Sorry, Mr Musician Who Publishes Their Own Work, this "crap" is not for you. Go and play with your little WYSIWYG tools if you think their output is "excellent." You're very free with comments like "this is crap" but I notice that you don't actually address the issues like:
For example, how is a computer supposed to distinguish between a staccato quarter note and an eighth note?
You also threw in a cheap shot about lilypond's slurs -- a known deficiency, you didn't add anything. I have no doubt that slurs will soon be fixed.
If you think Sibelius is better than Lilypond, bully for you. Go use Sibelius or Finale. Really. No one will mind if you do. After all it's about playing music, not just looking at the printed page.
In the meantime there are people who care about getting it right, and who are willing to put in 10+ hours a week for years on hacking it. In addition to practicing and playing, and let's not forget their day jobs. It seems obvious to me that a labour of love will be of a higher quality than work done for hire by some schmoe who goes home after putting in his eight hours. Lilypond is well on its way to proving this.
You seem to have some sort of personal gripe against Theo. Look at Darren Reed and IPFilter. He for whatever reason decided to change the IPF license. The OpenBSD developers (not just Theo) decided this was incompatible so they wrote a replacement instead of just standing around griping.
I can say without hesitation that traveling to space to upgrade the instruments and ensure the future of the Hubble Space Telescope was worth the potential risk to my life.
Sure, the HST has old technology, and perhaps there are much cooler instruments now. But where is the replacement for Hubble? The Webb telescope is scheduled to be launched in 2011. What do we do from Hubble's death to then? If there are problems with the current STS maintenance program, we should address them.
Instead we're supposed to support some cockamamie plan to launch a manned Mars mission from inside the Moon's gravity well.
(And we see no problem in sending hundreds of thousands of other people to a far-away land to face death for reasons that are yet to be explained satisfactorily.)
Jesus! Do you know what "theory" means? Here's a hint: we have a theory of gravity due to Einstein (we call it "general relativity"). Does this mean there's some dispute about whether or not gravity exists? The name we give to Darwin's theory of evolution -- why evolution happens -- is "natural (and sexual) selection."
Global warming is another issue. There are many many scientists who dispute the alleged "scientific evidence"
Global warming is a fact. Retreating glaciers and the breakup of the Antarctic ice pack show this quite well. The point of (some) dispute is how much of this warming can be attributed to increased levels of "greenhouse gases" like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which comes from burning fossil fuels. (Burning a non-fossil fuel like wood is part of the carbon cycle and does not add to the CO2 levels.)
Suspicions should be raised if all the "scientists" who dispute this happen to have a vested interest like, oh, being paid by fossil fuel companies.
Broadband will more likely be wireless based and most people will probably have mobile phones.
How do you get 1.5Mbps wireless to every house? Over-the-air capacity is fine for voice, especially since they charge by time -- there's a strong incentive to keep calls short, and the bandwidth required is not huge.
We've got a deficit over a half-trillion and things like this are getting funded. Riiiiight.
So we need to stop spending money on everything until the deficit is 0? Equivalently, if you've got a mortgage on your house, then you need to stop spending money on all non-essentials like eating out, owning a car, having more than seven sets of clothes (laundry once a week), computers, eating dessert,...
Thousands of children die every day, yet things like faster semiconductors are getting funded. Riiiiight.
If Linux got 95% desktop marketshare, I'm sure you'd have the exact same problem with any average-joe-user running as root because they didn't want to have to switch users whenever they want to install...
False. When average-joe-user wants to install the cute package, the package manager pops up a window that the root password must be typed into.
The sane way to set up an end-user distribution is: creating an ordinary user account is part of the install; and gdm/kdm/xdm does not allow root logins. The user doesn't even need to know there's a special user account called "root" -- they just run everything they need, and if super-user privileges are required a window pops up for the root password. (This is how RedHat sets things up, except I don't think it disallows xdm root logins.) The usual cute programs like screensavers etc. can be installed just as well into the user's home directory, no root password required.
Being asked for the root password when doing potentially dangerous things makes the user more likely to reflect, reconsider, and change those bad "Administrator" ways.
