationship between the popularity of a codebase and the likelihood that any inherent vulnerabilities will be discovered. Whether this is good or bad for the users of the software depends entirely on whether any discovered vulnerabilities are fixed, or allowed to fester so that they can be exploited.
Aha.
Vulnerabilities are a product of mistakes on the part of the people who write the code. The number of bugs in a piece of code is a function of the experience, skill, and coding/QC practices of the programmer(s) who wrote that code.
There is no relationship between popularity and vulnerabilities in software. Period.
There may be a relationship between popularity and exploits in code (hackers targeting the biggest slice in the pie.) But this wasn't about exploits, it was about vulnerabilities.
More appropriately, there may be a relationship between the popularity of a codebase and the likelihood that any inherent vulnerabilities will be discovered. Whether this is good or bad for the users of the software depends entirely on whether any discovered vulnerabilities are fixed, or allowed to fester so that they can be exploited.
DSpace solves only a small portion of the archiving problem.
Where does the metadata come from? And more importantly, what happens when the bitstreams are dumped into the repository? You'll end up with a bunch of well-organized, but completely unreadable, binary data. Unless you convert everything into XML, which is probably a $300 million project right there.
Your point being?
I wasn't talking about New Orleans. I was talking about protection from tornadoes in the midwest. Where they use safe rooms (new houses, rich people) and storm cellars (older houses, lower income people). Please follow the thread of the discussion before commenting
vim will execute because it has HFS metadata that tells OS X that to run it using Terminal. This metadata is lost if you try to send the executable by eMail. Just like any other type of Mac executable, be it .app bundle or CFM app.
Feel free to try eMailing vim to yourself. You'll end up with a generic document.
The lack of metadata will neuter an executable every time.
So the people so poor that they're living paycheck to paycheck, unable to build a "bank vault" to protect themselves in, or even have the common decency to own a car and be able to fill it with expensive gas didn't care enough to live?
Those people live in older houses. Which, in "tornado alley" anyway, were equipped with storm cellars. Without fail.
The reinforced "safe rooms" in newer houses are intended as substitutes for storm cellars.
It appears that it is time for "DVD" Jon Johansen to prove that he deserves the title he has been granted by all of geekdom.
Here we have the promising beginnings of a company that could revolutionize the business market with personal computers. Why, then, did it end up being someone other than Apple that did so?
Because Apple didn't have the single feature most desired by busines buyers:
The IBM logo.
Apple was a tiny company in California. Who would bet a company on a tiny company run by California hippies? IBM was a huge, century-old corporation in New York. It's salesmen wore suits. It's products were used by the government and by big financial institutions. Given the choice, which would your average pointy-haired MBA choose?
The only companies (besides Apple) that succeeded after IBM entered the market were those that could offer "100% IBM Compatible" systems.
It's not just downtown New Orleans. Millions of people were affected by the storm, and hundreds of thousands, in Mississippi, Alabama, and the rest of Louisiana need food, water, and medical supplies. The people evacuated to the Astrodome in Houston need help now. The hundreds of thousands already in shelters need help now. After the people still in New Orleans get evacuated, they will need help too. Many will get these things from the American Red Cross before FEMA can even get down there.
Yes, the people stranded in the Superdome and Convention Center need immediate help that only the government can provide. But those people are not the only victims, despite what CNN might have you believe.
The US Government does not pay for, staff, or organize these shelters on its own, and it does not feed these people solely out of our tax money. I don't know where that FEMA budget goes, but it only comes into play days after a disaster. The government bureaucracy is reactive; private charities like the Salvation Army and Red Cross are proactive.
After Hurricane Hugo, it took a week for FEMA to get off it's collective ass. The Salvation Army was there. The Red Cross was there. The state and local governments were pleading for federal assistance. I was living there at the time, and I luckily did not need any aid. If it'd been up to FEMA, hundreds would have died before getting help.
It's your money. Give it to whomever you want. Keep it. Use it to pay your taxes, I don't care. But don't tell people that donating money to private charities won't help. It may not drain New Orleans or airlift those people out of the Superdome, but that doesn't make it a scam
As it happened, the court's approach seemed to invalidate the copyrighting of a broad "look and feel" of a piece of software, though this was not decisively stated in the court's ruling. The fact that Apple and Microsoft had entered into the licensing agreement for Windows 1.0 made a large part of the case a mere contractual matter rather than a matter of copyright law -- much against Apple's preference -- so it was not necessary for the court to set a precedent in its ruling. It remains unclear what would have happened if Apple had acquired a software patent purporting to secure the "look and feel" of the Macintosh user interface as an invention, and had then pursued Microsoft and HP under patent law.
From the Wikipedia article, of course.
