Take you centralization of my e-mail content determination, and fuck off.
Reflect on the fact that you're not using my mail server, and calm the fuck down. That's the other nice thing about open source -- if you don't like a feature, you can always remove it yourself without chewing the developer a new asshole.
Otherwise, I'll continue to use the mpg123 engine for
all my mp3 decoding needs.
mpg123 is great, but it doesn't seem to support variable-rate MP3s. As these are the majority of what one seems to be able to download from MP3.com these days, I'm finding it really annoying to have to start X just to play some tunes, especially since I do all of my development work in console text mode.
So we could integrate TNEF decoding into mutt. But the question may be: do we want to?
No, but only because integrating it into the MTA is probably a better choice because it centralizes the modifications. Modifying every MUA in the world to handle MS extensions would be a misdirection of effort.
And of course we want to be able to handle whatever crap MS spews at us. We work all the time for higher levels of interoperability, and just because the thing we're trying to interoperate with is from MS doesn't matter in my book. Should we ditch Samba just because SMB is a proprietary protocol? Hardly.
Yes, it would be better if MS (and about fifty lesser software companies) played nice with everyone else, but it's questionable whether they ever will because they don't perceive it as being in the best interest of their profits, and it may not be. Ergo, we must learn to cope. And that's not a bad thing, because it just makes open source look better and it serves our users better while defanging the predatory companies that try to pull this crap on us. In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to, but this is not an ideal world.
Also, techniques like the old "saturate Echelon" approach, where you *always* tag on keywords like semtex, Nidal, West Bank, UN, ammo, NSA, NRO, ZOG, etc. to your messages. If everyone did it, and varied the list, it'd clog their system eventually...
Nah. 99.999% of the people who did that crap stuck it in their.sig file. You think the NSA's not smart enough to write a parser that ignores keywords after the last "--" at the beginning of a line in an email? In the battle between any randomly chosen half-assed programmer and lazy, pseudo-libertarian wisecrackers, I'll back the half-assed programmer.
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Re:Confusing "isolates" with technilliterates?
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Disconnected
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· Score: 2
I had a similar reaction to this review, but without having read the book, I can't tell if it's Katz or Wresch who's confusing two unrelated topics.
As far as the "information have-nots" are concerned, while this is a problem, I don't think it's as big of a problem as politicians like to claim. The income gap between tech and non-tech workers is as large as it is because of a temporary shortage of tech workers drives up wages, and because the traditional financial sector is still learning how to sort out sound business plans from hot air and bullshit in the tech sector. (The deflation of absurd IPO stock prices is a sign that the financial sector is catching on.) In time, the gap will narrow because tech wages will fall as the supply of workers meets the demand. Anyone remember what it was like trying to score a decent salary as a programmer around, oh, 1985?
The more important issue that the book talks about, so-called "isolates", really worries me. What Wresch is talking about reviving is the corporate paternalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Maybe Wresch thinks it would be a good idea if we all got involved in our jobs to the exclusion of a separate social life, but neither company towns nor scrip nor total loss of privacy really appeal to me. If it becomes a problem that I don't belong to the company softball team, I'll find another company. I already have a social life in the form of that traditional refuge for the "alienated" -- my people call it friends and family.
I wonder if DC really believes the hacking has stopped or if they see this as the only face-saving stance that they could take.
I think you hit the nail on the head right there. DC's statements read like a PHB trying to convince other PHB's that their business situation is stable, everything's okay, and would you please go back to sleep and feed us more venture capital. Sure, it seems stupid to us, but it's probably plausible to the class of people who can listen to DC's business plan without snickering.
Well, except that it's Tualatin, named after the Portland satellite city of the same name, which is where I happen to work. It's roughly pronounced tuh-WA-lah-tin. Be wary of placing too much faith on the spelling of Slashdot stories.
And for the record, Willamette is pronounced wi-LAM-met, not wi-lam-MET. Don't ask me why; I'm originally from Tennessee and I think Oregonians talk funny, too.;-)
I'm not saying the program has good terms or that it isn't a crummy way to treat people, just that those terms were clear and upfront. Personally, I have no problem at all allowing broad immigration of well-educated people from other countries, and I think we ought to do more of it. A LOT more, especially as the native education levels continue to decline in the absence of any real competition. I just think it ought to be at the front end, instead of from a sudden rules change at the back end. As eager as I am to get the heck out of the US, I'm certainly not a xenophobe or a nativist.
