Phew, thanks for that - here I was thinking it's just me. I'd never worked much with Linux before, and tried installing Ubuntu on three separate computers, none of them working at all. Similar to your experience I think, though I didn't get as far as working out how to configure the X server. On two machines the installation process hung and errored itself to death, on the third it worked but I ended up with a screen full of garbage... Mandrake/Mandriva: similar results. If it's hard enough to work out that it requires a day of research to find every damn driver, then it's too hard. And though I've only ever bought one copy of Windows, I have to say, one day of my time is easily worth the price of a Windows licence.
Mind you, an older copy of Knoppix (3.3) worked just fine thanks...
Here in New Zealand the original is still being sold, and in a lot of places I've seen it being advertised as "uncut", "unedited version", "get it while it's still hot!" etc.
I'm not sure what the export laws on software are in New Zealand - it might be possible to buy it from an overseas address - try the local Gameplanet site (link withheld for reaons of taste).
Correction to my previous post: only remove the space in "...2a,00,3a,..." and in "Contro l -- don't remove the spaces in "Scancode Map" and "Keyboard Layout".
It sounds like you're using Windows. In 2000/XP/2003 you can disable the 'caps lock' key (and any other you want, e.g. 'insert' if like me you hate it almost as much as caps lock) by editing the registry. See this page for more details.
Shortcut: paste the following into Notepad and save as a.reg file. Open the file to change the registry. But make sure to remove all the spaces (inserted by Slashdot); and type 'return' after the last line.
This re-maps 'caps lock' to 'left shift', for the current user only. To make this apply to all users, replace HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Keyboard Layout with HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Keyboard Layout (again, remove the space inserted by/.). Then restart. Happy non-caps-locking...
Ah well. I was curious, that's all... I have an interest in languages. But I'm afraid I don't buy the paynim connection either - that seems to come from the Latin word for 'pagan'.
* Exception: Linguistically Fairy appears to derive from the Persian word for Persian (Farsi).
Not sure where you got this from. At least according to the OED, 'fairy' comes from words that are cognate with 'fay', which in turn are derived from Latin fatum, 'fate', which in turn is derived from the verb fari, 'to speak'. Of course evidence is not always compelling, and the OED doesn't provide quite enough evidence to convince me that 'fay' absolutely certainly comes from fatum. But what is your evidence?
Heh. I'm now in the fortunate position of supervising research students, and fairly regularly discuss with them the issues of backing up their theses. I've persuaded one student to back up her thesis to a new CDR every week... I just hope she labels them:-)
In my field (a humanities discipline) a distressing number of people routinely use floppies. I keep on warning them - the problem is that most of the floppies they have are second/third/nth-hand ones that have been getting re-used since the early 90s. Not one floppy a colleague has given me has ever lasted long enough to retrieve the data off it.
Why don't they just e-mail documents to me, you ask? Well, some people in humanities are sufficiently close to the archetypal geek's grandmother in terms of their computer capabilities that they can't find the "Attach" button, and even if they could they couldn't navigate to the file. Not all, by any means, but some. (I'm getting way off topic here, but there's one very cute colleague who, when he accidentally dragged MS Word off the Dock in OS X, had a real panic because it went *poof* in a cloud of smoke and he thought he'd deleted it altogether. Well... come to think of it, that's a pretty reasonable conclusion to draw from such a stupidly designed graphical effect.)
Anyway, thank the gods for students: at least they know enough to use USB flash drives rather than floppies. (Though even some USB drives are designed in just such a way that they can't fit into any of the USB sockets provided by the nice people at Dell.)
There are some interesting ideas here, but my own suspicion is that economics will obstruct, heavily modify, or otherwise wreck the intended outcomes. One example:
Archaelology and paleontology will be essentially competed sciences,...
