In PSE, the crop tool's rectangle can be rotated before you finish. Go to a corner of the rectangle and wait for the cursor to change into a rotate cursor. Another nice feature is to set the aspect ratio before cropping, so you can resize the cropping rectangle and have it constrained to, say, 6x4. I presume gimp can do that, too.
There's been some talk about getting a subscription service running for MythTV users; if I recall, the goal was to get it going for $5/month.
Here's an option that could be considered: buy a BeyondTV license from Snapstream, then use your username and password along with a little reverse engineering to login legally to their guide service. BeyondTV's guide data is included with your purchase -- no monthly fees. Currently it costs $70, so after a year it would have paid for itself at the proposed $5/month.
That said, I should say I'm pretty pleased with the actual BeyondTV software, even though it is Windows-based. I spent about 2 weeks trying to get Myth (MythDora) and Freevo to work at all on a pretty vanilla new Dell PC with new hardware reported to be compatible. I downloaded BTV just to see if the hardware was to blame, and after a grand total of 15 minutes, I had a working PVR with multiple tuners. The software is customizable as well, so I can do nightly batch processing like I was planning to do with the Linux box, although the included Xvid transcoding works automatically if you want to do that.
Oy. I "bulleted" one too many lines (the first one from the press release), and I meant to say "Solaris/sparc, Solaris/x86, and Linux." Forgive me, it's late.
Yes, the compilers are included! This is great news, indeed. From the press release:
Included at no cost in the new Solaris Enterprise System are:
The award winning and open sourced Solaris 10 OS, with the recently announced PostgreSQL database;
The entire Sun Java Enterprise System infrastructure software platform, including the Sun Java Identity Management Suite, Sun Java Integration Suite, Sun Java Communications Suite, Sun Java Application Platform Suite, Sun Java Availability Suite and Sun Java Web Infrastructure Suite;
The N1 Management Software including the Sun N1 System Manager, the Sun N1 Service Provisioning System, the Sun N1 Grid Engine;
All tools for C, C++ and Java development, including Sun Studio 11, Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8 and Sun Java Studio Creator;
SunRay ultra-thin client software;
Sun Secure Global Desktop Software.
I'm downloading Sun Studio 11 for Solaris, x86, and Linux right now.
It's unclear how exploitable this bug is with OpenSSH. Just to be sure, apply the patch, recompile zlib, then relink and reinstall ssh.
If you don't want to go to the trouble of doing that right now, a quick fix would be to disable compression in the sshd_config file ("Compression no") and restart sshd. In fact, zlib has had a string of several security bugs recently, so it may be best to just do this anyway.
I hope you will consider one or more of the following:
(a) Report this to the press, anonymously if you have to.
(b) Contact the relevant federal agency that oversees these retirement accounts.
(c) Resign, unless you can sleep at night knowing that is happening.
No matter how recent the backup was, "guessing" at account balances for people's life savings is absolutely unacceptable and your company must be held accountable.
Caldera/SCO OpenUNIX 8 (and UnixWare 7) do not run under VMWare, nor does BSDi BSD/OS 4.2.
BSD/OS 4.2 was actually very close to working for me, but I think it had the same problem with the driver for ethernet controller that OpenBSD had. OpenBSD didn't run out of the box correctly until recently (version 2.9) which worked around this problem.
It looks like Wind River finally released a BSD/OS 4.3, so maybe they've addressed this issue.
I haven't tried NetBSD recently, but I would think that VMware compatibility would be a priority for those guys.
That said, VMware is *highly* recommended for any developer, especially those interested in portability, since it makes it easy to test your app on a variety of x86 operating systems.
You should be able to add or remove hard drives at will. When you add RAM, you simply plug it in and the OS knows to use it; why not hard drives?
The user should not need to understand the notion of a filesystem. "Advanced" users should only need to know that they can plug in a hard drive and know that the OS will automatically format and integrate it into the system. Need more disk space to store MP3s? Simply add a disk, reboot, and have your space automatically split across the second drive.
