You do have to add up percentages correctly, though.
50% of all mail is claimed to be spam, not 50% of all traffic.
Porn and P2P traffic certainly overlap to a large extent, as anyone who ever downloaded "Harry Potter" only to find it to actually be "Big Tits 23" can confirm.
As for the statistics - most of them are far from mysterious if you read the actual statistics and not the dumbed-down headline version that mainstream media turns them into.
They are right, though, even if they have an obvious agenda. I work for an ISP. Last time we checked, 80%+ of all traffic on our network was P2P. Next up are HTTP and SMTP, everything else is in the single-digit area. Online games would probably get a 5-10% share if we had a way to accumulate them all.
The Bell System and the various state-owned monopolies built reliable, universal landline networks across these countries almost a century ago.
But they've been sleeping ever since.
When ISDN started out in Europe, nothing happened in the US.
Now Europe has DSL everywhere. And I don't mean 768 KBit. I've seen 6 MBit offers, and my company will be rolling out 8 MBit ADSL early next year. Meanwhile you guys have what? Shared cable?
The US hasn't been innovative for at least 15-20 years. There are still frontier sciences, and many breakthroughs are researched in the US. However, due to the insane patent system, constant danger of litigation etc. - many things developed in the US have never seen the mainstream market there.
With optical or electronic voting you can count votes almost instantly. Think how simple it is to create a program
It isn't. If anything, this election should have made that clear. Sure it's easy to code a counter. But once you figure in transaction safety, tamper- and hack-proofing, audit trails and a dozen other requirements that you can not do away with without doing away with democracy itself, it doesn't look that simple anymore, does it?
The point being that paper ballots is a system that humans comprehend fully. Thus, humans can supervise it, humans can control and audit it.
Stupid people -- remember Florida? -- cannot make connections between names and check boxes.
Weird how all over the world no other country has ever had that problem. Maybe the US has more stupid people than everyone else, or maybe you should just shoot the people designing the ballots and go with what works for everyone else?
Easier data analysis.
Uh? If you're talking about data analysis of vote totals, then there's no difference at all. Well, at least over here we actually do use computers, you know? We just count the votes and then enter total numbers into them instead of having them do the counting.
As for data analysis on the votes themselves - I dare to say that is one of the things you don't want to do. Elections are anonymous for a reason.
These are the guys who have massive experience in observing elections. Their report is due later today, but from what has leaked through, I expect it to be damning.
Some things the observers from OSCE said:
* In some areas, they (as official observers!) had less access to the polls than during the elections in Kasachstan.
* The computer systems in many places were less secured than in Venecuela.
* A polish observer said the polls in Serbia(!) were easier to watch and more transparent.
That's a bunch of slap-down from professionals with years of experience. The US has, election-wise, officially fallen to the standards of a third-world country.
What's wrong with making crosses on a simple sheet of paper? I mean the way that 99% of the civilized world do their elections? Why is it that US insists on playing alpha-tester with all kinds of wacky new election methods, even after the last sheep farmer in south-east Wisconsin has learnt that they're more trouble than they're worth?
It's not just Canada. Many european nations are concerned, too. There was a scandal over here recently because the EU Commission gave approval to the exchange of airline customer data against the wishes of the EU Parliament and against massive outcry from privacy advocates.
The US is generally seen as a country with very little privacy protection.
We're turning into squalid East Germany, where every fifth German was a "security" henchman, controlling their neighbors through surveillence and intimidation.
Turning into? You're well beyond already. The Stasi (east-german secret police, "Staatssicherheit", ironically an almost direct translation of "Homeland Security") never made public recruitment drives, among other things.
or.biz or.pro - i.e. yet another useless TLD (YAUTLD ?).
I would really, really, really want to have ICANN's criteria on which TLDs to approve and which ones not to be made public. They are either well above my level, or just as I figure - totally crazy with the deciding factor somewhere in the "whoever paid for the nicest hotel" area.
Guess it's time for another attempt to convince my ISP to adapt ORSC and put an end to this nonsense.
It seems like they think that if they say Windows is more secure enough times it will become a reality.
They're smarter than that. They do believe that if they say it often enough, people will start to think it's true. And for marketing, that's what counts - not reality, but what people think. Customers, especially.