I'm just speculating, (like almost everyone else here) but anyway...obviously the dikes have to be patched before any drying-out action takes place.
Afterward, though, there's a heck of a lot of water to be moved out, and the existing pumps aren't up to the task. More pumps will need to be brought in, but there are only so many mobile pumps in the world. Besides, they need long hoses to carry that water out over the levees.
An absorbent material could be used anywhere, and then placed into any container (doesn't have to be watertight, so a pickup or dump truck could work) and driven out. No, it wouldn't solve all New Orleans' problems, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the stuff was used in some capacity. Again, I'm just speculating.
Dragging and dropping was indeed invented by Apple. It wasn't present in the Xerox Alto/Star or any previous mouse-driven system; it appeared for the first time in the Apple Lisa.
The drag-and-drop gesture (yes, it was the first mouse gesture) allowed Apple to eliminate the "move" button on the mouse. The double-click behavior allowed it to eliminate the "activate" button, meaning Apple could use a single-button mouse to achieve all the functions of a three-button mouse (at the time.)
I doubt anyone would have called it obvious or intuitive in 1983. If it were, we might all be using single-button mice.
For that matter, I believe that sliders, and radio buttons as features of a GUI were introduced by Apple at one time or another. (Xerox had buttons, scroll bars and popup menus, and maybe some other thing's I've forgotten.) Whether any of these GUI controls were ever worthy of patent protection is debatable, of course.
What about those gels that absorb many hundreds of times their weight in water? Dump 'em in, truck them out, dry them, repeat?
To be truthful, things like cell phones, wireless data networks, and satellite links are luxuries in any time or circumstance. All a human needs is food, water, and shelter, right? So why does anyone have a cell phone or computer?
Speed and accuracy.
Moving rescue personnel, evacuees, water, food, medicine, and other supplies around is a logistics nightmare. Especially when the roads and airports are covered in debris. Coordinating everything, and getting it out there before the victims die of exposure, is exactly the sort of things communications and computers are built for. Only here, it's lives on the line instead of money.
Ham radio is great, but just try keeping up-to-date supply inventories using pencil and paper. Or keeping a conversation confidential, so that a hungry mob doesn't swarm the relief trucks before they get to the distribution point.
As I understand it, "astro-turfing" is a similar concept used to support a political cause. For example, a politician might send anonymous campaign workers to pose as "activists" at a rally, where they would spread the candidate's message. (Deliberately vague, but I don't want to get political.)
Viral marketing is the same thing done by companies, for money. See also "slashvertisement."
The problem is, there is no university level program to teach professional software development.
"MIS" or "Information science and technology" at most universities is taught so that people don't have to write much code. There might be two programming courses in Visual Basic or something, just to "get a feel for it." The rest of the student's time is spent learning specialized business and accounting topics.
Software Engineering is taught as a subset of computer science. The line on the diploma says "Computer Science," just like the kids who specialized in machine learning, algorithm analysis, and computability.
HR people, looking for highly qualified programmers, make "Computer Science" a requirement, since everybody with the requisite skills has a CS degree (though not everyone with a CS degree may have the skills or interest to become a programmer.) This perpetuates the cycle. Had I paid more attention in my theory classes, I might try to analyze this loop, but I'm just a lowly programmer.
I rather doubt that the bus ever makes it up to ~65MPH in typical use, though. Most city busses spend there time in the 30-40MPH range, I'd guess. Maybe charter/tour busses?
Busses and Toyotas aside, the "new Concorde" still compares poorly to ordinary aircraft. A Boeing 747-400, at 416 passengers and 0.85 Mach, yields 489 passengers/mach.
On the other hand, the more useful Mach*passenger metric, as proposed by someone else in this discussion, would put the 747-400 at 353 passenger-Machs, making it less, umm, "efficient" than this new jet (600 passenger-Machs) but more than the old Concorde (100 passengers at Mach 2, or 200 passenger-Machs.)
Apple has neglected or actively discouraged game developers over a long period of time -- starting with a refusal to produce a joystick standard (so there is still no standard joystick interface after 20 years)
Under the Classic Mac OS, Apple had I calledGame Sprockets. It wasn't perfect. Many Mac game companies used it.
I don't know if you've dealt much with the Mac userbase, but here's how we tend to deal with device drivers:
We don't.
We bought Macs because Apple takes care of that for us. Apple either writes its own drivers, or tests third-party drivers, and bundles them with the OS.
Rarely do Mac users install drivers. Even if manufacturers provided them on CD or for download, it would detract from the "plug and play" philosophy that, well, makes OS X more than just a pretty-colored Unix. Changing this would make a number of loyal customers very angry, even as it makes 1337 software pirates very happy.