And when you are doing a browse by artist with any modest sized collection (300+ artists), even if you move your finger around the dial so fast your thumb burns it still takes 5+ seconds to go from top to bottom.
Their list-based interface is simply unacceptable for large amounts of data. I mean, even if there was a way to hold something down so you could scroll by *page* instead of item by item, that would probably make it work.
I mean, I specifically stayed away form the iPod because I can't stand the damn thing. I test drove one for a few hours, and it certianly did *not* grow on me. It took forever and a day to scroll from the top to the bottom of a large list, during which I had to keep rotataing my thumb, over and over and over.... I can see myself getting RSI in mere days from this monstrosity.
Meanwhile, in my MP3 player with a nice side-mounted jog-wheel, I ccan simply *hold* the button down and boom, it scrolls away.
Really, I think the iPod wheel could have been better designed. It would make much more sense if you could drag your thumb around half way, and *hold* it there, to continue the scrolling. To stop scrolling you could simply move your thumb back to the 0 degree point, or around thereof.
..or is this indicative of a wider trend, where Windows and Linux are coming together from a technology perspective?
Think about it. Over the past few years, the windowing environments in Linux have grown more and more advanced. With the newer XOrg releases and upcoming KDE4 and Gnome 3, I expect amazing things from the Linux desktop.
Meanwhile, while Linux has been addressing it's core weakness, Microsoft already has a firm foothold on the desktop. Instead, the past few years they have been integrating more and more sysadmin-friendly technologies - such as integrating scripting into the OS, improving their command shell (and replacing it - hence Monad), improving remote administration.
Windows has WinFS, Linux has Reiser4 + plugins.
In the next few years, I doubt a layman will be able to tell Windows and Linux apart from a purely features / technology perspective. What *ill*be important, is he thing that is the most important - who do you trust with the source code to your OS? A private company or a group of hackers.
if I put up information, correct or incorrect, and wish to remove said information, I would rather it be gone for good and not hanging around in a cache somewhere
Yeah. Just like in the real world, where when you say something about someone or something else, then at a later date wish you *hadn't* said it, you can just turn back time and make it so that you never did.
Why would you be putting spaces in there anyways? I doubt that's compliant behaviour - according to specas, whatever is inside the quotes is supposed to be interpereted as the value.
Get one. They're dirt cheap, have plenty of CPU power, and they run Linux. Combine one with an open source OS image and you have one powerful router - you can do VPN with it, firewall, anything you want - and you can adjust the NAT table to your liking if the default isn't sufficient, and it does wireless to boot.
It'll save you plenty on your home power bill too. Seriously, a 486 or simmilar running 24x7 can cost you 5-10 bucks a month, or even more in some areas. Home routers use significantly less power.
Any real Linux user should create an LFS system at least once. I found it a usefull and educational process, and it gretaly helped me to understand things that were previously somewhat mysterious, like the boot process.
It only takes one afternoon with a decent machine to get a basic booting system, another on top of that to have a full X session with most desktop goodies.
Once I was at this point, I really only used the system for a few days before installing Gentoo again (maintainging all those apps yourself with no packaging system is a pain), but I still don't consider it a waste of time.
Everyone keeps ranting about how 128 bits is unreliastic and we will never need the space.
It is quite obvious Sun is working on Human Teleportatoin, and needs the 128 bits to be able to addresss the quantum superpositions of all of the particles in a human body.
A9 is powered by Google for it's web search, IMDB for it's movie search, etc etc. The only search they are actually running themselves is their "In The book" search, and I don't see how any spammer could affect that search.
I always like to see new innovations in the search market.
A new beta engine funded by Mark Cuban called IceRocket is extremely promising to me. They have some neat ideas, like showing an image preview of the search reuslt, and the ability to load the first X bytes of the page in an IFRAME to see if it is really what you want before you havigate away.
They also have a cool "people-search" feature that searches all the hot-Or-Not type sites.
It is also extremely fast - though that is likely because no one uses it yet. Check it out - http://www.icerocket.com
While I like Google better as a company, and I like their search, email, and news site sbetter, I sure do wish they had some of the portal features Yahoo has. I mean, with Yahoo! Calender, Yahoo! Addressbook, Yahoo! greetings, Yahoo! Messanger, and Yahoo! Mail, and the seamless integration between them all, Yahoo is basically an online groupware suite.