I think it's a pretty safe bet that this is not going to happen. Where's the funding going to come from? Present-day archaeology is, for the most part, grotesquely unfunded, and has barely made a dent in what is available of the remnants of times past. No one other than academic bodies currently has any interest in funding this kind of research; academic bodies are likely to get much poorer over the next century; and no external funding body, like corporations, is ever going to have an interest (or at best, any more than an altruistic/philanthropic interest) in funding that kind of research. And that's already leaving aside the (perhaps more pertinent) fact that archaeology at its most important is primarily a testing ground for sociological and historical theories; uncovering relics is a means to that end. And debate on that kind of topic is never going to die down.
All sex laws and taboos will be seen as medieval.
I'd like to think so, but there are always going to be powerful interests (religious and otherwise) in maintaining taboos. It may well be that sex taboos may vanish, but I'm quite certain that there will still be taboos of one kind or another. Think also: how did so-called "Victorian" prudishness ever come about? I'm sure there's a good answer to that, which I don't have time to investigate right now, but my point is that it is not the case that human history has been one long freeing-up of people's inhibitions and instincts.
I have other quibbles, but I guess the main caveat I have to offer is this: for any given social or technological goal, there are going to be wealthy vested interests trying to make sure it does not ever come about, regardless of whether any one person perceives the goal to be a good or an evil. To be sure, most of the predictions you make are not goals as such, but I think the same caveat applies nonetheless.
Hurray, pedantry time! Correction: Socrates has only been dead for 2403 years, since he died in 399 BC and (I assume) you're writing from 2005 AD. There was no year 0.
Which means that either Google doesn't have the right to scan the web or it does have the right to scan books.
Yes, AFAIK that is accurate: Google does have the right both to scan the web and to scan the books. Google is not suspending the scanning of copyrighted books because it's against the law; they appear to be doing so as a kind of "good faith" gesture towards publishers. It appears to be entirely legal for Google to scan copyrighted books on behalf of libraries that own the books (a lot of people seem to forget that bit!). It certainly doesn't seem that anyone is under any actual legal obligation to stop scanning.
At the same time, I guess Google doesn't want any legal hassles from publishers, no matter how illegitimate their lawsuits would be. It's not hard to see why they're doing this, though (a) it's disappointing that the publishers get their way many books are excluded from one of the greatest research tools ever imagined; and (b) it's good that Google has not admitted that what they are doing is in any way illegitimate.
I'm sure there's a lot of variation between professors. I'm a lecturer (= professor in the US) and I always thoroughly price-check (because I'm young enough to remember being a student? I hope that's not the only reason).
At the same time I don't think it would be a good idea for anyone if publishers abolished free examination copies for profs. I don't even have a vested interest, mind you: in my country no publisher ever gives examination copies to profs - I wish they would. I've asked, and publishers just ignore me; alas, I can't even avoid books published by the especially rude publishers, because they're all like that. Well, you live with it - not a major problem, really, since everyone's in the same boat.
Having said that, sometimes I'm hampered in my choice of textbooks by the fact that some books get re-used from one course to another. That means if we're going to change the set books, everyone has to agree to it. At the moment for one set of courses we're using the most expensive option available, for no good reason: it's neither better nor worse than the other books available, but costs twice as much. And there's not a thing I can do about it, because of one obstinate berk.
Anyway, I try make up for that in other courses. For what it's worth: some people do check, and sometimes there are complicating factors that prevent us from taking the most sensible course.
Oh, and I routinely take out-of-copyright editions, format them nicely, and print them off for students to photocopy, when I can.
Are there any portable music players that support.ogg vorbis yet? (and are they any good?)
Many; probably most (in terms of brands, obviously not in terms of number of units). All will also play mp3, most will play wma, many will play flac, almost all will play a range of other formats too. For starters try the iAudio and Rio ranges. Both offer both flash and HDD players. Also lots of mobile phones, even digital watches, support ogg playing (though in a few cases, only via a soft/firmware update). Just google. There's lots out there.