I think there is work being done on this, and I seem to recall it was mentioned in a previous story, but I don't recall where.
What I'm curious about is why, once you have a good, stable boot configuration, you can't store an image of memory at the moment the first login screen comes up, and have a boot loader that just loads that image at startup. I realize that this would be undesirable on a lot of systems, but I sure would appreciate this near-instant-on with the ancient IBM Thinkpad I carry around for lightweight tasks -- mostly text editing and my private development projects.
It seems to me that if you elect to spend time as a guest worker in another country with the up-front understanding that it is for a limited time, you ought to be a good guest and leave gracefully when that time is up, not bitch and moan and try to get the rules changed because you don't want to live up to your end of the bargain.
Please don't get me wrong and think this is anti-foreigner or even anti-immigration. If there had been a promise of citizenship eligibility at the beginning that would be completely different. It's just a matter of playing by the rules when the rules are pretty fair. If I were a guest worker in, let's say Germany (Please? Anyone need a C/PHP developer anywhere near Munich?), I'd go home when the time was up and be grateful for the hospitality.
And from another point of view, it would be crummy of the US to continue to drain the best talent out of third world countries that can use all the bright people they can get.
They simply cannot release the music in an unsecure format.
What, you mean they can't release music the way they've been doing for the last century? Hogwash. They've been packing away the millions for all that time, too. And despite widespread "piracy". It's not like digital music is new, either. We've had CD's since before a lot of/. users were born.
Then everyone else finds it on Napster, and has no need to buy it (and this is especially true for digital music, as you have exactly what
you would be purchasing).
This is also hogwash. Compressed music is a second-rate substitute for the real thing. If I were to download a track from a Napster user, I would be getting considerably less than what the owner of the original CD paid for. It would be good enough for my car or the crappy speakers on my office PC, but painfully inadequate for when I want to sit down at home at my stereo and listen. Maybe when we have the bandwidth to transfer uncompressed CDs the way MP3s are transferred now, they might have a point, but still not a very good one.
The fundamental flaw in all anti-piracy reasoning is that if a user illegally copies a thousand dollars worth of CDs, the music industry has lost a thousand dollars. The fact of the matter is that most people don't have a thousand dollars to spend on CDs every week, especially their core audience, who are teenagers and college students. If every MP3 in the world were magically erased and all sources were cut off, it would not translate into sales. Downloaders of pirated MP3s would probably buy about as many CDs as they do now, or maybe less, since their exposure to new music would be reduced.
I have two laws for you: the FOIA and the Privacy Act. And no, I don't mean you can do a FOIA request on Carnivore's code. What you can do is use the Privacy Act to get a copy of your FBI dossier. Here's what you do:
Get investigated by the FBI. This is not as difficult as it sounds, and to judge from the neo-Nazi rumblings coming from the DOJ about the "inherent power" of the government to monitor our communications, it'll probably just get easier as time goes by.
Once you have reasonable confidence that the Carnivore parasitizing your ISP's network is following you, begin sending carefully prepared (and perhaps machine-generated) messages to and from a variety of email accounts, some bogus, some belonging to friends and relatives.
This being done, wait until you're no longer under investigation by the FBI. (How to accomplish that is left as an exercise to the reader.) Use the Privacy Act to get a copy of your dossier and all the email Carnivore captured. Using this -- if your test data set was well prepared -- you should be able to deduce quite a bit about the behavior of Carnivore.
Of course, this entails some personal risk, but liberty usually does.
Alternatively, if you think your local Carnivore is monitoring something it shouldn't, flood it with data and sit outside of your ISP's NOC and see how often the MIBs come to change the tapes.
Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.--Thomas Jefferson
I'm a hacker and a Thelemite. I've been both for about fifteen years now. I remember that in the mid to late 80's there seemed to be a higher proportion of people professing belief in Eastern, polytheistic, and so-called "alternative" religions. That seems to have changed over the last decade.
To be a member of a minority religion or other belief system is difficult at best in a monotheistic society. (I'll spare you my rant on why I think monotheism virtually guarantees bigotry and intolerance; it's off-topic and probably flamebait anyway.) The pre-AOL internet was a good place for geographically distant minorities to meet and, well, hide. Hackerdom was also a good place to hide and to find community outside of the mainstream. Beyond that, I don't think there's any causal connection.