I can install it, set it up, run updates on it once in a while, run the baseline security analyzer on it, and forget about it. Give me a linux that does all this in an easy to use manner, and I'll switch.
You'll have to spend a bit more time doing the initial setup, but you'll more then regain that over the next few years. I'd say it's well worth the investment, and you may want to consider it. Alternatively:
I'd like nothing better than to run a Unix variant, but until you bring me a monolithic distribution that just works
There are suppliers for exactly your market. SuSE, for example, is delivering ready-to-run enterprise servers, preinstalled and preconfigured. They'll even show up to complete the installation with your network settings and other requirements and give you a support contract.
The difference is that there are multiple vendors instead of just one. You will, oh horror, have to choose.
I've upgraded a stable system to testing yesterday. The equivalent of upgrading Red Hat 7.0 to Fedora, or SuSE 7.0 to 9.0 or something like that. Last I checked, you'd very much want to make a backup there first.
On Debian, it was:
# apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
Took a while, updated over 500 packages. Afterwards, everthing worked as smoothly as before. Most services on the machine were down for a minute or two at most.
The listed alternatives aren't. They take somewhere between 100 and 300 Euros/$ in setup fees, which means you've gotta shell that out before you can make any transactions.
For a small site taking donations, that kills the option right there.
The only real alternative I found to paypal is Moneybookers.
Hello, anyone home? The choice of tab or window is made by the user not the one designing the website.
I've got 2-7 tabs open whenever I waste time on/. and yet you see no tab-specific code here, right? It depends on whether I click left (same window), right (new window, rarely used) or middle (new tab) and there's nothing the/. coders can do about that. Ha!:)
Essentially, it's an interface error. The problem seems to be that dialog boxes don't explain which tab they belong to.
So with some creative coding, properly guessed/estimated delays, you can create the impression that dialog box A belongs to tab X, while it's actually from tab Y.
I'm not sure if it's restricted to tabs. Can't get to the demo sites anymore as they're/.'ed, but I wouldn't be surprised if it works just as well for opening the external site in a new window.
Preface: I love tabs to death, I don't remember how I could surf without them anymore.
That said, tabs are problematic, especially if you have several open to the same site but in different sessions.
For example, in my online game (see below), you can play several characters with the same account. If you play char 1, open a tab, do something there, then log out and log into your character 2 while the tab with char 1 is still open, woohoo, there's all kinds of trouble waitin' for ya, son.
Tabs make switching so convenient that you sometimes forget just where you were and what you were doing.
I also have a generic error() function defined that's really a wrapper for the error handler - so the error logging system now in place works for language errors and logic errors alike.
Well, care to share that function and explain how to add it in?
Good point. There are the stats from my online game. So it's not a Linux or windos site, it's not a geeks-only site, there's plenty of aol or hotmail users in the game:
Top 10 of 94 Total User Agents # Hits User Agent 1 1122501 44.95% Mozilla/5.0 2 1057756 42.36% MSIE 6.0 3 186661 7.47% Opera/7.5 4 40541 1.62% MSIE 5.0 5 31246 1.25% Opera/7.2 6 12661 0.51% MSIE 5.5 7 7791 0.31% Feedreader 8 7377 0.30% Opera 7.5 9 4929 0.20% Ocelli/1.1 10 4456 0.18% iCab 2.9
Doesn't look like 90% IE to me. Then again, I don't work in microsoft PR, I'm sure there's a way to creatively interpret the stats.
[Bush] The justice system of the United States has long been a beacon and example for the world,
Can I get some of whatever he's smoking? Everyone outside the US I know alternates between laughing at and being shocked by what the US calls "justice".
OpenOffice is what I use whenever other people pick up word, excel or the other ms crap.
Funny thing is, at first the MS junkies tried to put me down (even OO does have it's problems, you know). After a while, though, they started coming over, especially after using it for a while.
I don't use word often, except when forced to at work. Every time I cringe about one of its billion bugs or quirks, I find that OO did the same thing properly, and I rejoice.
OO isn't without problems, but it's worth a try and so far none of the people I convince to try have gone back to the MS crap.
This is where "Open Source" meets "Free Software" and the two don't agree, not in the least.