My personal favourite: iAudio. They've got some fantastic products, also including stuff like hand-held XviD/DivX players, etc. Sound quality: as good as or better than the iPod. Battery life: definitely better than the iPod. Price: not as cheap as older iPods, but still very well-priced IMHO.
Office 2002 or 2003 has it on the Save As menu. The option you want is "Web Page (filtered)|*.html".
WOW, that's quite a difference from older versions of Office - I don't use MS Office any more, so I hadn't spotted this. It's still very messy if you export "other people's" Office documents into html, because no one uses styles and so all the formatting is done by ad hoc class tags; but it is most definitely a hell of a lot better than the screwed up mess that Office used to produce.
Now if MS just removed the "Save as Web Page" option and replaced it with this "filtered" option, wouldn't the OP's life be a lot easier...
Oh, and as other people have noted, the Dreamweaver command to "clean up MS Word html" is pretty good, though nothing except a competent human is going to produce perfect tidy CSS-ed output.
I'm not sure if this is feasable as it would be hard to ward off spammers, but is there any chance that we could see an OSS distributed search system that works like SETI@HOME?
I think distributed search is an interesting idea, and worth exploring, but very likely to be prone to all sorts of exploits. My guess is spam would be the least of the worries. It'd be feasible, I'm sure, to get people to voluntarily make their desktop a "node" in a massively distributed search engine (another thread has been suggesting names starting with K; one that leapt to my mind is KaZeArch... ho ho), but:
bandwidth!!!!!! do you really want a kajillion nodes around the world zapping your server every second? OK, this could be dealt with with a little forethought.
the possibility of security holes; now, of course one can take precautions against that, but basically the more things can develop holes, the more will. Security holes in OSes are bad enough; I can imagine one hole in an app that makes all computers part of a huge interdependent network could cause a heartstoppingly dire catastrophe. Again, interdependency would be something to be avoided.
Is it really worth it? I suppose that depends on how scalable the commercial search engines are.
So, interesting idea, raises some obvious problems which are I'm sure soluble, needs more knowledge than I have to work out the feasibility. These are just initial thoughts,... $0.02 worth.
As an Australian IT professional, I'm well aware of the USA's tactics; it's political suicide for a foreign government to knock back a freetrade agreement with such an august country as the US. So, the really nasty DMCA/IP laws get inserted into the country's laws as a predicate to signing the agreement.
Here in NZ, this catch -- and what a doozy of a catch -- appears to be one of the main motivators towards seeking an FTA with China instead of with the USA.
Well, in terms of morals and human rights, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other; so we might as well at least go for the option that allows us more autonomy, and halfway sensible copyright laws.
Sounds good at first. But wait: doesn't that mean that 8,300 non-criminals were denied entry? I'd be curious to know on what grounds they were turned back. Sounds a bit frightening to me.
Well, living in NZ, I know that journalist friends don't dare admit to being journalists any more when trying to enter the US. This may be different for a big corporation like the BBC, but one freelancer I know tried to go to the US last year to make a radio documentary about someting to do with linguistics, said so at immigration, and was insta-deported. I guess being a journalist, no matter what kind of journalist, is only one step away from being a terrorist - who knows, they might, heaven forfend, tell foreigners about what life is like in the US (the horror!).
I guess the Iron Curtain just moved around a bit. Hope you like it there, guys.
In the U.S. the court can order you to provide encryption keys and if you do not you will be held in contempt of the court. This usually means the judge puts you in jail until you decide to provide the keys. To me(IANAL) it seems like the above just formalises the practice.
RTFA. No mention of courts. What the UK police want is a situation where they can walk into your house with "probable cause" and say "Give me all your encryption keys, right now." If you don't, you are ipso facto a genuine criminal. Then you go to court, and then jail.
The only way forward I think is complete integration of SVG(coming!), complete compliance with HTTP, HTML and XML standards (possible SMGL too); as much as it should pass the ACID2 test which only one test opera version has passed.