The nearer today's Internet comes to imitating TV, the less it comes to differ from the general populace. Those oldbies who remain have either hidden themselves a little deeper or moved on.
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Re:Bombing obscure third world country
on
Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 2
Of course, that sucked up so much of the budget that they had to retire the Vulcan bombers for lack of funds to upkeep them...
Yes, but other than being cool-looking in a retro sort of way, what were they good for? That's like the American SR-71 -- a nifty-looking piece of hardware, but obsoleted by less attractive technologies. A defeat for the national aesthetic, but hardly the national will.
Argentina was, however, a poor choice. Defeating Argentina is like defeating France; everyone does it now and again, but where's the challenge? The US got to boast pretentiously about containing the menace of Saddam Hussein; all the UK gets to do is boast about containing the menace of Jorge Luis Borges.
Then again, both of them have made comebacks, but at least Borges' comeback was just a three volume set of collected works.
Agreed. There's just no way to get everyone's display to look the same, even if everyone is browsing in 24-bit true color on exactly the same platform. Monitor settings vary widely unless they've all been carefully (and expensively) calibrated, and then only for awhile. I have a hell of a time getting the widely disparate monitors on the three machines I use to be reasonably close to each other. Add the extreme difference in default gamma between Macs and PCs, and well, it's a lost cause.
What you need here is good design. Contrary to what appears to be popular belief on the web, good design is always centered around the clear presentation of content, and it aims for simplicity. If you keep those goals in mind, it's not going to matter much if the few graphic elements on your pages don't look the same on all monitors.
Even if the principles of good design did not dictate graphic simplicity, real-world bandwidth does. There are a LOT of 14.4k, 28.8k, and 33.6k modems out there. Moreover, just because you compress the heck out of your graphics doesn't mean crap when they are decompressed into RAM. And yes, it's trivial to build a 1k GIF or JPEG that expands into a multimegabyte block of RAM, and there are plenty of dolts doing it. And on older, slower machines, of which many remain, deeply nested tables take forever to render.
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Re:US leads and the world follows
on
Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 1
US Leads, and its European lapdog and aircraft carrier,the UK, certainly follows
I'm glad you guys have noticed your government's bizarrely sycophantic position with regard to ours. Our relations with the major European powers and their weird consistency have been puzzling a lot of us for awhile. The UK does whatever we do, France opposes whatever we do, and the Germans are still sulking over their loss of prestige now that we no longer need them to be the battlefield for World War Three (though we suspect this is a ruse to distract us from the way their central bank is rapidly doing to Europe what their army twice failed to do).
Personally, I'm sorry y'all lost the Empire. It seems to have sapped the national will the way Vietnam left the US reeling. Maybe the UK should consider bombing the holy living shit out of an obscure third world country. We did, and now we're at least ten times as brutish and arrogant as we were before Vietnam.
In all seriousness though, and no offense intended, why does the UK follow the US so closely? Are we paying off your government? Blackmailing the Queen? Or is it just to piss off the rest of the EC?
The problem, though, is that the approach taken doesn't work on multi-CPU systems.
This may be gross ignorance on my part, since I've never done any realtime programming, but aren't most common RT apps designed to run on single-processor systems? MontaVista's solution is surely not the end of the journey towards a realtime Linux, but it will probably satisfy a lot of needs in the meantime.
KDE 2.0s interface is more contemporary than GNOME's
Only if by "contemporary" you mean "more like Windows". I can't really think of much in the way of older user interfaces that GNOME resembles.
KDE takes a less timid approach to making use of others interface design philosiphies than GNOME does.
KDE is certainly more eager to imitate Windows. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a dead end strategy when it comes to winning hearts and minds. "Chase the dream, not the competition." It also presumes you like the Windows-style interface. If I did, I wouldn't be using Linux. Windows does come "free" with new computers. (Okay, but you have to pay for it either way.);)
KDE has more mature app integration than GNOME
I can't really argue that point. But GNOME is newer, and it is plainly advancing faster than KDE, which is to be expected for a system attempting to blaze new territory rather than to simply achieve parity with a competitor. Still, I'll be glad when I can cut and paste more often.