Users should only have the concept of a Home folder (let's not call it a directory). The user can place all of her data in this folder. Advanced users can create subfolders if they so choose, but the UI should be able to automatically group files in a single folder by type if the user doesn't create one.
Users should not be concerned with OS files, the actual files used to store.EXE and Application files, etc.
Mac OS X is the closest to this. Your home directory contains all your data and application preference files. I recently lost a hard drive, but had a nightly backup of my home directory. I simply reinstalled OS X and the applications I use, and *voila* everything is back to normal -- no importing bookmarks, restoring my e-mail client configuration, etc. Users of KDE/GNOME are enjoying similar benefits.
Windows has a ways to go, but for starters it can get rid of the idiotic "drive letter" concept. At least with UNIX you can mount a separate disk drive into the global filesystem. Windows 2000 provides this equivalent feature finally, but only if you use NTFS. I doubt Windows XP Home encourages end users to use one "C:" drive and mount other disks as a folder, but it should.
Naturally, power users, system administrators, programmers, etc., still would benefit from the concept of a filesystem. But the millions of end-users needn't be bothered with it.
Wonder if eMusic patented the highly sophisticated technology of adding an ID3 comment. If you recall, eMusic threatened Napster with lawsuits based on users sharing files previously retrieved from eMusic.
> id3info "./01 - Greed.mp3"
*** Tag information for./01 - Greed.mp3
=== TIT2 (Title/songname/content description): Greed
=== TALB (Album/Movie/Show title): Straight Ahead
=== TRCK (Track number/Position in set): 1
=== LINK (Linked information): frame
=== TPE1 (Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)): Pennywise === COMM (Comments): (ID3v1 Comment)[XXX]: www.emusic.com/albums/2085/
=== TCON (Content type): (43)
Guess of Napster's new "Protection Layer".
(1) For each file to be shared by the user, write the user's Napster username to the ID3.
(2) As new files are downloaded, preserve the remote user's Napster username in the file, if present. If a username was detected, do not allow this file to be shared.
Of course, even casual pirates could run a utility to strip the comments from their downloads, but I wouldn't be surprised if Napster implements something this naive.
My RH7.0 box included an "Errata CD" along with a leaflet titled "Mandatory Errata Installation Instructions."
The bad news is that it only contained the fixes for rhnsd (up2date). It would be nice if RH would continue to include full-fledged Errata CDs, rather than rely upon up2date, but I have a feeling that this was a one-time thing. Kudos to RH for stepping up, though.
Ideally vendors would include pre-patched distributions when new disc manufacturing runs are ordered. The primary example I'm thinking of is Microsoft: it would have been nice for MSDN to include a Windows NT 4 SP 6 full install disc, rather than require you to install NT 4 and then service packs. (You can't even run Windows Update since NT4 includes IE2.0!)
Just have the CD player look for a special default playlist file in the root directory of the MP3 CD, named index.m3u. If it's there, great, read in the whole file and treat that as the CD catalog. If not, do it the hard way by traversing every directory.
I tend to burn CDs with artist directories in the top level, and then album directories as subdirectories of the artist directories. I then have a script create playlist files for every directory, so as you get closer to the root directory the playlist files contain more songs. Since relative pathnames can be used in playlist files, these playlists can be the same as they are on CD-ROM as they are stored on my hard drive.
Things are not going to change as long as Visa and Mastercard can profit from fraudulent transactions.
Most people think that when Joe Sixpack goes to the credit card company to report fraudulent transaction(s) on his statement that Visa/MC is liable for the total amount charged less $50. The fact is that the merchant is required to reimburse for the total amount charged plus fees related to the chargeback, for transactions taken by phone or Internet. Visa threatened me with $25,000/month fines if fraudulent transactions exceeded 1% of my sales volume. So let's see here... why would Visa/MC give a flying squirrel about fraud when not only are they not liable for it, but actually profit by it at the expense of the merchants?