You mean like the ones the Greeks had over 2000 years ago?
The ones where somewhere between 70 and 90% of the population were slaves, where only free-born, sane, non-criminal, adult males were enfranchised, empires routinely extorted vast tributes out of their "allies", that is to say when they weren't enslaving them or committing genocide, foreigners had no rights, respectable women were rarely allowed to go outdoors, folks were happy to take water from cholera-infested public wells, and people sometimes got put to death for free-thinking?
Yes, those are the ones. I suppose I can see one or two similarities... but I'd rather live in China than ancient Greece any day.
Further online information available for most of the above statements upon Wikipeding, Googling, or if all else fails, upon request (except for the figures on slavery: that's a rather specialised field).
Slashdot Mirror
Phew, thanks for that - here I was thinking it's just me. I'd never worked much with Linux before, and tried installing Ubuntu on three separate computers, none of them working at all. Similar to your experience I think, though I didn't get as far as working out how to configure the X server. On two machines the installation process hung and errored itself to death, on the third it worked but I ended up with a screen full of garbage ... Mandrake/Mandriva: similar results. If it's hard enough to work out that it requires a day of research to find every damn driver, then it's too hard. And though I've only ever bought one copy of Windows, I have to say, one day of my time is easily worth the price of a Windows licence.
Mind you, an older copy of Knoppix (3.3) worked just fine thanks ...
Here in New Zealand the original is still being sold, and in a lot of places I've seen it being advertised as "uncut", "unedited version", "get it while it's still hot!" etc.
I'm not sure what the export laws on software are in New Zealand - it might be possible to buy it from an overseas address - try the local Gameplanet site (link withheld for reaons of taste).
Correction to my previous post: only remove the space in "...2a,00 ,3a,..." and in "Contro l -- don't remove the spaces in "Scancode Map" and "Keyboard Layout".
It sounds like you're using Windows. In 2000/XP/2003 you can disable the 'caps lock' key (and any other you want, e.g. 'insert' if like me you hate it almost as much as caps lock) by editing the registry. See this page for more details.
Shortcut: paste the following into Notepad and save as a .reg file. Open the file to change the registry. But make sure to remove all the spaces (inserted by Slashdot); and type 'return' after the last line.
This re-maps 'caps lock' to 'left shift', for the current user only. To make this apply to all users, replace HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Keyboard Layout with HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Keyboard Layout (again, remove the space inserted by /.). Then restart. Happy non-caps-locking ...
Ah well. I was curious, that's all ... I have an interest in languages. But I'm afraid I don't buy the paynim connection either - that seems to come from the Latin word for 'pagan'.
Not sure where you got this from. At least according to the OED, 'fairy' comes from words that are cognate with 'fay', which in turn are derived from Latin fatum, 'fate', which in turn is derived from the verb fari, 'to speak'. Of course evidence is not always compelling, and the OED doesn't provide quite enough evidence to convince me that 'fay' absolutely certainly comes from fatum. But what is your evidence?
Heh. I'm now in the fortunate position of supervising research students, and fairly regularly discuss with them the issues of backing up their theses. I've persuaded one student to back up her thesis to a new CDR every week ... I just hope she labels them :-)
In my field (a humanities discipline) a distressing number of people routinely use floppies. I keep on warning them - the problem is that most of the floppies they have are second/third/nth-hand ones that have been getting re-used since the early 90s. Not one floppy a colleague has given me has ever lasted long enough to retrieve the data off it.
Why don't they just e-mail documents to me, you ask? Well, some people in humanities are sufficiently close to the archetypal geek's grandmother in terms of their computer capabilities that they can't find the "Attach" button, and even if they could they couldn't navigate to the file. Not all, by any means, but some. (I'm getting way off topic here, but there's one very cute colleague who, when he accidentally dragged MS Word off the Dock in OS X, had a real panic because it went *poof* in a cloud of smoke and he thought he'd deleted it altogether. Well ... come to think of it, that's a pretty reasonable conclusion to draw from such a stupidly designed graphical effect.)