The KDE UI is centered around implementing what works best for the user, where GNOME appears to do what is best for the
developer.
Huh? I think you can make a case that GNOME is friendlier to C programmers than KDE's C++ API -- which is part of why I like it, being a C programmer -- but I can't really say that either system is better for developers than end users. Except for the actual task of GUI design, character-based commandline systems are a lot more developer-friendly than GUIs in general.
What's really disturbing to me about these pointless advocacy debates is the hidden presumption that everybody must be forced into one standard interface despite their personal preferences. That's a BS viewpoint fostered by commercial software. What we need are solid interoperability standards so you can use KWrite, I can use AbiWord, and the next guy can use Word, and we can all use each other's data without respect to each other's software. Killing the competition is only good if you're selling software; if you're giving it away, the competition ought to be more friendly and cooperative.
...or, more accurately, we need it to be. The recent abuses of the patent system and the sudden expansion of IP law all point to the fact that the idea of intellectual property may look good on paper -- as does communism -- but in practice, its benefits are more than outweighed by ever larger abuses of the system. More and more information that used to be in the public domain is in danger of becoming proprietary, database copyrights being the first example that springs to mind. That's stealing from the public domain, our common public property, but you don't hear the megacorps say anything about that; it's just when some 14-year-old steals a copy of a Metallica song that they get upset.
This problem is expanding fast, fueled in part by the technology that the more naively ethical among us thought would be used for the common good. Every significant corporation on earth is now trading in "customer profiles", information about you and me that they can use against us. That's not just spam -- that's employers being able to fire you over Usenet (or Slashdot postings), overzealous politicians using your purchases at Amazon.com to ferret out your private beliefs, and insurance companies discriminating against people on the basis of behavior and genetics. It's fair to say most people don't want that information getting out, much less distributed to the highest bidder, but they won't come to you for licensing fees -- they'll just take it and then get Congress to expand copyright law to protect their "right" to your most intimate details.
Intellectual property would be a good idea, except that more than in almost any other area, virtually any IP system favors the rich and powerful over the common man. Increasingly, it institutionalizes the plundering of common knowledge by corporations while depriving the public of the right to actually own anything they pay for. Opposing IP rights isn't communism or airy-headed idealism -- it's cold, hard common sense aimed at protecting the rights of private individuals and preventing the arbitrary abuse of corporate and governmental power.
Where this really sucks has squat to do with the boring crap produced by the big record companies. I dunno how many of you have looked at what MP3.com does for small acts with their DAM CD program, but it's a pretty cool (and largely cost-free) way for everyone with an unsigned band, be they a big local act or just some kids in the garage, to market and sell CDs of their stuff. I've probably spent more on DAM CDs this year than on anything I've seen in stores.
Yes, Sturgeon's Law still applies, and most unsigned acts are unsigned because they suck. But with thousands and thousands of acts to choose from, and the option of pre-listening via MP3 (with the artists' explicit consent), it's not hard to find the good stuff, either.
What the record companies are afraid of isn't piracy. It's the loss of mindshare and their inability, as large bureaucracies, to manage a future music business full of tens of thousands of performers with relatively small audiences instead of a hundred or so industry acts. What we're seeing is the battle between the music industry and the emergence of net-empowered musicians. The future belongs not to a few acts with millions of fans, but to many acts with thousands of fans.
It will be a shame if this is delayed -- it can hardly be stopped at this point -- by the music "industry".
C'mon, why do you think Americans pay per gallon of gasoline what Europeans pay per liter? Farm subsidies? Research grants? There are already billions of tax dollars going directly or indirectly into U.S. corporations. Some of it (funding for scientific research) is not such a bad idea, but much of it is a simple quid-pro-quo in return for campaign contributions. And even the taxpayer-funded scientific research tends to go into proprietary, patented products.
There's not much Americans can say about this sort of thing. We keep voting for the same two parties, and when it gets down to it, we keep voting for the candidate who spends the most on ads. (Okay, in all fairness, two-thirds of the electorate votes unthinkingly for their party, and the remaining third votes unthinkingly for whoever spends the most on ads. It's not like Machiavelli didn't warn us about this.)
Tomorrow...the RIAA sues people taping songs from the radio.