Here's a plausible scenario: the cops always abuse everyone's civil rights everytime, but they're only allowed to show it on TV if the guy turned out to be guilty. (Hey, if the guy's innocent, we can't show that because that would be an invasion of his privacy.) Pure paranoia? Maybe. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean...
- how CAN they do that?
They have guns. The only antidote is money. As in: if you're poor, you'd better do what the guy with gun tells you to.
Why should it be a joke? Sometimes you really want random numbers, not some PRNG. If you can't afford to (or don't wnat to) buy a hardware-based random number generator this is a good second-best. A couple of decades ago you bought books of random numbers, now you get a CD.
Fucking around with fonts and themes is how time is wasted. If PHBs (and their employees) were prevented from fucking around with fonts and themes and cute borders they'd have to put actual content in their documents. No wonder everyone wants fancy colors and themes and Power Point, it keeps them from having to use their little brains. And when they're allowed to send these monstrous flashy 500MB attachments to everyone in the fucking company, that's when the real hilarity ensues.
Who doesn't like to have their ego stroked? So what if they're professional ego-strokers? Nothing wrong with that. (Except that it does reinforce the social stratification... the only people you ever interact with are the ones just like you.) The upscale waitress would just as out of place and "hopeless" in a McDonalds.
Mozilla could be a contender, but [it] still chokes on a number of websites.
(Of course the sites are the ones that are broken, not Mozilla -- but you knew that already.)
I've been using nothing but Mozilla/Galeon/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox for a couple of years now. I can't remember the last time a site was unusable: shopping, news, reviews,... I do it all online. How about examples of sites that are unusable with a Gecko browser? Functionality, I don't care about flashy colors etc. Something regular people visit.
Anyone who tries to rename 500 files "by hand" one by one is the insane one. This is not a problem with right-clicks; it's one of the classic weaknesses of WYSIWYG GUIs. It's hard to automate or generalize actions in a GUI. Example: you have hundreds of files with extension "jpeg" and you want to change them all to have extension "jpg" -- if you use something like bash, you can do it like this:
for f in *.jpeg; do mv "$f" "${f%jpeg}jpg"; done
Of course you can't expect an end-user to learn bash syntax. If a GUI tool in the OS implements this "rename many" then everything's jake. The point is that a GUI tool has to implement the automation; at least until we come up with a simple (graphical?) programming language that end-users can use. (Hypercard/talk, anyone?)
In other words, to masquerade as A and talk to B, you have to break into a router that is between them (or you won't see/block replies). I can believe that there's a large number of unpatched/compromised PCs on broadband that can be used for spam. However I have a harder time believing that there's a significant number of backbone routers that are unpatched/compromised. Any numbers?
...you'll just cause the spammers to sign up for a one time domain name setup the SPF, spew their spam....
One of the documents on the SPF site talks about this. There are two things to keep in mind: now you have a sure way of finding out who the spammer is (follow the money to the registrar) so it's easier to enforce any anti-spam laws etc. (and/or permit vigilanteeism!) The other is that you can put in a check for newly registered sites: if a site is newer than X, then it goes through intensive spam checks and perhaps gets shunted off to a "pending" folder. If nothing else, spammers won't be able to use well-known free email places like yahoo, hotmail etc. Since most of my friends use those free services, I won't have to risk their messages being tossed out due to a false positive spam check. (If SPF becomes widely adopted, I will have no problem tossing anything I get from a new domain. But that's just me, the only newly-minted domains I plan to pay attention to are friends' vanity sites.)
I don't believe we'll ever get rid of spam. However SPF seems a decent approach to reducing the amount of spam humans have to see. The FAQ and the objections answered do a good job of treating these issues.
DNS security does remain a problem, of course. That's an independent problem, one we have to fix at some point.
... I'm not fond of SPF, because all someone has to do is be able to forge an IP, which isn't particularly difficult.
Really? Are you just saying this because you heard it somewhere, or have you figured out how to predict sequence numbers so you don't have to complete the TCP handshake?
There is no question that for a brief time in the early 90's there was some risk of such attacks because switched networks had not replaced large broadcast segments in some significant destination networks (i.e. corporate and retail ISP), ISN prediction was easy, and security was generally so rotten that with skill, an attacker could pretty much guarantee the ability to crack devices in the necessary places to make a spoof work.
