"Speaking of country code TLDs, anyone know for sure when.eu will become available?"
The EU isn't a country, it doesn't have a country code, and it won't be recognised by ICANN. All of the territory of the EU overlaps other countries, therefore it will not become a country code. ICANN is keeping the.eu domain reserved for this purpose, but doesn't plan to create a country-specific domain for a non-country.
Disclaimer: everything I know I learned from wikipedia!;-)
"You're finally learning that if you treat your employees right, they won't ruin your reputation."
Out of interest, does anything interesting happen in the football-club manager, or realtime-strategy games if you work your simulated humans too hard?
I know in most games (age of empires, warcraft) the people seem quite cheerful about working day and night, for however many simulated decades you let the game run for, it's only the soldiers (and dwarves, if you have those) who get grumpy.
Though in Warcraft, the heroes seem to perform better if you let them rest between battles, letting health gradually recover. Maybe EA are deciding whether programmers should be counted as heroes or as grunts...
Suggested employment contract at EA: "My life for the horde"
"Looking for free AV or firewall software I encounterd that MOST has spyware bundled with it"
No kidding! I installed ZoneAlarm the other day, after I finally managed to locate it on their website (no, for the nth time, I don't want to install the paid version...)
ZoneAlarm's EULA now has whole sections about "other software" which may be installed, licenses for which will be stored somewhere after installation, but which are included by reference in the ZoneAlarm EULA, and how ZoneAlarm isn't responsible for any of the damage those programs do.
It surprised me so much to see crap in the EULA of a "trusted" product that you have to wonder about freeware in general. Is any of it respectable any more?
Update: just found the text on ZoneAlarm's website (seems to be the same EULA for free and paid versions):
5. THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE: Certain third party software included with the
Software is subject to additional terms and conditions imposed by Zone Labs' third party licensor(s). Such terms and conditions are contained in the "About" pages of the Software and are deemed incorporated herein by reference. You agree to comply with all applicable terms and conditions.
"I don't like spam anymore than anyone else but my advice to you is to install a spam filter and shut up. I get one piece of spam a day."
My company just installed a spam-filter, and it is just randomly deleting emails. It seems to have decided that a load of mailing-lists are spam, as is anything with "MP3" in the email (yes I write audio software at work)
Anyone who thinks the "solution" is for them to automatically send reams of email, and for me to automatically delete reams of email, probably isn't paying any of the costs involved...
"Advantages of the ISO 8601 standard date notation compared to other commonly used variants:
* easily readable and writeable by software
* easily comparable and sortable with a trivial string comparison"
So the ISO date format seems to have been developed as a workaround to the deficiencies of computer software.
And yes, I consider "m/d/y" to be as moronic as everyone else. "Middle-endian" I believe is the name for it. Do these people write a hundred and twenty three as 231?
"Pop-Up windows which steal focus immediately from whatever task has focus (active rather than passive bulletins) Ever been typing something, and hit ENTER just as something pops up?"
This is an annoying one, as it probably happens to me nearly every day.
* Startup kmail, mozilla, and xchat * xchat loads first, because it's not waiting for KDE libraries * type/join #pr.... * realise that the "n" in join has caused kmail to open a new email (it just finished loading), "p" caused it to print an email (despite there being no printer on this computer), and "r" caused it to reply to another email. * OK, thanks, now I've got about a dozen windows I don't need, something is trying to access the printer, and the command I was trying to send to xchat just got lost...
"The option should just be removed from the menu altogether. Sure, that would lead to users getting confused..."
No, if you really want to confuse the user, simply create the menu dynamically, picking 6 items apparently at random to put on the menu. Microsoft can't be wrong here, they have user-interface guidelines and everything. After a few seconds, when the user has had time to read most of the menu items, change them again, this time picking 12 items at random.
If you can, use two columns, and put an animation in so that the menu takes half a second to appear.
"Thankfully Homeland security deemed no terrorists were involved."
Pure genius, that one. "Someone's stolen millions of dollars' worth of easily-sellable computer equipment. After extensive investigation, we decided that the motive was unlikely to be terrorism"
In related news, a man found buying a newspaper is not thought to have been motivated by terrorism.