If they could, they would. Remember, this is the same organization that requires retail stores to pay royalties for playing the radio over the in-store PA system. Yes, that would be the same radio signal that originated at a station that already paid royalties to broadcast songs to anyone with a receiver. Their audacity is only amazing to us because we could never get away with the ludicrous feats of artist-shafting and double-dipping that they can. It no doubt seems perfectly reasonable to them, because every time they stroke the belly of that giant Buddha that is the United States Congress, money shoots out of its ass. Wait -- that's our ass.
If you want to screw the MPAA and the RIAA, broaden your interests. Spend less time buying their fifth-rate, predigested pap and go see some live bands and theatrical performances. Visit the nearest bookstore (new and used). Or hell, go to the library, where what remains of your tax dollars after the Reagan administration got done with them are going to provide copyrighted material to all comers for free! Hang out somewhere and meet people. (People are so cool -- you can talk to them, play games with them, and sometimes even have sex with them. Can the MPAA deliver that?) Maybe learn to play your own goddamn guitar -- if Lars can do it, how hard can it be?
Hell, maybe my life would strike some people as boring, but it's been keeping me entertained for years, and neither the MPAA nor the RIAA make much money off me.
I have both KDE and Gnome on my system. I probably will continue to do so until a) Gnome is more stable and b) there are more Gnome apps. The license issue was important to me, and the argument that the end user doesn't care about licenses never made much sense to me -- that's precisely why the average end-user is trapped into using proprietary software with unconscionable licenses that are only becoming more so as software vendors push unconscionable legislation like UCITA.
I'm glad Qt is GPLed now, and I wish them the best. One of the strongest points of the Linux graphical environment is choice. I guess that strikes some people as inconvenient, but I refuse to surrender my choices in the name of anyone's convenience, even my own. That being said, I prefer Gnome.
Why? The API is written in C. I'm a C programmer. I can and do program in C++ at the office, but on my own time, I use the language I prefer. If someone wants to write a C wrapper for the C++ Qt API, I might consider KDE again. Less because of any inherent advantage in KDE than because it would really gall the C++ crowd.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Reflect on the fact that you're not using my mail server, and calm the fuck down. That's the other nice thing about open source -- if you don't like a feature, you can always remove it yourself without chewing the developer a new asshole.
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mpg123 is great, but it doesn't seem to support variable-rate MP3s. As these are the majority of what one seems to be able to download from MP3.com these days, I'm finding it really annoying to have to start X just to play some tunes, especially since I do all of my development work in console text mode.
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No, but only because integrating it into the MTA is probably a better choice because it centralizes the modifications. Modifying every MUA in the world to handle MS extensions would be a misdirection of effort.
And of course we want to be able to handle whatever crap MS spews at us. We work all the time for higher levels of interoperability, and just because the thing we're trying to interoperate with is from MS doesn't matter in my book. Should we ditch Samba just because SMB is a proprietary protocol? Hardly.
Yes, it would be better if MS (and about fifty lesser software companies) played nice with everyone else, but it's questionable whether they ever will because they don't perceive it as being in the best interest of their profits, and it may not be. Ergo, we must learn to cope. And that's not a bad thing, because it just makes open source look better and it serves our users better while defanging the predatory companies that try to pull this crap on us. In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to, but this is not an ideal world.
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Nah. 99.999% of the people who did that crap stuck it in their .sig file. You think the NSA's not smart enough to write a parser that ignores keywords after the last "--" at the beginning of a line in an email? In the battle between any randomly chosen half-assed programmer and lazy, pseudo-libertarian wisecrackers, I'll back the half-assed programmer.
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As far as the "information have-nots" are concerned, while this is a problem, I don't think it's as big of a problem as politicians like to claim. The income gap between tech and non-tech workers is as large as it is because of a temporary shortage of tech workers drives up wages, and because the traditional financial sector is still learning how to sort out sound business plans from hot air and bullshit in the tech sector. (The deflation of absurd IPO stock prices is a sign that the financial sector is catching on.) In time, the gap will narrow because tech wages will fall as the supply of workers meets the demand. Anyone remember what it was like trying to score a decent salary as a programmer around, oh, 1985?
