I looked for the Mozilla 0.6 source to try this myself, but they apparently don't have a tarball for it. I'd wager they have 0.6 in CVS, so I'll have to try that some day.
Heh, no it's not illegal.:) My mom owns a store and explained this to me just last night. Some stores will charge a 3% surcharge, because that's what the credit card company charges *them* to use their system to make a sale. It isn't as common now, but I remember a period in the late 80's where every store and gas station had huge "CREDIT SAME AS CASH" signs everywhere.
Nowadays, most stores just choose to eat the 3% in the interest of keeping the customer happy.
While you don't specifically mention it, your argument reminds me slightly of the people who maintain that internet sales ought to be taxed merely on the assumption that "ma and pa, brick and mortar" stores are losing out on sales to the internet. And believe it or not, it IS one of the major arguments that proponents of internet sales tax use.
Sounds a bit like the RIAA & MPAA debates, doesn't it? I'm sure most everyone on slashdot knows where they stand on those issues.
I think it's unfair for places to have to compete with out-of-state sales simply because they get around a tax loophole.
It's not a loophole, it's a clause in the Constitution. States are not technically allowed to tax residents of another state. (Wish I had a link... I'll try to track one down.) IIRC, this was one of the things that The South(tm) wanted to change in the Civil War.
Even if it were not stated expressly in the Constitution, sales tax on mail order and internet purchases is completely unjustified. Sales tax exists to generate revenue for things like roads, schools, and other public facilities. If I live in Michigan and I'm buying from an online store in Washington, your state has no justification to tax me because I do not use any of your facilities.
I kinda thought the same thing, but the words that sprang into my head weren't as harsh as yours.:P
To me, it just looks like an excuse for 3Dfx to put the buzzword "Mothion Blur" bullet on the back of their box.
For starters, I for one would not appreciate trying to aim my railgun at 6 models, trying to figure out which one is going to score me a frag.
Secondly, it's just not that impressive. Whoopee, the Voodoo 5 can render several time-lapsed translucent models of a character! I'm positive my GeForce could do that just as easily without having special support for it in hardware.
I would say maybe that's the reason 3Dfx didn't end up supporting it. It just isn't interesting or useful enough to justify. Slashdot must be having an incredibly slow day.
This human calculator guy made an interesting note that astrophysicists use a system that counts days from Jan 1, 1900.
In my current job (USAF Avionics repair), we fill out LOTS of paperwork, almost every single sheet requiring a date. Many forms are still handwritten, so they require a date to be in a particular format. Some of these forms actually require the same date in different formats. (Reasons differ, but none are for the sake of redundancy.) Here are the two most common examples.
1) You have the classic Julian date. The Julian date is my personal favourite, one that I use for all kinds of personal stuff as well. You have a single number that begins with 001 at the beginning of the year. Likewise, 356 is the last day of the year unless you've got a leap year. (That is, unless I've reversed my leap-year definition again.) In the event that you need to specify the year, you just prepend the year. For example, today would be 00355 or 2000355 depending on the scope of the date. It's even Y2K friendly!
2) The regular old YYYYMMDD format too. Another good computer-friendly format.
3) When actually *writing* dates down, I usually do DDMMMYY, where the month is an abbreviation. Today, for example, would be 20DEC00. It's not easy to goof up and transpose the YY and DD when reading or writing as long as you keep in mind that the day goes first. Which, mind you, was not a problem from 1932 to 2000, but next year, it is conceivable some could mistake the "01" for the first day of the given month.
I'd like to be that optimistic. Really, I would. But let's face it. In your neighborhood, when you were taking things apart, playing video games, or (if you were fortunate enough and in the right generation) geeking around on a home computer... what were all the other kids doing?
Right. Outside playing in the mud with tiny plastic human shapes. It is very true that there *will* be more geeks along the way, but there sure as hell aren't going to be many.
To take on an exaggerated conspiratory point of view, all the [insert favourite conspirators here] want is to have *most* of the kids completely passive to censorware. They want *most* of the parents to go along with it so that they can eventually control *most* of the information that gets public. Most is all it takes, and to our great disadvantage, most of the people who exist today are really, really, stupid when it comes to complex things like freedom and liberty.