I also wish Google news was customizeable like my.yahoo.com - while Google news is more timely and more relevant, many of the topics have no interest to me, and I'd like to be able to insert stock tickers and whatnot. My Yahoo! even lets you plug your own RSS feeds in now.
For the past sixty years the United States have been tilting heavily in one direction
In what direction would *that* be?
You imply that it is the left, but the US is and has been (for *at least* the past sixty years) one of the most right-winged first world nations around. The "Democrats" in the US would be what is considered very conservative in most of Europe and also in Canada and AU.
Moreover, ensuring that the legislative branch is elected rather than appointed is an important check on the executive branch, since the executive branch chooses the justices of the Supreme Court (the judicial branch). Since the Senate must approve the choice of justices that the executive branch makes, it's important that the Senate is not chosen by the executive branch as well
You are missing the point. The fact that the executive branch chooses the legislative branch is all but irrelevant in a House of Lords style system because the members serve for life. In order for the executive branch to stack the house with people who side with them on judicial appointments, the same executive would have to be elected many times in a row - something that is highly unlikely to happen.
The problem with Senators in the US is that they are elected. Thus, they really serve no purpose at all. They are just another copy of the lower house.
In most every other democracy in the that has a two-house system, the upper house is appointed - not elected, and members serve for life (or until they retire).
While the idea of an unelected house may seem un-democratic, it has many attributes that make it a much better "buffer" than an elected upper house. Since the body appointing the members is of a particular party, they will appoint people who favor their views. however, since a member of Senate serves for life, over the long term, rather than have one viewpoint in majority, the Senate will always have a huge diversity of opinions. Thus, you will likely *never* have a situation where one viewpoint controls both the lower, upper, and executive, branches of government.
The US two-party-only system has always baffled me. Every thing I learn more about the system supports the concept that it is pretty much by law only a two-party state.
For example, your above comment. What would happen if an independant candidate won a state? Who would be the electoral college voter?
This is exactly what the electoral college is designed for...
...but it exists in case the next Hitler comes along so that even with a popular vote such a person would not come to power. (No, I don't think anyone running is the next Hitler, but hyperbole is great for driving points home
I am really getting sick of people spouting this BS in articles like this lately.
The electoral college system was designed because 200 years ago, it was the only logical way to do things. You didn't have cars, planes, or busses. All you had was horses.
Imagine a country-wide vote in 1800. Imagine the mountains and mountains of paper that would all have to be delivered to Washington by horseback. Imagine the number of postman involved, any one of which could easily be picked off, or bribed. Imagine how long it would take to count.
The electoral college was developed so that you only had to send one person / state to Washington. The individual states could each count the votes in their state, then they know what to tell their guy to vote for. it is the only thing that made sense logistically.
Nowadays, however, all the reasons for it are gone. Your argument is rubbish - why are the electoral college voters more suited for judging character than the populace as a whole? I wouldn't trust most of the politicians I know with keys to my house, let alone keys to the country's vote.
Given the recent trademark lawsuit of Microsoft vs. Lindows for sounding too much like Windows, I find it ironic that mere months later Microsoft would start selling radio stations that *even explicitly say* "Sounds like KMEL JAMS 106.1".
Microsoft: you can't have your cake and eat it too.
But what I find most stupid is the philosophy behind it. Why make something so complex for free? I'm an excellent software engineer, good software is hard to make, it's beyond art, takes incredible amounts of education, hardwork and talent, and it should be kept proprietary and one should be paid to make it.
You say that good code is like a work of art - if it is, then why don't you do what an artist does? An arist creates a small number of great paintings(programs), has a showing (creates a company website), and sells them to the highest bidder, and sells each painting only once. The artist does not care if that painting is subsequently copied by another artist - in fact, it is seen as a compliment by most!
Your age shows in the post (first tried RedHat 8.0 in University), so let me educate you a bit on the history of programming. Before Microsoft came along, it was common that software (and a whole lot of its code) was free. Why? Because most programmers worked for hardware companies, who were interested in selling hardware.
Does IBM make any less money if it ships a server running Linux or Windows? No, in fact they likely make more money since they don't need the Windows license markup and can thus charge less.
Personally, *my* wish in life is that eventually, all "software companies" are abolished; programmers will either work for hardware companies customizing their OS/driver platforms, or they will work as consultants, customizing existing open source software to the business, with the end product from both of these endevours going back to the public.