The more important issue that the book talks about, so-called "isolates", really worries me. What Wresch is talking about reviving is the corporate paternalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Maybe Wresch thinks it would be a good idea if we all got involved in our jobs to the exclusion of a separate social life, but neither company towns nor scrip nor total loss of privacy really appeal to me. If it becomes a problem that I don't belong to the company softball team, I'll find another company. I already have a social life in the form of that traditional refuge for the "alienated" -- my people call it friends and family.
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I think you hit the nail on the head right there. DC's statements read like a PHB trying to convince other PHB's that their business situation is stable, everything's okay, and would you please go back to sleep and feed us more venture capital. Sure, it seems stupid to us, but it's probably plausible to the class of people who can listen to DC's business plan without snickering.
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And for the record, Willamette is pronounced wi-LAM-met, not wi-lam-MET. Don't ask me why; I'm originally from Tennessee and I think Oregonians talk funny, too. ;-)
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I'm not saying the program has good terms or that it isn't a crummy way to treat people, just that those terms were clear and upfront. Personally, I have no problem at all allowing broad immigration of well-educated people from other countries, and I think we ought to do more of it. A LOT more, especially as the native education levels continue to decline in the absence of any real competition. I just think it ought to be at the front end, instead of from a sudden rules change at the back end. As eager as I am to get the heck out of the US, I'm certainly not a xenophobe or a nativist.
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What I'm curious about is why, once you have a good, stable boot configuration, you can't store an image of memory at the moment the first login screen comes up, and have a boot loader that just loads that image at startup. I realize that this would be undesirable on a lot of systems, but I sure would appreciate this near-instant-on with the ancient IBM Thinkpad I carry around for lightweight tasks -- mostly text editing and my private development projects.
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Please don't get me wrong and think this is anti-foreigner or even anti-immigration. If there had been a promise of citizenship eligibility at the beginning that would be completely different. It's just a matter of playing by the rules when the rules are pretty fair. If I were a guest worker in, let's say Germany (Please? Anyone need a C/PHP developer anywhere near Munich?), I'd go home when the time was up and be grateful for the hospitality.
And from another point of view, it would be crummy of the US to continue to drain the best talent out of third world countries that can use all the bright people they can get.
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What, you mean they can't release music the way they've been doing for the last century? Hogwash. They've been packing away the millions for all that time, too. And despite widespread "piracy". It's not like digital music is new, either. We've had CD's since before a lot of /. users were born.
Then everyone else finds it on Napster, and has no need to buy it (and this is especially true for digital music, as you have exactly what you would be purchasing).
This is also hogwash. Compressed music is a second-rate substitute for the real thing. If I were to download a track from a Napster user, I would be getting considerably less than what the owner of the original CD paid for. It would be good enough for my car or the crappy speakers on my office PC, but painfully inadequate for when I want to sit down at home at my stereo and listen. Maybe when we have the bandwidth to transfer uncompressed CDs the way MP3s are transferred now, they might have a point, but still not a very good one.
The fundamental flaw in all anti-piracy reasoning is that if a user illegally copies a thousand dollars worth of CDs, the music industry has lost a thousand dollars. The fact of the matter is that most people don't have a thousand dollars to spend on CDs every week, especially their core audience, who are teenagers and college students. If every MP3 in the world were magically erased and all sources were cut off, it would not translate into sales. Downloaders of pirated MP3s would probably buy about as many CDs as they do now, or maybe less, since their exposure to new music would be reduced.
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- Get investigated by the FBI. This is not as difficult as it sounds, and to judge from the neo-Nazi rumblings coming from the DOJ about the "inherent power" of the government to monitor our communications, it'll probably just get easier as time goes by.
- Once you have reasonable confidence that the Carnivore parasitizing your ISP's network is following you, begin sending carefully prepared (and perhaps machine-generated) messages to and from a variety of email accounts, some bogus, some belonging to friends and relatives.
- This being done, wait until you're no longer under investigation by the FBI. (How to accomplish that is left as an exercise to the reader.) Use the Privacy Act to get a copy of your dossier and all the email Carnivore captured. Using this -- if your test data set was well prepared -- you should be able to deduce quite a bit about the behavior of Carnivore.
Of course, this entails some personal risk, but liberty usually does.Alternatively, if you think your local Carnivore is monitoring something it shouldn't, flood it with data and sit outside of your ISP's NOC and see how often the MIBs come to change the tapes.
Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.--Thomas Jefferson
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It's in /etc/hosts under Linux.
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To be a member of a minority religion or other belief system is difficult at best in a monotheistic society. (I'll spare you my rant on why I think monotheism virtually guarantees bigotry and intolerance; it's off-topic and probably flamebait anyway.) The pre-AOL internet was a good place for geographically distant minorities to meet and, well, hide. Hackerdom was also a good place to hide and to find community outside of the mainstream. Beyond that, I don't think there's any causal connection.
The nearer today's Internet comes to imitating TV, the less it comes to differ from the general populace. Those oldbies who remain have either hidden themselves a little deeper or moved on.
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Yes, but other than being cool-looking in a retro sort of way, what were they good for? That's like the American SR-71 -- a nifty-looking piece of hardware, but obsoleted by less attractive technologies. A defeat for the national aesthetic, but hardly the national will.
Argentina was, however, a poor choice. Defeating Argentina is like defeating France; everyone does it now and again, but where's the challenge? The US got to boast pretentiously about containing the menace of Saddam Hussein; all the UK gets to do is boast about containing the menace of Jorge Luis Borges.
Then again, both of them have made comebacks, but at least Borges' comeback was just a three volume set of collected works.
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What you need here is good design. Contrary to what appears to be popular belief on the web, good design is always centered around the clear presentation of content, and it aims for simplicity. If you keep those goals in mind, it's not going to matter much if the few graphic elements on your pages don't look the same on all monitors.
Even if the principles of good design did not dictate graphic simplicity, real-world bandwidth does. There are a LOT of 14.4k, 28.8k, and 33.6k modems out there. Moreover, just because you compress the heck out of your graphics doesn't mean crap when they are decompressed into RAM. And yes, it's trivial to build a 1k GIF or JPEG that expands into a multimegabyte block of RAM, and there are plenty of dolts doing it. And on older, slower machines, of which many remain, deeply nested tables take forever to render.
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I'm glad you guys have noticed your government's bizarrely sycophantic position with regard to ours. Our relations with the major European powers and their weird consistency have been puzzling a lot of us for awhile. The UK does whatever we do, France opposes whatever we do, and the Germans are still sulking over their loss of prestige now that we no longer need them to be the battlefield for World War Three (though we suspect this is a ruse to distract us from the way their central bank is rapidly doing to Europe what their army twice failed to do).
Personally, I'm sorry y'all lost the Empire. It seems to have sapped the national will the way Vietnam left the US reeling. Maybe the UK should consider bombing the holy living shit out of an obscure third world country. We did, and now we're at least ten times as brutish and arrogant as we were before Vietnam.
In all seriousness though, and no offense intended, why does the UK follow the US so closely? Are we paying off your government? Blackmailing the Queen? Or is it just to piss off the rest of the EC?
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This may be gross ignorance on my part, since I've never done any realtime programming, but aren't most common RT apps designed to run on single-processor systems? MontaVista's solution is surely not the end of the journey towards a realtime Linux, but it will probably satisfy a lot of needs in the meantime.
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Only if by "contemporary" you mean "more like Windows". I can't really think of much in the way of older user interfaces that GNOME resembles.
KDE takes a less timid approach to making use of others interface design philosiphies than GNOME does.
KDE is certainly more eager to imitate Windows. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a dead end strategy when it comes to winning hearts and minds. "Chase the dream, not the competition." It also presumes you like the Windows-style interface. If I did, I wouldn't be using Linux. Windows does come "free" with new computers. (Okay, but you have to pay for it either way.) ;)
KDE has more mature app integration than GNOME
I can't really argue that point. But GNOME is newer, and it is plainly advancing faster than KDE, which is to be expected for a system attempting to blaze new territory rather than to simply achieve parity with a competitor. Still, I'll be glad when I can cut and paste more often.
The KDE UI is centered around implementing what works best for the user, where GNOME appears to do what is best for the developer.
Huh? I think you can make a case that GNOME is friendlier to C programmers than KDE's C++ API -- which is part of why I like it, being a C programmer -- but I can't really say that either system is better for developers than end users. Except for the actual task of GUI design, character-based commandline systems are a lot more developer-friendly than GUIs in general.