"Don't they realize that those of us that went thgough the trouble of putting our numbers on tht list won't buy anything from them? Why are they wasting their time and ours?"
Maybe they want to punish the people who thought they could tell big business what to do? Phoning people up to play pre-recorded messages that you can't opt out of seems like an ideal way of doing that...
Surely most interpretations of the space treaties would assume that the whole of mars has the equivalent of "national park" protection.
Is this "designating national-park zones" somehow equivalent to the "free-speech zones", i.e. confining to a small space what used to be available everywhere, so that areas outside the zone can be exploited?
"Wake me up when one of these is upheld in court. That will be news. The patent office still hasn't even approved this one"
I think the "news" is that Microsoft are trying to get as many patents as possible, as quickly as possible.
The apparent stupidity of some of the ideas they've come up with (patenting the comparaison of numbers?) implies that they're not trying to pretend that any innovation is happening at the company, they just want lots of patents.
Notice the timing though. Europe is in the middle of a nasty debate about whether to allow software patents. The SCO harassement is starting to wane. Stallman and the FSF are warning that the next attack against free software will come using patents as attack tools. Everybody is expecting something to happen. And Microsoft seems to have decided it needs a stockpile of ammunition.
I won't be waking you up when it's upheld in court, because that will occur many years after the patents concerned have been used to destroy a competitor (probably a useful OSS program we all use), or as "FUD" which we'll see when our managers sneer at the idea of using free software at work now that they're living in fear of being sued for it.
But the action required is not so much finding prior art, as (a) ensuring that European law remains sane, and (b) continuing to create free software which is more innovative than anything the proprietary world can offer.
"the obvious minor stuff like the government only producing documents in MSWord format or WWW sites that are in MSHTML so only work in MSIE"
It could be worse. Your government could demand that all tax returns be filed electronically, make it illegal to not file electronically, and then create a website for filing so that it can't be used on non-Internet Explorer browsers
Of course, no real government would ever be that retarded.
"That kind of attitude will get you fired. Management is edgy these days and support/admin money is tight. There just isn't room for someone who doesn't want to go along with the flow. It's not 1998 anymore. The Aeron chairs and the foosball table have been auctioned off and there are many other people just waiting to take your job."
+3 Insightful?
-1 Fucking scary that people even think like this anymore. Get away, dogbert! We (normal people, non-telecom companies) don't fire people for installing essential software.
"Yeah, they've been around in the UK for five years now and they're still not that common"
I remember driving for nearly 5 minutes and seeing nothing but Smart cars coming the other way... We later found out that they hold a yearly rally (london to brighton or something...) and that was what we had seen.
Again, Konspire2B is designed for this sort of thing, and has been stable for ages. Create a channel (by posting a public key) and broadcast on that channel. Anyone subscribed to your channel will receive the file and help-out with the distribution. Text, images, video, anything that's a file will work, and if you leave it running, it'll pick-up everything on the channels you're subscribed to.
"Only real webmasters get subpoenaed by the FBI. If you haven't been subpoenaed lately, take a good hard look at your website...it has become meanlingless."
More like, my website-hosts are hemorrhaging information, and there's no way to find out, nor to delete logs more frequently.
Now if only an XS4ALL website website didn't cost 9 times as much as the current solution [PHP+MySQL], we might be gettting somewhere...
Slashdot Mirror
"Speaking of country code TLDs, anyone know for sure when .eu will become available?"
.eu domain reserved for this purpose, but doesn't plan to create a country-specific domain for a non-country.
;-)
The EU isn't a country, it doesn't have a country code, and it won't be recognised by ICANN. All of the territory of the EU overlaps other countries, therefore it will not become a country code. ICANN is keeping the
Disclaimer: everything I know I learned from wikipedia!
At the moment, EU sites are using *.eu.int
Codes to look for are ISO_3166-1 and rfc1394
"You're finally learning that if you treat your employees right, they won't ruin your reputation."
Out of interest, does anything interesting happen in the football-club manager, or realtime-strategy games if you work your simulated humans too hard?