It is not that time. A decade of cracking, the complete triumph of switches even in shoestring networks like my home office, and the cleansing influence of y2k have made a TCP session spoof into the sort of trick that requires such significant setup that there is no point in doing the spoof in the classical manner of sequence number prediction.
In the words of Bill Cole, "if someone had figured out a way to do TCP spoofing against an arbitrary target on the Internet without compromising higher-value machines than the target as preparation, that capacity is itself so potentially valuable that using it to send spam would be silly....There are some very lucrative and nearly invisible ways one could use that sort of ability."
Really? So mozplayerexp and mplayerplug-in can play the Car Talk streams? Where do they get the codecs?
Yes, of course wget followed by feeding each mms to mplayer would work -- if mplayer had the codec. The inability of MPlayer to handle asx files correctly is not the killer issue, it's the lack of the codec.
I sent them a message earlier this week about their blithe "Use MPlayer or Crossover!" instructions... After compiling the latest version of MPlayer (1.0 pre3) and all the available codecs, it still couldn't play an mms URL from the.asx file the link send you to. Not only does MPlayer not have that codec, it doesn't play.asx files. I suggested that (Car Talk) they could at least tell the truth that they don't give a shit about Unix geeks who only form a few percent of the population...
Incidentally Crossover 1.2.1 ($30) with Windows Media Player 6 does play the stream.
Man, I remember seeing an ad for this in... Popular Science? I had to be content with drooling, no way my parents would get me one. When you removed the LP, it looked like a cool tower with round top, in fake wood grain if I remember right.
...the gyroscopes that keep the Hubble oriented properly need occasional replacing. A space tug isn't going to get rid of the problem of failing gyroscopes, only shuttle missions.
In the article, ORC says:
... has the ability to lift multi-ton GEO spacecraft from intermediate orbits to GEO, take over the attitude control and station keeping of these large spacecraft.
The tug takes over pointing -- the Hubble's own gyros are not an issue.
Ideally, instead of complex replaceable gyros in satellites, build it with a "handle" . When the gyros start failing, a space tug grabs on and takes over. Unmanned launches, no worries about STS safety etc. (Maybe satellites are launched with an attached tug -- a "space motor". When it dies, it could be detached and a new motor attached.) That seems the obvious way to deal with putting expensive electronics up there in LEO where the atmosphere will drag you down.
Of course maybe ORC is not the right company, I don't know; but the concept seems obvious and good.
How do you prove it's your own country without presenting papers of some sort?
It's completely reasonable that when crossing an international border you have to show evidence you're ok to enter a country. You do need to present this evidence before entering the US. We can therefore presume that anyone already inside the country is here legally.
Yes of course there are illegal aliens inside the borders. You can't infringe on citizens' and legal aliens' rights to make up for the shortcomings of the INS or the Border Patrol.
NASA is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Before space became cool, they used to be called NACA -- the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. (Only newbies pronounced it "nacka" -- cool people said N A C A. The name was changed in 1958.) Just about all aviation research for US WW2 airplanes came from NACA, for instance. NASA still has the responsibility for aviation research.
One of the cool programs that NASA Ames (at Moffett Field in Mountain View, Silicon Valley) has is the Aviation Safety Reporting Program for crew. If there's a safety issue on any flight, crew members are encouraged to send in an ASRS report. If you screw up in some way and cause an unsafe condition, and file an ASRS report, you get immunity from any FAA enforcement action related to the incident. Anonymised versions of these incidents are available in the ASRS newsletter "Callback." This program has done many orders of magnitude more for safety than any TSA Code Yella (or whatever the hell it is today) ever did.
Of course this present hysteria-driven incident is repugnant. There is no way to be utterly safe, and infringing on citizens' privacy for some dubious profiling benefit is complete crap. I don't see how it's even constitutional to require gummint-issued photo ID from passengers. In a free society one is not expected to have "papers" to move about in one's own country. It doesn't even increase security: any high-school kid will be able to tell you how to get a fake drivers' license.