Anyway, thank the gods for students: at least they know enough to use USB flash drives rather than floppies. (Though even some USB drives are designed in just such a way that they can't fit into any of the USB sockets provided by the nice people at Dell.)
There are some interesting ideas here, but my own suspicion is that economics will obstruct, heavily modify, or otherwise wreck the intended outcomes. One example:
I think it's a pretty safe bet that this is not going to happen. Where's the funding going to come from? Present-day archaeology is, for the most part, grotesquely unfunded, and has barely made a dent in what is available of the remnants of times past. No one other than academic bodies currently has any interest in funding this kind of research; academic bodies are likely to get much poorer over the next century; and no external funding body, like corporations, is ever going to have an interest (or at best, any more than an altruistic/philanthropic interest) in funding that kind of research. And that's already leaving aside the (perhaps more pertinent) fact that archaeology at its most important is primarily a testing ground for sociological and historical theories; uncovering relics is a means to that end. And debate on that kind of topic is never going to die down.
I'd like to think so, but there are always going to be powerful interests (religious and otherwise) in maintaining taboos. It may well be that sex taboos may vanish, but I'm quite certain that there will still be taboos of one kind or another. Think also: how did so-called "Victorian" prudishness ever come about? I'm sure there's a good answer to that, which I don't have time to investigate right now, but my point is that it is not the case that human history has been one long freeing-up of people's inhibitions and instincts.
I have other quibbles, but I guess the main caveat I have to offer is this: for any given social or technological goal, there are going to be wealthy vested interests trying to make sure it does not ever come about, regardless of whether any one person perceives the goal to be a good or an evil. To be sure, most of the predictions you make are not goals as such, but I think the same caveat applies nonetheless.
Hurray, pedantry time! Correction: Socrates has only been dead for 2403 years, since he died in 399 BC and (I assume) you're writing from 2005 AD. There was no year 0.
Speak for yourself -- I know ancient Greek, you insensitive clod!
Yes, AFAIK that is accurate: Google does have the right both to scan the web and to scan the books. Google is not suspending the scanning of copyrighted books because it's against the law; they appear to be doing so as a kind of "good faith" gesture towards publishers. It appears to be entirely legal for Google to scan copyrighted books on behalf of libraries that own the books (a lot of people seem to forget that bit!). It certainly doesn't seem that anyone is under any actual legal obligation to stop scanning.
At the same time, I guess Google doesn't want any legal hassles from publishers, no matter how illegitimate their lawsuits would be. It's not hard to see why they're doing this, though (a) it's disappointing that the publishers get their way many books are excluded from one of the greatest research tools ever imagined; and (b) it's good that Google has not admitted that what they are doing is in any way illegitimate.
I'm sure there's a lot of variation between professors. I'm a lecturer (= professor in the US) and I always thoroughly price-check (because I'm young enough to remember being a student? I hope that's not the only reason).
At the same time I don't think it would be a good idea for anyone if publishers abolished free examination copies for profs. I don't even have a vested interest, mind you: in my country no publisher ever gives examination copies to profs - I wish they would. I've asked, and publishers just ignore me; alas, I can't even avoid books published by the especially rude publishers, because they're all like that. Well, you live with it - not a major problem, really, since everyone's in the same boat.
Having said that, sometimes I'm hampered in my choice of textbooks by the fact that some books get re-used from one course to another. That means if we're going to change the set books, everyone has to agree to it. At the moment for one set of courses we're using the most expensive option available, for no good reason: it's neither better nor worse than the other books available, but costs twice as much. And there's not a thing I can do about it, because of one obstinate berk.
Anyway, I try make up for that in other courses. For what it's worth: some people do check, and sometimes there are complicating factors that prevent us from taking the most sensible course.
Oh, and I routinely take out-of-copyright editions, format them nicely, and print them off for students to photocopy, when I can.