The fact that anyone can spend your money by simply knowing your account number is mind blowing. That's about as ludicrous as being able to access the Pentagon's servers by simply knowing someone's login name. The credit card processing system is inherently flawed and Visa/MC certainly doesn't seem to care.
The problem is that merchants are generally at the mercy of the banks (of which Visa and MC are consortiums of). Merchants can't survive without credit card processing, and with banks, it's always "you need us more than we need you."
If there's a class-action possible against Visa/MC, then sign me up. You can bet if Visa/MC were liable for the fraudulent transactions then things would get fixed real quick.
Console gamers aren't accustomed to and will not tolerate their games crashing every 15 minutes. In fact, I can't remember any of my old NES and Sega Genesis games locking up or coming away feeling that a console game was buggy. I also never had to apply 5 service packs (i.e. NT4) to a console game system to get it to run smoothly.
I've been trying to play Microsoft's Crimson Skies game today, but the game crashes/locks up/needs Windows to be restarted constantly. This is on a fresh install of Windows ME on a pretty ordinary system -- it is literally the only application other than the junk Windows Setup installed. The argument that the XBoxes will all be the identical hardware configuration ergo will it will be reliable thing doesn't work when the games don't work on that one configuration.
The Quake-engine games seem to be more reliable (but far from console stability) than DirectX games, and DirectX will be used for the XBox. Since nVidia's drivers, DirectX, and the Windows OS are all far from rock-solid, I hope Microsoft at least places the Reset button in a convenient position on the box.
There will be games like Crimson Skies (perhaps Halo) which will be fun to play in between reboots, but I'm sure there will be plenty of good games for the PS2 and Dolphin which are both fun to play and Just Plain Work.
Simply put, you're the one guy in the world in whose presence I would have been in awe of. I wouldn't bother asking for Michael Jordan's autograph, didn't shed a tear for JFK Jr., and couldn't care less about shaking the hand of a U.S. President, but it would have been a great honor just to say "hi" to you in person.
Your work served as the foundation of my own work, and many others as well. The most influential book in my life so far has been Unix Network Programming -- without it, I simply would have done what most college students do and simply go to class just to get it over with. Your work inspired me to do something outside the realm of the classroom and filled my head with ideas and dreams, and for that I can't thank you enough.
Your obituary cites you as a "noted author of computer books", but your books weren't simply "computer books" nor "programming books", nor were you simply an author. Your works stand as great works of computer science.
We will miss you, W. Richard Stevens, and we regret that you were taken from us when surely you had 20 more years of knowledge yet to bestow upon us.
Slashdot Mirror
In PSE, the crop tool's rectangle can be rotated before you finish. Go to a corner of the rectangle and wait for the cursor to change into a rotate cursor. Another nice feature is to set the aspect ratio before cropping, so you can resize the cropping rectangle and have it constrained to, say, 6x4. I presume gimp can do that, too.
Or, to be pedantic, after a year and 2 months it would pay for itself.
There's been some talk about getting a subscription service running for MythTV users; if I recall, the goal was to get it going for $5/month.
Here's an option that could be considered: buy a BeyondTV license from Snapstream, then use your username and password along with a little reverse engineering to login legally to their guide service. BeyondTV's guide data is included with your purchase -- no monthly fees. Currently it costs $70, so after a year it would have paid for itself at the proposed $5/month.
That said, I should say I'm pretty pleased with the actual BeyondTV software, even though it is Windows-based. I spent about 2 weeks trying to get Myth (MythDora) and Freevo to work at all on a pretty vanilla new Dell PC with new hardware reported to be compatible. I downloaded BTV just to see if the hardware was to blame, and after a grand total of 15 minutes, I had a working PVR with multiple tuners. The software is customizable as well, so I can do nightly batch processing like I was planning to do with the Linux box, although the included Xvid transcoding works automatically if you want to do that.
Oy. I "bulleted" one too many lines (the first one from the press release), and I meant to say "Solaris/sparc, Solaris/x86, and Linux." Forgive me, it's late.