Just a minute. There are many people that have been selling apples before even electricity was discovered. My grandfather was called "Mac" before Steve Jobs was even in existance. It's tough to find a kid's colouring crayon box without the colour "aqua" in there.
So far I see nothing that is enforcable as an original and unique trademark. If Apple Computer Inc. really wanted to protect their corporate image, you'd think they might coin something a bit more memorable than the world's most common fruit.
I took a look at the emu10k drivers... problem is, the instructions tell me to build it as a kernel module, which I'd rather not do. Can I just dump SB's downloaded drivers somewhere into the source tree and still have things work? (ie- will make menuconfig correctly and compile just as my 2.2.17 emu10k drivers did?)
Quiet, ye troll. Linus HIMSELF said that the ONLY reason Rieser hasn't made it into 2.4 is because he didn't want to upset the code freeze. Not because it's buggy. Not because of it's "in development" status. You only have yourself to blame for screwing up your laptop, because LINUX ITSELF is in development. It is nowhere near a finished product, but luckily it is good enough for some of us.
Please put this soapbox back from where you got it.
Re:Christmas isn't about presents
on
Gifts For Geeks
·
· Score: 1
Hmm.. I'd be at stage 3 as well. However, I don't think I *ever* had a stage 2. I might go on to stage 4 if I was bored enough, though.:P
Seriously, I really *really* REALLY am beginning to dislike this whole gift-giving stuff. It was fun when I was a child (yay, things for free!), but now all I wind up with is a whole buch more stuff that I have to find space for. I've already bought all the things that I want. Anything else is much too expensive to give me as a gift.
All of the above, of course, doesn't even touch on the fact that I really suck at buying presents. I don't like spending money to begin with, and I'm claustrophobic in malls and stores. This year I've bought about half of my gifts online. Next year, I think I might shoot for damn near all.
At $10,000 per message, the potential contractural debt is ruinous for spammers.
Back in 1998, I was getting about 3 emails a week from this one guy advertising some kind of pyramid scam. The advantage on my part was that he left a toll-free phone number to call. When you dialed it, some guy went on a 3-minute speil about the scam and allowed you to leave a message afterward with your name, phone number, address, etc.
I took this opportunity to leave a message explaining in highly legal-sounding terms that he was using my personal paid-for email box for his commercial advertising purposes. I said that if I recieved any more messages containing the 800 number that I would bill him a (something on the order of) $8000 fee for every advertisement.
I left my email address letter-for-letter, hung up, and recieved no more spam from him.:)
[A month later, I found the sticky note with that number on it and decided to call it up and leave the beginning 3 minutes of every track from my new chem bros CD on its answering machine. Yeah, I'm cruel...]
Yeah, you're right. We shouldn't be wasting our time on inventing new technologies, because heck, they take *time* to implement. All of the software we will ever need has already been coded. The global network is as fast as it's going to get. We have enough privacy.
Many of the people posting to this story seem to be implying that MS is just plain evil and they will do anything in their power to close up open-source. That is plain and simply not true. MS in a large corporation that is in the business of making $$$$.
But M$ has had incredible success thus far with keeping their source intentionally closed. That is how that have made *all* of their $$$$ in the past. To do otherwise flies in the face of everything they've ever accomplished.
I'm not saying it'll never happen, I'm just saying that I highly doubt they would suddenly embrace OSS as quickly and with as much enthusiasm as you believe.
You ought to have done a bit more reading before jumping off the cliff, there sonny.
I actually did some work to find out the details of this bug. It started from some guy who just untarred everything and tried to run it as a user, and it failed. Upon further investigation, it turned out that when being run for the first time, mozilla creates some files in it's binary directory, which naturally a user has no write access to.
The workaround is deceptively simple: run mozilla as root or whoever owns the directory first. Then after the required files are created, you can run it as any user you choose and no problems will occur.
I did that and am now replying to your misinformed post using 0.6 as a regular user. Good day.
...Except it won't run any of your usual software. Linux and FreeBSD will probably be okay (after awhile) in this area. Winders and other closed OS's. won't. I mean, yes, they *will* port the operating systems, but how many of those decent third-party devlopers want to buy an Itanium box just to recompile their stuff?