Even more, out of professional need-to-know, what university did you attend?
See, I'm an academic and need to be able to advise students on what grad schools to avoid.
Many; probably most (in terms of brands, obviously not in terms of number of units). All will also play mp3, most will play wma, many will play flac, almost all will play a range of other formats too. For starters try the iAudio and Rio ranges. Both offer both flash and HDD players. Also lots of mobile phones, even digital watches, support ogg playing (though in a few cases, only via a soft/firmware update). Just google. There's lots out there.
My personal favourite: iAudio. They've got some fantastic products, also including stuff like hand-held XviD/DivX players, etc. Sound quality: as good as or better than the iPod. Battery life: definitely better than the iPod. Price: not as cheap as older iPods, but still very well-priced IMHO.
... but only if you don't mind the audio quality being degraded even further.
WOW, that's quite a difference from older versions of Office - I don't use MS Office any more, so I hadn't spotted this. It's still very messy if you export "other people's" Office documents into html, because no one uses styles and so all the formatting is done by ad hoc class tags; but it is most definitely a hell of a lot better than the screwed up mess that Office used to produce.
Now if MS just removed the "Save as Web Page" option and replaced it with this "filtered" option, wouldn't the OP's life be a lot easier ...
Oh, and as other people have noted, the Dreamweaver command to "clean up MS Word html" is pretty good, though nothing except a competent human is going to produce perfect tidy CSS-ed output.
I think distributed search is an interesting idea, and worth exploring, but very likely to be prone to all sorts of exploits. My guess is spam would be the least of the worries. It'd be feasible, I'm sure, to get people to voluntarily make their desktop a "node" in a massively distributed search engine (another thread has been suggesting names starting with K; one that leapt to my mind is KaZeArch ... ho ho), but:
So, interesting idea, raises some obvious problems which are I'm sure soluble, needs more knowledge than I have to work out the feasibility. These are just initial thoughts, ... $0.02 worth.
Heh ... I guess you've never worked in academia!
Here in NZ, this catch -- and what a doozy of a catch -- appears to be one of the main motivators towards seeking an FTA with China instead of with the USA.
Well, in terms of morals and human rights, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other; so we might as well at least go for the option that allows us more autonomy, and halfway sensible copyright laws.
That would be China, by the way.
Yup ... I think that was the scary bit. Oh yes.
Well, I'm scared, anyway.
I take it you mean Saudi Arabia? You know, the one that has US military bases plastered all over it?
Well, living in NZ, I know that journalist friends don't dare admit to being journalists any more when trying to enter the US. This may be different for a big corporation like the BBC, but one freelancer I know tried to go to the US last year to make a radio documentary about someting to do with linguistics, said so at immigration, and was insta-deported. I guess being a journalist, no matter what kind of journalist, is only one step away from being a terrorist - who knows, they might, heaven forfend, tell foreigners about what life is like in the US (the horror!).
I guess the Iron Curtain just moved around a bit. Hope you like it there, guys.
RTFA. No mention of courts. What the UK police want is a situation where they can walk into your house with "probable cause" and say "Give me all your encryption keys, right now." If you don't, you are ipso facto a genuine criminal. Then you go to court, and then jail.
Beg pardon - you mis-spelt 'Safari' ...
The ones where somewhere between 70 and 90% of the population were slaves, where only free-born, sane, non-criminal, adult males were enfranchised, empires routinely extorted vast tributes out of their "allies", that is to say when they weren't enslaving them or committing genocide, foreigners had no rights, respectable women were rarely allowed to go outdoors, folks were happy to take water from cholera-infested public wells, and people sometimes got put to death for free-thinking?
Yes, those are the ones. I suppose I can see one or two similarities ... but I'd rather live in China than ancient Greece any day.
Further online information available for most of the above statements upon Wikipeding, Googling, or if all else fails, upon request (except for the figures on slavery: that's a rather specialised field).