Really, if I as company X spend some time customizing an application to by business, what harm does it do to release the code? None, other than it may save someone else time and money in the long run. God forbid it be a compeditor - but what if it saved a non-profit like World Vision millions of dollars??? Isn't that worth it? Are you really that greedy of a copany, that the chance that it may help a competitor outweights the chance that you could be saving people's lives? (Sze note: from the behaviour of most companies, the answer is a resounding yes.)
Just as a note, I say the above as a professional programmer with a software company as well. I know to some people like you it might seem weird for me to be advocating the elimination
of my profession, but really, I am in it for the love of what I do, not the love of money. When you do something for the love of what you do, you will always find a way to make ends meet.
It has to do with KDE's superior underlying IO subsystem, that Gnome is just starting to try to duplicate with VFS.
The fact is with KDE you rarely would every *have* to copy the file over, since every KDE app can just access the file as if it was local anyways. You can edit a KWord document on an FTP/SFTP/WebDAV server just as easily as you can in your $HOME.
I think it would be more like they would be able to track where you were every time you logged in.
How? There is no user id / password, anyone in the city can use it, period. At least that is how the WiFi ISP in my city works - it would be stupid to do it any other way, since travellers and people at your airports would not have the access and thus would lose a huge benefit of the WiFi, tourism.
And as everyone knows, it is trivial to change your mac address, I could write a script that changes mine to a random one in less than 2 minutes.
End result, you're basically as anonymous as you can get. Far more anonymous than any commercial ISP that's for sure.
They discover a killer visus was unleashed att he corner of Main and Sixth at 6pm. Who cares? Unless they *happen* have video surveilience of that area as well they have no clue who that was. I mean, look at how hard the cops have tracking down who made a call at a payphone at such an such a time. Now expand that so all you have ia a 1/8 mile radius at such and such a time. Good luck.
Email is a lot easier to intercept than faxes. Faxes require physically tapping into the line. Email simply requires any ISP have any computer on their local network which the data passes through en-route from the military computer to the voting office be comprimised, *or* tapping into the lines.
And what at all makes you believe that the email would travel over the internet?
In all likelihood it is all going to be internal email on the military network, which means it'd be damn near impossible to intercept.
Slashdot Mirror
And when you are doing a browse by artist with any modest sized collection (300+ artists), even if you move your finger around the dial so fast your thumb burns it still takes 5+ seconds to go from top to bottom.
Their list-based interface is simply unacceptable for large amounts of data. I mean, even if there was a way to hold something down so you could scroll by *page* instead of item by item, that would probably make it work.
I mean, I specifically stayed away form the iPod because I can't stand the damn thing. I test drove one for a few hours, and it certianly did *not* grow on me. It took forever and a day to scroll from the top to the bottom of a large list, during which I had to keep rotataing my thumb, over and over and over.... I can see myself getting RSI in mere days from this monstrosity.
Meanwhile, in my MP3 player with a nice side-mounted jog-wheel, I ccan simply *hold* the button down and boom, it scrolls away.
Really, I think the iPod wheel could have been better designed. It would make much more sense if you could drag your thumb around half way, and *hold* it there, to continue the scrolling. To stop scrolling you could simply move your thumb back to the 0 degree point, or around thereof.
..or is this indicative of a wider trend, where Windows and Linux are coming together from a technology perspective?
Think about it. Over the past few years, the windowing environments in Linux have grown more and more advanced. With the newer XOrg releases and upcoming KDE4 and Gnome 3, I expect amazing things from the Linux desktop.
Meanwhile, while Linux has been addressing it's core weakness, Microsoft already has a firm foothold on the desktop. Instead, the past few years they have been integrating more and more sysadmin-friendly technologies - such as integrating scripting into the OS, improving their command shell (and replacing it - hence Monad), improving remote administration.
Windows has WinFS, Linux has Reiser4 + plugins.
In the next few years, I doubt a layman will be able to tell Windows and Linux apart from a purely features / technology perspective. What *ill*be important, is he thing that is the most important - who do you trust with the source code to your OS? A private company or a group of hackers.
if I put up information, correct or incorrect, and wish to remove said information, I would rather it be gone for good and not hanging around in a cache somewhere
Yeah. Just like in the real world, where when you say something about someone or something else, then at a later date wish you *hadn't* said it, you can just turn back time and make it so that you never did.
Oh wait... thats impossible.
Do you think Disney is just a few cartoon studios and some crappy theme parks?
Their movies and theme parks account only for a *small fraction* of their money.