I know in most games (age of empires, warcraft) the people seem quite cheerful about working day and night, for however many simulated decades you let the game run for, it's only the soldiers (and dwarves, if you have those) who get grumpy.
Though in Warcraft, the heroes seem to perform better if you let them rest between battles, letting health gradually recover. Maybe EA are deciding whether programmers should be counted as heroes or as grunts...
Suggested employment contract at EA: "My life for the horde"
"Using a DDOS on spammers is kind of like sending an arsonist to burn down the house of a murderer..."
except without the fires and dead people...
No kidding! I installed ZoneAlarm the other day, after I finally managed to locate it on their website (no, for the nth time, I don't want to install the paid version...)
ZoneAlarm's EULA now has whole sections about "other software" which may be installed, licenses for which will be stored somewhere after installation, but which are included by reference in the ZoneAlarm EULA, and how ZoneAlarm isn't responsible for any of the damage those programs do.
It surprised me so much to see crap in the EULA of a "trusted" product that you have to wonder about freeware in general. Is any of it respectable any more?
Update: just found the text on ZoneAlarm's website (seems to be the same EULA for free and paid versions):
"I don't like spam anymore than anyone else but my advice to you is to install a spam filter and shut up. I get one piece of spam a day."
My company just installed a spam-filter, and it is just randomly deleting emails. It seems to have decided that a load of mailing-lists are spam, as is anything with "MP3" in the email (yes I write audio software at work)
Anyone who thinks the "solution" is for them to automatically send reams of email, and for me to automatically delete reams of email, probably isn't paying any of the costs involved...
"No, the correct way to write a date is 2004-11-29, what's the problem. That sorts correctly!"
Ah, but which came first, the ISO date format, or the need for a fix to the problem of computers that can't sort dates properly?
From the main advocate of that format:
"Advantages of the ISO 8601 standard date notation compared to other commonly used variants:
* easily readable and writeable by software
* easily comparable and sortable with a trivial string comparison"
So the ISO date format seems to have been developed as a workaround to the deficiencies of computer software.
And yes, I consider "m/d/y" to be as moronic as everyone else. "Middle-endian" I believe is the name for it. Do these people write a hundred and twenty three as 231?
"Close but no cigar. It takes you to google's "I'm feeling luck" page as if you had typed in barnes and noble on google and clicked the button."
If anyone else finds that as annoying as I do, there's a fix so that it displays the proper search results
"Pop-Up windows which steal focus immediately from whatever task has focus (active rather than passive bulletins) Ever been typing something, and hit ENTER just as something pops up?"
/join #pr....
This is an annoying one, as it probably happens to me nearly every day.
* Startup kmail, mozilla, and xchat
* xchat loads first, because it's not waiting for KDE libraries
* type
* realise that the "n" in join has caused kmail to open a new email (it just finished loading), "p" caused it to print an email (despite there being no printer on this computer), and "r" caused it to reply to another email.
* OK, thanks, now I've got about a dozen windows I don't need, something is trying to access the printer, and the command I was trying to send to xchat just got lost...
"The option should just be removed from the menu altogether. Sure, that would lead to users getting confused..."
No, if you really want to confuse the user, simply create the menu dynamically, picking 6 items apparently at random to put on the menu. Microsoft can't be wrong here, they have user-interface guidelines and everything. After a few seconds, when the user has had time to read most of the menu items, change them again, this time picking 12 items at random.
If you can, use two columns, and put an animation in so that the menu takes half a second to appear.
"Thankfully Homeland security deemed no terrorists were involved."
Pure genius, that one. "Someone's stolen millions of dollars' worth of easily-sellable computer equipment. After extensive investigation, we decided that the motive was unlikely to be terrorism"
In related news, a man found buying a newspaper is not thought to have been motivated by terrorism.
"You know what would be a fantastic gadget to have?"
"I'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the phone"
(misquoting bash.org , if such a thing is possible)
"Don't they realize that those of us that went thgough the trouble of putting our numbers on tht list won't buy anything from them? Why are they wasting their time and ours?"