I'm downloading Sun Studio 11 for Solaris, x86, and Linux right now.
It's unclear how exploitable this bug is with OpenSSH. Just to be sure, apply the patch, recompile zlib, then relink and reinstall ssh.
If you don't want to go to the trouble of doing that right now, a quick fix would be to disable compression in the sshd_config file ("Compression no") and restart sshd. In fact, zlib has had a string of several security bugs recently, so it may be best to just do this anyway.
I hope you will consider one or more of the following:
(a) Report this to the press, anonymously if you have to.
(b) Contact the relevant federal agency that oversees these retirement accounts.
(c) Resign, unless you can sleep at night knowing that is happening.
No matter how recent the backup was, "guessing" at account balances for people's life savings is absolutely unacceptable and your company must be held accountable.
Caldera/SCO OpenUNIX 8 (and UnixWare 7) do not run under VMWare, nor does BSDi BSD/OS 4.2.
BSD/OS 4.2 was actually very close to working for me, but I think it had the same problem with the driver for ethernet controller that OpenBSD had. OpenBSD didn't run out of the box correctly until recently (version 2.9) which worked around this problem.
It looks like Wind River finally released a BSD/OS 4.3, so maybe they've addressed this issue.
I haven't tried NetBSD recently, but I would think that VMware compatibility would be a priority for those guys.
That said, VMware is *highly* recommended for any developer, especially those interested in portability, since it makes it easy to test your app on a variety of x86 operating systems.
- Increase FULL Breast Cup Sizes! GUARANTEED
and:Talk about hedging your bets...
The user should not need to understand the notion of a filesystem. "Advanced" users should only need to know that they can plug in a hard drive and know that the OS will automatically format and integrate it into the system. Need more disk space to store MP3s? Simply add a disk, reboot, and have your space automatically split across the second drive.
Users should only have the concept of a Home folder (let's not call it a directory). The user can place all of her data in this folder. Advanced users can create subfolders if they so choose, but the UI should be able to automatically group files in a single folder by type if the user doesn't create one.
Users should not be concerned with OS files, the actual files used to store .EXE and Application files, etc.
Mac OS X is the closest to this. Your home directory contains all your data and application preference files. I recently lost a hard drive, but had a nightly backup of my home directory. I simply reinstalled OS X and the applications I use, and *voila* everything is back to normal -- no importing bookmarks, restoring my e-mail client configuration, etc. Users of KDE/GNOME are enjoying similar benefits.
Windows has a ways to go, but for starters it can get rid of the idiotic "drive letter" concept. At least with UNIX you can mount a separate disk drive into the global filesystem. Windows 2000 provides this equivalent feature finally, but only if you use NTFS. I doubt Windows XP Home encourages end users to use one "C:" drive and mount other disks as a folder, but it should.
Naturally, power users, system administrators, programmers, etc., still would benefit from the concept of a filesystem. But the millions of end-users needn't be bothered with it.
> id3info "./01 - Greed.mp3"
./01 - Greed.mp3
*** Tag information for
=== TIT2 (Title/songname/content description): Greed
=== TALB (Album/Movie/Show title): Straight Ahead
=== TRCK (Track number/Position in set): 1
=== LINK (Linked information): frame
=== TPE1 (Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)): Pennywise
=== COMM (Comments): (ID3v1 Comment)[XXX]: www.emusic.com/albums/2085/
=== TCON (Content type): (43)
Guess of Napster's new "Protection Layer".
- (1) For each file to be shared by the user, write the user's Napster username to the ID3.
Of course, even casual pirates could run a utility to strip the comments from their downloads, but I wouldn't be surprised if Napster implements something this naive.(2) As new files are downloaded, preserve the remote user's Napster username in the file, if present. If a username was detected, do not allow this file to be shared.
Plus it has a nice ring, almost like "sex" and "sh" put together.