IIRC, AMD's upcoming 64-bit chip (sledgehammer?) will be backwards-compatible with 32-bit x86 stuff. I'm not sure whether this means the whole OS and its apps will have to be either one or the other, but it is a definite strongpoint IMHO.
I dunno, I agree with the car thing. But after spending over a year on my personal self-customized GNOME desktop, using windows for anything other than game-playing is just painful. I will admit, the interface for Win95 was good for it's time. And I think that the Start menu and taskbar were really great ideas. But everything else just leaves me highly unsatisfied. (For example, the idea of actually clicking on windows just to focus them now seems insane. Hurrah sloppy mouse focus!)
Tarball method:
# wget this_package.tar.gz
# tar xvfz this_package.tar.gz
# cd this_package
#./configure
./configure: whoopsey! a problem happened but I can't tell you what it is!
(hours later)
# make
(several warnings, possibly a fatal error or two)
# make install
Heh, there are some parts of Canada like that, too. There are laws and regulations that either forbid the use of printed English or state that if English is used (say on a billboard), then a full French translation must accompany it, usually in much larger lettering.
It might interest you to know that the Founders put the commerce clause in the Constitution so that States couldn't put tariffs on goods from other States (as happened under the Articles of Confederation).
So then, does this mean that no state could (or should) be able to pass a law declaring a new internet commerce tax for online purchases?
The state governments' opinion is that they are losing out on revenue generated by sales tax whenever an online sales is made. The retailers' opinion is that they lose out on profit whenever someone in their state buys a product from a warehouse located in a differing state.
Frankly, (and I know I'm getting a little off-topic here) Point #1 is absurd because state taxes get spent on things like roads, schools, etc. None of which is ever utilized by the person buying out-of-state. Point #2 is getting older each year as we watch more companies and organizations try to get laws passed to stifle new business models and methods, so that they may preserve their own and never have to change.
This internet tax thing is a pretty huge debate where I'm currently located (New Mexico), and I'm always trying to come up with ways to disprove the idiotic assumption that such a tax should exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, well I guess that could be true also.
I looked for the Mozilla 0.6 source to try this myself, but they apparently don't have a tarball for it. I'd wager they have 0.6 in CVS, so I'll have to try that some day.
Heh, no it's not illegal.
Nowadays, most stores just choose to eat the 3% in the interest of keeping the customer happy.
While you don't specifically mention it, your argument reminds me slightly of the people who maintain that internet sales ought to be taxed merely on the assumption that "ma and pa, brick and mortar" stores are losing out on sales to the internet. And believe it or not, it IS one of the major arguments that proponents of internet sales tax use.
Sounds a bit like the RIAA & MPAA debates, doesn't it? I'm sure most everyone on slashdot knows where they stand on those issues.
I think it's unfair for places to have to compete with out-of-state sales simply because they get around a tax loophole.
It's not a loophole, it's a clause in the Constitution. States are not technically allowed to tax residents of another state. (Wish I had a link... I'll try to track one down.) IIRC, this was one of the things that The South(tm) wanted to change in the Civil War.
Even if it were not stated expressly in the Constitution, sales tax on mail order and internet purchases is completely unjustified. Sales tax exists to generate revenue for things like roads, schools, and other public facilities. If I live in Michigan and I'm buying from an online store in Washington, your state has no justification to tax me because I do not use any of your facilities.
I kinda thought the same thing, but the words that sprang into my head weren't as harsh as yours.
To me, it just looks like an excuse for 3Dfx to put the buzzword "Mothion Blur" bullet on the back of their box.
For starters, I for one would not appreciate trying to aim my railgun at 6 models, trying to figure out which one is going to score me a frag.
Secondly, it's just not that impressive. Whoopee, the Voodoo 5 can render several time-lapsed translucent models of a character! I'm positive my GeForce could do that just as easily without having special support for it in hardware.
I would say maybe that's the reason 3Dfx didn't end up supporting it. It just isn't interesting or useful enough to justify. Slashdot must be having an incredibly slow day.
The sun is a "mass"...
of incandescent gas, a giant thermonuclear furnace!
Just had to say it. I love that song.
Heh, yeah, "two most common examples" and then I go ahead and write three. Sometimes I'm such an idiot.
This human calculator guy made an interesting note that astrophysicists use a system that counts days from Jan 1, 1900.