Maybe they want to punish the people who thought they could tell big business what to do? Phoning people up to play pre-recorded messages that you can't opt out of seems like an ideal way of doing that...
Surely most interpretations of the space treaties would assume that the whole of mars has the equivalent of "national park" protection.
Is this "designating national-park zones" somehow equivalent to the "free-speech zones", i.e. confining to a small space what used to be available everywhere, so that areas outside the zone can be exploited?
"Wake me up when one of these is upheld in court. That will be news. The patent office still hasn't even approved this one"
I think the "news" is that Microsoft are trying to get as many patents as possible, as quickly as possible.
The apparent stupidity of some of the ideas they've come up with (patenting the comparaison of numbers?) implies that they're not trying to pretend that any innovation is happening at the company, they just want lots of patents.
Notice the timing though. Europe is in the middle of a nasty debate about whether to allow software patents. The SCO harassement is starting to wane. Stallman and the FSF are warning that the next attack against free software will come using patents as attack tools. Everybody is expecting something to happen. And Microsoft seems to have decided it needs a stockpile of ammunition.
I won't be waking you up when it's upheld in court, because that will occur many years after the patents concerned have been used to destroy a competitor (probably a useful OSS program we all use), or as "FUD" which we'll see when our managers sneer at the idea of using free software at work now that they're living in fear of being sued for it.
But the action required is not so much finding prior art, as (a) ensuring that European law remains sane, and (b) continuing to create free software which is more innovative than anything the proprietary world can offer.
"WHO do you call when 911 don't respond?"
Call anyone you like - Echelon will still be listening...
"They have been charged with conspiracy to commit interstate shipment of stolen property"
Otherwise known as "whatever's necessary to make it a federal issue"?
"the obvious minor stuff like the government only producing documents in MSWord format or WWW sites that are in MSHTML so only work in MSIE"
It could be worse. Your government could demand that all tax returns be filed electronically, make it illegal to not file electronically, and then create a website for filing so that it can't be used on non-Internet Explorer browsers
Of course, no real government would ever be that retarded.
"That kind of attitude will get you fired. Management is edgy these days and support/admin money is tight. There just isn't room for someone who doesn't want to go along with the flow. It's not 1998 anymore. The Aeron chairs and the foosball table have been auctioned off and there are many other people just waiting to take your job."
+3 Insightful?
-1 Fucking scary that people even think like this anymore. Get away, dogbert! We (normal people, non-telecom companies) don't fire people for installing essential software.
"If this thing looks "cool" to you, I'd hate to see what wasn't cool...."
This isn't cool.
"Yeah, they've been around in the UK for five years now and they're still not that common"
I remember driving for nearly 5 minutes and seeing nothing but Smart cars coming the other way... We later found out that they hold a yearly rally (london to brighton or something...) and that was what we had seen.
"Tax private use of larger vehicles. Either through petrol(gas) tax, road tax, purchase tax, take your pick!"
Or just enforce the weight limits on residential roads...
"EDS are preparing themselves to manage the UK national identity database and identity card scheme"
I trust they added the "300% overbudget and 10 years late" into their cost-estimates, as is traditional with EDS projects?
Again, Konspire2B is designed for this sort of thing, and has been stable for ages. Create a channel (by posting a public key) and broadcast on that channel. Anyone subscribed to your channel will receive the file and help-out with the distribution. Text, images, video, anything that's a file will work, and if you leave it running, it'll pick-up everything on the channels you're subscribed to.
"Only real webmasters get subpoenaed by the FBI. If you haven't been subpoenaed lately, take a good hard look at your website...it has become meanlingless."
More like, my website-hosts are hemorrhaging information, and there's no way to find out, nor to delete logs more frequently.
Now if only an XS4ALL website website didn't cost 9 times as much as the current solution [PHP+MySQL], we might be gettting somewhere...
"What's the instinctive reaction when you're falling behind? Jack up the pace"
"The Emperor is coming here?"
"That is correct, Captain. And he is most displeased with your apparent lack of progress."
"We shall redouble our efforts,"
"I hope so, for your sake..."