What's really disturbing to me about these pointless advocacy debates is the hidden presumption that everybody must be forced into one standard interface despite their personal preferences. That's a BS viewpoint fostered by commercial software. What we need are solid interoperability standards so you can use KWrite, I can use AbiWord, and the next guy can use Word, and we can all use each other's data without respect to each other's software. Killing the competition is only good if you're selling software; if you're giving it away, the competition ought to be more friendly and cooperative.
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This problem is expanding fast, fueled in part by the technology that the more naively ethical among us thought would be used for the common good. Every significant corporation on earth is now trading in "customer profiles", information about you and me that they can use against us. That's not just spam -- that's employers being able to fire you over Usenet (or Slashdot postings), overzealous politicians using your purchases at Amazon.com to ferret out your private beliefs, and insurance companies discriminating against people on the basis of behavior and genetics. It's fair to say most people don't want that information getting out, much less distributed to the highest bidder, but they won't come to you for licensing fees -- they'll just take it and then get Congress to expand copyright law to protect their "right" to your most intimate details.
Intellectual property would be a good idea, except that more than in almost any other area, virtually any IP system favors the rich and powerful over the common man. Increasingly, it institutionalizes the plundering of common knowledge by corporations while depriving the public of the right to actually own anything they pay for. Opposing IP rights isn't communism or airy-headed idealism -- it's cold, hard common sense aimed at protecting the rights of private individuals and preventing the arbitrary abuse of corporate and governmental power.
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Yes, Sturgeon's Law still applies, and most unsigned acts are unsigned because they suck. But with thousands and thousands of acts to choose from, and the option of pre-listening via MP3 (with the artists' explicit consent), it's not hard to find the good stuff, either.
What the record companies are afraid of isn't piracy. It's the loss of mindshare and their inability, as large bureaucracies, to manage a future music business full of tens of thousands of performers with relatively small audiences instead of a hundred or so industry acts. What we're seeing is the battle between the music industry and the emergence of net-empowered musicians. The future belongs not to a few acts with millions of fans, but to many acts with thousands of fans.
It will be a shame if this is delayed -- it can hardly be stopped at this point -- by the music "industry".
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There's not much Americans can say about this sort of thing. We keep voting for the same two parties, and when it gets down to it, we keep voting for the candidate who spends the most on ads. (Okay, in all fairness, two-thirds of the electorate votes unthinkingly for their party, and the remaining third votes unthinkingly for whoever spends the most on ads. It's not like Machiavelli didn't warn us about this.)
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Oh hell, if Lars will take the time to learn what fair use is, I'll try to remember what he plays.
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If they could, they would. Remember, this is the same organization that requires retail stores to pay royalties for playing the radio over the in-store PA system. Yes, that would be the same radio signal that originated at a station that already paid royalties to broadcast songs to anyone with a receiver. Their audacity is only amazing to us because we could never get away with the ludicrous feats of artist-shafting and double-dipping that they can. It no doubt seems perfectly reasonable to them, because every time they stroke the belly of that giant Buddha that is the United States Congress, money shoots out of its ass. Wait -- that's our ass.
If you want to screw the MPAA and the RIAA, broaden your interests. Spend less time buying their fifth-rate, predigested pap and go see some live bands and theatrical performances. Visit the nearest bookstore (new and used). Or hell, go to the library, where what remains of your tax dollars after the Reagan administration got done with them are going to provide copyrighted material to all comers for free! Hang out somewhere and meet people. (People are so cool -- you can talk to them, play games with them, and sometimes even have sex with them. Can the MPAA deliver that?) Maybe learn to play your own goddamn guitar -- if Lars can do it, how hard can it be?
Hell, maybe my life would strike some people as boring, but it's been keeping me entertained for years, and neither the MPAA nor the RIAA make much money off me.
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I'm glad Qt is GPLed now, and I wish them the best. One of the strongest points of the Linux graphical environment is choice. I guess that strikes some people as inconvenient, but I refuse to surrender my choices in the name of anyone's convenience, even my own. That being said, I prefer Gnome.
Why? The API is written in C. I'm a C programmer. I can and do program in C++ at the office, but on my own time, I use the language I prefer. If someone wants to write a C wrapper for the C++ Qt API, I might consider KDE again. Less because of any inherent advantage in KDE than because it would really gall the C++ crowd. ;-)
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