In my current job (USAF Avionics repair), we fill out LOTS of paperwork, almost every single sheet requiring a date. Many forms are still handwritten, so they require a date to be in a particular format. Some of these forms actually require the same date in different formats. (Reasons differ, but none are for the sake of redundancy.) Here are the two most common examples.
1) You have the classic Julian date. The Julian date is my personal favourite, one that I use for all kinds of personal stuff as well. You have a single number that begins with 001 at the beginning of the year. Likewise, 356 is the last day of the year unless you've got a leap year. (That is, unless I've reversed my leap-year definition again.) In the event that you need to specify the year, you just prepend the year. For example, today would be 00355 or 2000355 depending on the scope of the date. It's even Y2K friendly!
2) The regular old YYYYMMDD format too. Another good computer-friendly format.
3) When actually *writing* dates down, I usually do DDMMMYY, where the month is an abbreviation. Today, for example, would be 20DEC00. It's not easy to goof up and transpose the YY and DD when reading or writing as long as you keep in mind that the day goes first. Which, mind you, was not a problem from 1932 to 2000, but next year, it is conceivable some could mistake the "01" for the first day of the given month.
I'd like to be that optimistic. Really, I would. But let's face it. In your neighborhood, when you were taking things apart, playing video games, or (if you were fortunate enough and in the right generation) geeking around on a home computer... what were all the other kids doing?
Right. Outside playing in the mud with tiny plastic human shapes. It is very true that there *will* be more geeks along the way, but there sure as hell aren't going to be many.
To take on an exaggerated conspiratory point of view, all the [insert favourite conspirators here] want is to have *most* of the kids completely passive to censorware. They want *most* of the parents to go along with it so that they can eventually control *most* of the information that gets public. Most is all it takes, and to our great disadvantage, most of the people who exist today are really, really, stupid when it comes to complex things like freedom and liberty.
Just a minute. There are many people that have been selling apples before even electricity was discovered. My grandfather was called "Mac" before Steve Jobs was even in existance. It's tough to find a kid's colouring crayon box without the colour "aqua" in there.
So far I see nothing that is enforcable as an original and unique trademark. If Apple Computer Inc. really wanted to protect their corporate image, you'd think they might coin something a bit more memorable than the world's most common fruit.
I took a look at the emu10k drivers... problem is, the instructions tell me to build it as a kernel module, which I'd rather not do. Can I just dump SB's downloaded drivers somewhere into the source tree and still have things work? (ie- will make menuconfig correctly and compile just as my 2.2.17 emu10k drivers did?)
Quiet, ye troll. Linus HIMSELF said that the ONLY reason Rieser hasn't made it into 2.4 is because he didn't want to upset the code freeze. Not because it's buggy. Not because of it's "in development" status. You only have yourself to blame for screwing up your laptop, because LINUX ITSELF is in development. It is nowhere near a finished product, but luckily it is good enough for some of us.
Please put this soapbox back from where you got it.
Hmm.. I'd be at stage 3 as well. However, I don't think I *ever* had a stage 2. I might go on to stage 4 if I was bored enough, though.
Seriously, I really *really* REALLY am beginning to dislike this whole gift-giving stuff. It was fun when I was a child (yay, things for free!), but now all I wind up with is a whole buch more stuff that I have to find space for. I've already bought all the things that I want. Anything else is much too expensive to give me as a gift.
All of the above, of course, doesn't even touch on the fact that I really suck at buying presents. I don't like spending money to begin with, and I'm claustrophobic in malls and stores. This year I've bought about half of my gifts online. Next year, I think I might shoot for damn near all.
At $10,000 per message, the potential contractural debt is ruinous for spammers.
Back in 1998, I was getting about 3 emails a week from this one guy advertising some kind of pyramid scam. The advantage on my part was that he left a toll-free phone number to call. When you dialed it, some guy went on a 3-minute speil about the scam and allowed you to leave a message afterward with your name, phone number, address, etc.
I took this opportunity to leave a message explaining in highly legal-sounding terms that he was using my personal paid-for email box for his commercial advertising purposes. I said that if I recieved any more messages containing the 800 number that I would bill him a (something on the order of) $8000 fee for every advertisement.