I suggest you educate yourself as to how big Disney is. While at that site check out some other megalopolies, you may be surprised at who owns what.
Why would you be putting spaces in there anyways? I doubt that's compliant behaviour - according to specas, whatever is inside the quotes is supposed to be interpereted as the value.
Get one. They're dirt cheap, have plenty of CPU power, and they run Linux. Combine one with an open source OS image and you have one powerful router - you can do VPN with it, firewall, anything you want - and you can adjust the NAT table to your liking if the default isn't sufficient, and it does wireless to boot.
It'll save you plenty on your home power bill too. Seriously, a 486 or simmilar running 24x7 can cost you 5-10 bucks a month, or even more in some areas. Home routers use significantly less power.
Any real Linux user should create an LFS system at least once. I found it a usefull and educational process, and it gretaly helped me to understand things that were previously somewhat mysterious, like the boot process.
It only takes one afternoon with a decent machine to get a basic booting system, another on top of that to have a full X session with most desktop goodies.
Once I was at this point, I really only used the system for a few days before installing Gentoo again (maintainging all those apps yourself with no packaging system is a pain), but I still don't consider it a waste of time.
Try it out!
Everyone keeps ranting about how 128 bits is unreliastic and we will never need the space.
It is quite obvious Sun is working on Human Teleportatoin, and needs the 128 bits to be able to addresss the quantum superpositions of all of the particles in a human body.
I always like to see new innovations in the search market.
A new beta engine funded by Mark Cuban called IceRocket is extremely promising to me. They have some neat ideas, like showing an image preview of the search reuslt, and the ability to load the first X bytes of the page in an IFRAME to see if it is really what you want before you havigate away.
They also have a cool "people-search" feature that searches all the hot-Or-Not type sites.
It is also extremely fast - though that is likely because no one uses it yet. Check it out - http://www.icerocket.com
While I like Google better as a company, and I like their search, email, and news site sbetter, I sure do wish they had some of the portal features Yahoo has. I mean, with Yahoo! Calender, Yahoo! Addressbook, Yahoo! greetings, Yahoo! Messanger, and Yahoo! Mail, and the seamless integration between them all, Yahoo is basically an online groupware suite.
I also wish Google news was customizeable like my.yahoo.com - while Google news is more timely and more relevant, many of the topics have no interest to me, and I'd like to be able to insert stock tickers and whatnot. My Yahoo! even lets you plug your own RSS feeds in now.
And in that time we've maintained the best quality of life on the planet.
According to who? Certianly not the UN.
Norway has been ranked as having the top quality of life for the past four years in a row. Before that Cnaad won for several years in a row.
The US currently sits in eighth place. It often isn't even in the top 10.
Get your facts straight.
For the past sixty years the United States have been tilting heavily in one direction
In what direction would *that* be?
You imply that it is the left, but the US is and has been (for *at least* the past sixty years) one of the most right-winged first world nations around. The "Democrats" in the US would be what is considered very conservative in most of Europe and also in Canada and AU.
Moreover, ensuring that the legislative branch is elected rather than appointed is an important check on the executive branch, since the executive branch chooses the justices of the Supreme Court (the judicial branch). Since the Senate must approve the choice of justices that the executive branch makes, it's important that the Senate is not chosen by the executive branch as well
You are missing the point. The fact that the executive branch chooses the legislative branch is all but irrelevant in a House of Lords style system because the members serve for life. In order for the executive branch to stack the house with people who side with them on judicial appointments, the same executive would have to be elected many times in a row - something that is highly unlikely to happen.
In most every other democracy in the that has a two-house system, the upper house is appointed - not elected, and members serve for life (or until they retire).
While the idea of an unelected house may seem un-democratic, it has many attributes that make it a much better "buffer" than an elected upper house. Since the body appointing the members is of a particular party, they will appoint people who favor their views. however, since a member of Senate serves for life, over the long term, rather than have one viewpoint in majority, the Senate will always have a huge diversity of opinions. Thus, you will likely *never* have a situation where one viewpoint controls both the lower, upper, and executive, branches of government.
The US two-party-only system has always baffled me. Every thing I learn more about the system supports the concept that it is pretty much by law only a two-party state.
For example, your above comment. What would happen if an independant candidate won a state? Who would be the electoral college voter?
This is exactly what the electoral college is designed for...
I am really getting sick of people spouting this BS in articles like this lately.
The electoral college system was designed because 200 years ago, it was the only logical way to do things. You didn't have cars, planes, or busses. All you had was horses.