Free Software is incompatible with patents, both from the license terms (the GPL even explicitly mentions patents) and the spirit (sharing of knowledge).
Open Source allows such abominations as "you can look, but if you copy we'll sue you from Alaska to Hell". Isn't that essentially what DRM is trying to do?
The idea is nice at first glance, much like patents of old required a working mechanical model. It does fit well to the basic idea behind patents, which is essentially "tell us all how it works and we'll give you some rights for teaching us". It doesn't fit with Free in any sense. Whether or not it fits with Open Source depends on your philosophy. Mine certainly isn't one of prison-but-with-walls-of-glass. I prefer not having to live in a prison at all.
Funny coincidence, I've started shopping for a jammer today. Yesterday's train ride was the final drop. When will people learn that your private interest is not more important than the comfort of the 50 other people on the train?
I would expect that people talking on the phone in a crowded, public place would at least have the basic courtesy of not speaking twice as loud as everyone else.
And it's not like it's impossible or hard to do. I was in Tokyo last year, and while everyone there has a cell phone, I never, ever, found anyone using it in an obnoxious way. There were no loud rings, and people talking on the cell phone talked to quiet that they were no disturbance even to those standing nearby.
All it takes is a little respect for your fellow humans.
but a power-use like you would probably want to upgrade to a proper browser
Bingo. My online game (see below) has moved from 65% IE users to 40% IE users (Firefox took the lead early this month) because that's the formulation I use in the "sorry" page for the one part of the site that doesn't work in IE because IE's implementation of CSS is broken, so I catch IE users and show them a page explaining why it's broken and that they should upgrade to a better browser.
It's also how I sell Firefox to my friends. IE is just the default browser that comes with the OS. There are several real browsers you can install later, and you should. I recommend Firefox, but you can use Mozilla, Opera or any other you like.
Slashdot Mirror
You do have to add up percentages correctly, though.
50% of all mail is claimed to be spam, not 50% of all traffic.
Porn and P2P traffic certainly overlap to a large extent, as anyone who ever downloaded "Harry Potter" only to find it to actually be "Big Tits 23" can confirm.
As for the statistics - most of them are far from mysterious if you read the actual statistics and not the dumbed-down headline version that mainstream media turns them into.
They are right, though, even if they have an obvious agenda.
I work for an ISP. Last time we checked, 80%+ of all traffic on our network was P2P. Next up are HTTP and SMTP, everything else is in the single-digit area. Online games would probably get a 5-10% share if we had a way to accumulate them all.
The Bell System and the various state-owned monopolies built reliable, universal landline networks across these countries almost a century ago.
But they've been sleeping ever since.
When ISDN started out in Europe, nothing happened in the US.
Now Europe has DSL everywhere. And I don't mean 768 KBit. I've seen 6 MBit offers, and my company will be rolling out 8 MBit ADSL early next year. Meanwhile you guys have what? Shared cable?
The US hasn't been innovative for at least 15-20 years. There are still frontier sciences, and many breakthroughs are researched in the US. However, due to the insane patent system, constant danger of litigation etc. - many things developed in the US have never seen the mainstream market there.
It is hard to count crosses on papers.
Is it? How comes everyone else manages to?
With optical or electronic voting you can count votes almost instantly. Think how simple it is to create a program
It isn't. If anything, this election should have made that clear. Sure it's easy to code a counter. But once you figure in transaction safety, tamper- and hack-proofing, audit trails and a dozen other requirements that you can not do away with without doing away with democracy itself, it doesn't look that simple anymore, does it?
The point being that paper ballots is a system that humans comprehend fully. Thus, humans can supervise it, humans can control and audit it.
Stupid people -- remember Florida? -- cannot make connections between names and check boxes.
Weird how all over the world no other country has ever had that problem. Maybe the US has more stupid people than everyone else, or maybe you should just shoot the people designing the ballots and go with what works for everyone else?
Easier data analysis.
Uh? If you're talking about data analysis of vote totals, then there's no difference at all. Well, at least over here we actually do use computers, you know? We just count the votes and then enter total numbers into them instead of having them do the counting.
As for data analysis on the votes themselves - I dare to say that is one of the things you don't want to do. Elections are anonymous for a reason.
These are the guys who have massive experience in observing elections. Their report is due later today, but from what has leaked through, I expect it to be damning.