I left my email address letter-for-letter, hung up, and recieved no more spam from him.
[A month later, I found the sticky note with that number on it and decided to call it up and leave the beginning 3 minutes of every track from my new chem bros CD on its answering machine. Yeah, I'm cruel...]
Yeah, you're right. We shouldn't be wasting our time on inventing new technologies, because heck, they take *time* to implement. All of the software we will ever need has already been coded. The global network is as fast as it's going to get. We have enough privacy.
PFFT.
Many of the people posting to this story seem to be implying that MS is just plain evil and they will do anything in their power to close up open-source. That is plain and simply not true. MS in a large corporation that is in the business of making $$$$.
But M$ has had incredible success thus far with keeping their source intentionally closed. That is how that have made *all* of their $$$$ in the past. To do otherwise flies in the face of everything they've ever accomplished.
I'm not saying it'll never happen, I'm just saying that I highly doubt they would suddenly embrace OSS as quickly and with as much enthusiasm as you believe.
M$ has never worried about looking bad to a small group of people before, why should they now?
You ought to have done a bit more reading before jumping off the cliff, there sonny.
I actually did some work to find out the details of this bug. It started from some guy who just untarred everything and tried to run it as a user, and it failed. Upon further investigation, it turned out that when being run for the first time, mozilla creates some files in it's binary directory, which naturally a user has no write access to.
The workaround is deceptively simple: run mozilla as root or whoever owns the directory first. Then after the required files are created, you can run it as any user you choose and no problems will occur.
I did that and am now replying to your misinformed post using 0.6 as a regular user. Good day.
I agree. Said the Taco:
Those'll be one helluva desktop box.
...Except it won't run any of your usual software. Linux and FreeBSD will probably be okay (after awhile) in this area. Winders and other closed OS's. won't. I mean, yes, they *will* port the operating systems, but how many of those decent third-party devlopers want to buy an Itanium box just to recompile their stuff?
IIRC, AMD's upcoming 64-bit chip (sledgehammer?) will be backwards-compatible with 32-bit x86 stuff. I'm not sure whether this means the whole OS and its apps will have to be either one or the other, but it is a definite strongpoint IMHO.
I dunno, I agree with the car thing. But after spending over a year on my personal self-customized GNOME desktop, using windows for anything other than game-playing is just painful. I will admit, the interface for Win95 was good for it's time. And I think that the Start menu and taskbar were really great ideas. But everything else just leaves me highly unsatisfied. (For example, the idea of actually clicking on windows just to focus them now seems insane. Hurrah sloppy mouse focus!)
Let's see here...
Tarball method:
# wget this_package.tar.gz
# tar xvfz this_package.tar.gz
# cd this_package
#
./configure: whoopsey! a problem happened but I can't tell you what it is!
(hours later)
# make
(several warnings, possibly a fatal error or two)
# make install
RPM-enabled APT:
# apt-get install this_package
(does everything)
(package is installed)
I wonder which one is more complicated.
which sometimes becomes not merely a velar but rather an uvular fricative [X]
"uvular fricative"!! That's the coolest phrase I've ever heard in my life!
Heh, there are some parts of Canada like that, too. There are laws and regulations that either forbid the use of printed English or state that if English is used (say on a billboard), then a full French translation must accompany it, usually in much larger lettering.
It's just funny.
It might interest you to know that the Founders put the commerce clause in the Constitution so that States couldn't put tariffs on goods from other States (as happened under the Articles of Confederation).
So then, does this mean that no state could (or should) be able to pass a law declaring a new internet commerce tax for online purchases?
The state governments' opinion is that they are losing out on revenue generated by sales tax whenever an online sales is made. The retailers' opinion is that they lose out on profit whenever someone in their state buys a product from a warehouse located in a differing state.
Frankly, (and I know I'm getting a little off-topic here) Point #1 is absurd because state taxes get spent on things like roads, schools, etc. None of which is ever utilized by the person buying out-of-state. Point #2 is getting older each year as we watch more companies and organizations try to get laws passed to stifle new business models and methods, so that they may preserve their own and never have to change.
This internet tax thing is a pretty huge debate where I'm currently located (New Mexico), and I'm always trying to come up with ways to disprove the idiotic assumption that such a tax should exist.