Imagine a country-wide vote in 1800. Imagine the mountains and mountains of paper that would all have to be delivered to Washington by horseback. Imagine the number of postman involved, any one of which could easily be picked off, or bribed. Imagine how long it would take to count.
The electoral college was developed so that you only had to send one person / state to Washington. The individual states could each count the votes in their state, then they know what to tell their guy to vote for. it is the only thing that made sense logistically.
Nowadays, however, all the reasons for it are gone. Your argument is rubbish - why are the electoral college voters more suited for judging character than the populace as a whole? I wouldn't trust most of the politicians I know with keys to my house, let alone keys to the country's vote.
Given the recent trademark lawsuit of Microsoft vs. Lindows for sounding too much like Windows, I find it ironic that mere months later Microsoft would start selling radio stations that *even explicitly say* "Sounds like KMEL JAMS 106.1".
Microsoft: you can't have your cake and eat it too.
But what I find most stupid is the philosophy behind it. Why make something so complex for free? I'm an excellent software engineer, good software is hard to make, it's beyond art, takes incredible amounts of education, hardwork and talent, and it should be kept proprietary and one should be paid to make it.
You say that good code is like a work of art - if it is, then why don't you do what an artist does? An arist creates a small number of great paintings(programs), has a showing (creates a company website), and sells them to the highest bidder, and sells each painting only once. The artist does not care if that painting is subsequently copied by another artist - in fact, it is seen as a compliment by most!
Your age shows in the post (first tried RedHat 8.0 in University), so let me educate you a bit on the history of programming. Before Microsoft came along, it was common that software (and a whole lot of its code) was free. Why? Because most programmers worked for hardware companies, who were interested in selling hardware.
Does IBM make any less money if it ships a server running Linux or Windows? No, in fact they likely make more money since they don't need the Windows license markup and can thus charge less.
Personally, *my* wish in life is that eventually, all "software companies" are abolished; programmers will either work for hardware companies customizing their OS/driver platforms, or they will work as consultants, customizing existing open source software to the business, with the end product from both of these endevours going back to the public.
Really, if I as company X spend some time customizing an application to by business, what harm does it do to release the code? None, other than it may save someone else time and money in the long run. God forbid it be a compeditor - but what if it saved a non-profit like World Vision millions of dollars??? Isn't that worth it? Are you really that greedy of a copany, that the chance that it may help a competitor outweights the chance that you could be saving people's lives? (Sze note: from the behaviour of most companies, the answer is a resounding yes.)
Just as a note, I say the above as a professional programmer with a software company as well. I know to some people like you it might seem weird for me to be advocating the elimination of my profession, but really, I am in it for the love of what I do, not the love of money. When you do something for the love of what you do, you will always find a way to make ends meet.
Konsole already has true transparency if you compile it under the X.Org experimental server.
Expect other KDE apps to follow suit I imagine.
It has to do with KDE's superior underlying IO subsystem, that Gnome is just starting to try to duplicate with VFS.
The fact is with KDE you rarely would every *have* to copy the file over, since every KDE app can just access the file as if it was local anyways. You can edit a KWord document on an FTP/SFTP/WebDAV server just as easily as you can in your $HOME.
I think it would be more like they would be able to track where you were every time you logged in.
How? There is no user id / password, anyone in the city can use it, period. At least that is how the WiFi ISP in my city works - it would be stupid to do it any other way, since travellers and people at your airports would not have the access and thus would lose a huge benefit of the WiFi, tourism.
And as everyone knows, it is trivial to change your mac address, I could write a script that changes mine to a random one in less than 2 minutes.
End result, you're basically as anonymous as you can get. Far more anonymous than any commercial ISP that's for sure.
They discover a killer visus was unleashed att he corner of Main and Sixth at 6pm. Who cares? Unless they *happen* have video surveilience of that area as well they have no clue who that was. I mean, look at how hard the cops have tracking down who made a call at a payphone at such an such a time. Now expand that so all you have ia a 1/8 mile radius at such and such a time. Good luck.
Email is a lot easier to intercept than faxes. Faxes require physically tapping into the line. Email simply requires any ISP have any computer on their local network which the data passes through en-route from the military computer to the voting office be comprimised, *or* tapping into the lines.
And what at all makes you believe that the email would travel over the internet?
In all likelihood it is all going to be internal email on the military network, which means it'd be damn near impossible to intercept.