The bad news is that it only contained the fixes for rhnsd (up2date). It would be nice if RH would continue to include full-fledged Errata CDs, rather than rely upon up2date, but I have a feeling that this was a one-time thing. Kudos to RH for stepping up, though.
Ideally vendors would include pre-patched distributions when new disc manufacturing runs are ordered. The primary example I'm thinking of is Microsoft: it would have been nice for MSDN to include a Windows NT 4 SP 6 full install disc, rather than require you to install NT 4 and then service packs. (You can't even run Windows Update since NT4 includes IE2.0!)
I tend to burn CDs with artist directories in the top level, and then album directories as subdirectories of the artist directories. I then have a script create playlist files for every directory, so as you get closer to the root directory the playlist files contain more songs. Since relative pathnames can be used in playlist files, these playlists can be the same as they are on CD-ROM as they are stored on my hard drive.
Most people think that when Joe Sixpack goes to the credit card company to report fraudulent transaction(s) on his statement that Visa/MC is liable for the total amount charged less $50. The fact is that the merchant is required to reimburse for the total amount charged plus fees related to the chargeback, for transactions taken by phone or Internet. Visa threatened me with $25,000/month fines if fraudulent transactions exceeded 1% of my sales volume. So let's see here ... why would Visa/MC give a flying squirrel about fraud when not only are they not liable for it, but actually profit by it at the expense of the merchants?
The fact that anyone can spend your money by simply knowing your account number is mind blowing. That's about as ludicrous as being able to access the Pentagon's servers by simply knowing someone's login name. The credit card processing system is inherently flawed and Visa/MC certainly doesn't seem to care.
The problem is that merchants are generally at the mercy of the banks (of which Visa and MC are consortiums of). Merchants can't survive without credit card processing, and with banks, it's always "you need us more than we need you."
If there's a class-action possible against Visa/MC, then sign me up. You can bet if Visa/MC were liable for the fraudulent transactions then things would get fixed real quick.
Console gamers aren't accustomed to and will not tolerate their games crashing every 15 minutes. In fact, I can't remember any of my old NES and Sega Genesis games locking up or coming away feeling that a console game was buggy. I also never had to apply 5 service packs (i.e. NT4) to a console game system to get it to run smoothly.
I've been trying to play Microsoft's Crimson Skies game today, but the game crashes/locks up/needs Windows to be restarted constantly. This is on a fresh install of Windows ME on a pretty ordinary system -- it is literally the only application other than the junk Windows Setup installed. The argument that the XBoxes will all be the identical hardware configuration ergo will it will be reliable thing doesn't work when the games don't work on that one configuration.
The Quake-engine games seem to be more reliable (but far from console stability) than DirectX games, and DirectX will be used for the XBox. Since nVidia's drivers, DirectX, and the Windows OS are all far from rock-solid, I hope Microsoft at least places the Reset button in a convenient position on the box.
There will be games like Crimson Skies (perhaps Halo) which will be fun to play in between reboots, but I'm sure there will be plenty of good games for the PS2 and Dolphin which are both fun to play and Just Plain Work.
Simply put, you're the one guy in the world in whose presence I would have been in awe of. I wouldn't bother asking for Michael Jordan's autograph, didn't shed a tear for JFK Jr., and couldn't care less about shaking the hand of a U.S. President, but it would have been a great honor just to say "hi" to you in person.
Your work served as the foundation of my own work, and many others as well. The most influential book in my life so far has been Unix Network Programming -- without it, I simply would have done what most college students do and simply go to class just to get it over with. Your work inspired me to do something outside the realm of the classroom and filled my head with ideas and dreams, and for that I can't thank you enough.
Your obituary cites you as a "noted author of computer books", but your books weren't simply "computer books" nor "programming books", nor were you simply an author. Your works stand as great works of computer science.
We will miss you, W. Richard Stevens, and we regret that you were taken from us when surely you had 20 more years of knowledge yet to bestow upon us.
Sincerely,
Mike Gleason
NcFTP Software