Some things the observers from OSCE said:
* In some areas, they (as official observers!) had less access to the polls than during the elections in Kasachstan.
* The computer systems in many places were less secured than in Venecuela.
* A polish observer said the polls in Serbia(!) were easier to watch and more transparent.
That's a bunch of slap-down from professionals with years of experience. The US has, election-wise, officially fallen to the standards of a third-world country.
I've just got one question to the USians on here:
What's wrong with making crosses on a simple sheet of paper? I mean the way that 99% of the civilized world do their elections? Why is it that US insists on playing alpha-tester with all kinds of wacky new election methods, even after the last sheep farmer in south-east Wisconsin has learnt that they're more trouble than they're worth?
It's not just Canada. Many european nations are concerned, too. There was a scandal over here recently because the EU Commission gave approval to the exchange of airline customer data against the wishes of the EU Parliament and against massive outcry from privacy advocates.
The US is generally seen as a country with very little privacy protection.
We're turning into squalid East Germany, where every fifth German was a "security" henchman, controlling their neighbors through surveillence and intimidation.
Turning into? You're well beyond already. The Stasi (east-german secret police, "Staatssicherheit", ironically an almost direct translation of "Homeland Security") never made public recruitment drives, among other things.
or .biz or .pro - i.e. yet another useless TLD (YAUTLD ?).
I would really, really, really want to have ICANN's criteria on which TLDs to approve and which ones not to be made public. They are either well above my level, or just as I figure - totally crazy with the deciding factor somewhere in the "whoever paid for the nicest hotel" area.
Guess it's time for another attempt to convince my ISP to adapt ORSC and put an end to this nonsense.
It seems like they think that if they say Windows is more secure enough times it will become a reality.
They're smarter than that. They do believe that if they say it often enough, people will start to think it's true. And for marketing, that's what counts - not reality, but what people think. Customers, especially.
I can install it, set it up, run updates on it once in a while, run the baseline security analyzer on it, and forget about it. Give me a linux that does all this in an easy to use manner, and I'll switch.
You'll have to spend a bit more time doing the initial setup, but you'll more then regain that over the next few years.
I'd say it's well worth the investment, and you may want to consider it. Alternatively:
I'd like nothing better than to run a Unix variant, but until you bring me a monolithic distribution that just works
There are suppliers for exactly your market. SuSE, for example, is delivering ready-to-run enterprise servers, preinstalled and preconfigured. They'll even show up to complete the installation with your network settings and other requirements and give you a support contract.
The difference is that there are multiple vendors instead of just one. You will, oh horror, have to choose.
It doesn't break.
I've upgraded a stable system to testing yesterday. The equivalent of upgrading Red Hat 7.0 to Fedora, or SuSE 7.0 to 9.0 or something like that. Last I checked, you'd very much want to make a backup there first.
On Debian, it was:
# apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
Took a while, updated over 500 packages. Afterwards, everthing worked as smoothly as before. Most services on the machine were down for a minute or two at most.
The listed alternatives aren't. They take somewhere between 100 and 300 Euros/$ in setup fees, which means you've gotta shell that out before you can make any transactions.
For a small site taking donations, that kills the option right there.
The only real alternative I found to paypal is Moneybookers.
Balmer's an idiot. Counterproof is available right where I live:
Low-end PC for 299,- Euros
That's without software. If you want a windos with it, it's 399,- Euros.
Does the ape really think dropping the price to, say, 199,- without software and 299,- with windos will reduce copying of windos? Yeah, right.
Hello, anyone home? The choice of tab or window is made by the user not the one designing the website.
/. and yet you see no tab-specific code here, right? It depends on whether I click left (same window), right (new window, rarely used) or middle (new tab) and there's nothing the /. coders can do about that. Ha! :)
I've got 2-7 tabs open whenever I waste time on
Essentially, it's an interface error. The problem seems to be that dialog boxes don't explain which tab they belong to.
/.'ed, but I wouldn't be surprised if it works just as well for opening the external site in a new window.
So with some creative coding, properly guessed/estimated delays, you can create the impression that dialog box A belongs to tab X, while it's actually from tab Y.
I'm not sure if it's restricted to tabs. Can't get to the demo sites anymore as they're
Preface: I love tabs to death, I don't remember how I could surf without them anymore.
That said, tabs are problematic, especially if you have several open to the same site but in different sessions.
For example, in my online game (see below), you can play several characters with the same account. If you play char 1, open a tab, do something there, then log out and log into your character 2 while the tab with char 1 is still open, woohoo, there's all kinds of trouble waitin' for ya, son.
Tabs make switching so convenient that you sometimes forget just where you were and what you were doing.
I also have a generic error() function defined that's really a wrapper for the error handler - so the error logging system now in place works for language errors and logic errors alike.
Well, care to share that function and explain how to add it in?
Good point. There are the stats from my online game. So it's not a Linux or windos site, it's not a geeks-only site, there's plenty of aol or hotmail users in the game:
Top 10 of 94 Total User Agents
# Hits User Agent
1 1122501 44.95% Mozilla/5.0
2 1057756 42.36% MSIE 6.0
3 186661 7.47% Opera/7.5
4 40541 1.62% MSIE 5.0
5 31246 1.25% Opera/7.2
6 12661 0.51% MSIE 5.5
7 7791 0.31% Feedreader
8 7377 0.30% Opera 7.5
9 4929 0.20% Ocelli/1.1
10 4456 0.18% iCab 2.9
Doesn't look like 90% IE to me. Then again, I don't work in microsoft PR, I'm sure there's a way to creatively interpret the stats.
Understand those are cases where you are downloading third-party software.
True, that. Now the point is that you're downloading this "third-party software", aka virus, trojan horse or spyware, even though you never wanted to.
[Bush] The justice system of the United States has long been a beacon and example for the world,
Can I get some of whatever he's smoking? Everyone outside the US I know alternates between laughing at and being shocked by what the US calls "justice".
OpenOffice is what I use whenever other people pick up word, excel or the other ms crap.
Funny thing is, at first the MS junkies tried to put me down (even OO does have it's problems, you know). After a while, though, they started coming over, especially after using it for a while.
I don't use word often, except when forced to at work. Every time I cringe about one of its billion bugs or quirks, I find that OO did the same thing properly, and I rejoice.
OO isn't without problems, but it's worth a try and so far none of the people I convince to try have gone back to the MS crap.
RMS must be rotating in his... uh... bed or so.
This is where "Open Source" meets "Free Software" and the two don't agree, not in the least.
Free Software is incompatible with patents, both from the license terms (the GPL even explicitly mentions patents) and the spirit (sharing of knowledge).
Open Source allows such abominations as "you can look, but if you copy we'll sue you from Alaska to Hell".
Isn't that essentially what DRM is trying to do?
The idea is nice at first glance, much like patents of old required a working mechanical model. It does fit well to the basic idea behind patents, which is essentially "tell us all how it works and we'll give you some rights for teaching us".
It doesn't fit with Free in any sense. Whether or not it fits with Open Source depends on your philosophy. Mine certainly isn't one of prison-but-with-walls-of-glass. I prefer not having to live in a prison at all.
Very good. A step into the right direction.
Funny coincidence, I've started shopping for a jammer today. Yesterday's train ride was the final drop. When will people learn that your private interest is not more important than the comfort of the 50 other people on the train?
I would expect that people talking on the phone in a crowded, public place would at least have the basic courtesy of not speaking twice as loud as everyone else.
And it's not like it's impossible or hard to do. I was in Tokyo last year, and while everyone there has a cell phone, I never, ever, found anyone using it in an obnoxious way. There were no loud rings, and people talking on the cell phone talked to quiet that they were no disturbance even to those standing nearby.
All it takes is a little respect for your fellow humans.
Until then, I want my jammer.
but a power-use like you would probably want to upgrade to a proper browser
Bingo.
My online game (see below) has moved from 65% IE users to 40% IE users (Firefox took the lead early this month) because that's the formulation I use in the "sorry" page for the one part of the site that doesn't work in IE because IE's implementation of CSS is broken, so I catch IE users and show them a page explaining why it's broken and that they should upgrade to a better browser.
It's also how I sell Firefox to my friends. IE is just the default browser that comes with the OS. There are several real browsers you can install later, and you should. I recommend Firefox, but you can use Mozilla, Opera or any other you like.