... is now roaming free in the metasocial domain of my friends, constantly do i find myself explaining to my mom about why and how he saw a goresite a horsesex site and even Goatse
So if you're the only true nerd in the house, don't you think you should take an active role in how your kid brother grows up on the 'net? Make it clear what the acceptable uses/websites are, on the honor system. If you don't trust the kid to do so, he's not ready for unsupervised 'net use. If you're the only person at home who can see this, you should chaperone him. Try explaining the situation to your parents, they're human too.
I can only speak for myself: but why should I believe that some yutz who took a Kaplan's or "ITT Tech" course and passed a US government approved class is going to write decent code? I think the odds that Theo is going to take a licensing exam of a different country are exactly zero. Will that magically make OpenBSD less secure?
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and free software has done pretty damn well on the security front. If some pinhead executive wants to pay for "confidence" -- well, I'm sure someone will be happy to take that money off him.
And getting paid more for jumping through silly hoops when you're writing for free? How much more? 10% more than zero is -- zero. The whole thing is silly.
I did the eMusic thing for about 8 months, mostly hitting their classic jazz selections on the Prestige, Riverside, and Verve labels--all RIAA members. I was a fan, but I never got the Linux client to work
I got a free trial membership of fifty songs when I got my Neuros. (Interestingly, I too got the same kind of tracks. Mostly Monk, Coltrane, Chet Baker etc.) The client is working fine on my RedHat 9 system. I let my trial subscription lapse, but pretty soon I plan to sign up. They were completely inoffensive and had the sort of stuff I listen to.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think Sibelius is better than Lilypond, bully for you. Go use Sibelius or Finale. Really. No one will mind if you do. After all it's about playing music, not just looking at the printed page.
In the meantime there are people who care about getting it right, and who are willing to put in 10+ hours a week for years on hacking it. In addition to practicing and playing, and let's not forget their day jobs. It seems obvious to me that a labour of love will be of a higher quality than work done for hire by some schmoe who goes home after putting in his eight hours. Lilypond is well on its way to proving this.
You seem to have some sort of personal gripe against Theo. Look at Darren Reed and IPFilter. He for whatever reason decided to change the IPF license. The OpenBSD developers (not just Theo) decided this was incompatible so they wrote a replacement instead of just standing around griping.
(And we see no problem in sending hundreds of thousands of other people to a far-away land to face death for reasons that are yet to be explained satisfactorily.)
Suspicions should be raised if all the "scientists" who dispute this happen to have a vested interest like, oh, being paid by fossil fuel companies.
Thousands of children die every day, yet things like faster semiconductors are getting funded. Riiiiight.
The sane way to set up an end-user distribution is: creating an ordinary user account is part of the install; and gdm/kdm/xdm does not allow root logins. The user doesn't even need to know there's a special user account called "root" -- they just run everything they need, and if super-user privileges are required a window pops up for the root password. (This is how RedHat sets things up, except I don't think it disallows xdm root logins.) The usual cute programs like screensavers etc. can be installed just as well into the user's home directory, no root password required.
Being asked for the root password when doing potentially dangerous things makes the user more likely to reflect, reconsider, and change those bad "Administrator" ways.
Why should it be a joke? Sometimes you really want random numbers, not some PRNG. If you can't afford to (or don't wnat to) buy a hardware-based random number generator this is a good second-best. A couple of decades ago you bought books of random numbers, now you get a CD.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Who doesn't like to have their ego stroked? So what if they're professional ego-strokers? Nothing wrong with that. (Except that it does reinforce the social stratification... the only people you ever interact with are the ones just like you.) The upscale waitress would just as out of place and "hopeless" in a McDonalds.
I've been using nothing but Mozilla/Galeon/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox for a couple of years now. I can't remember the last time a site was unusable: shopping, news, reviews, ... I do it all online. How about examples of sites that are unusable with a Gecko browser? Functionality, I don't care about flashy colors etc. Something regular people visit.
for f in *.jpeg; do mv "$f" "${f%jpeg}jpg"; done
Of course you can't expect an end-user to learn bash syntax. If a GUI tool in the OS implements this "rename many" then everything's jake. The point is that a GUI tool has to implement the automation; at least until we come up with a simple (graphical?) programming language that end-users can use. (Hypercard/talk, anyone?)
I don't believe we'll ever get rid of spam. However SPF seems a decent approach to reducing the amount of spam humans have to see. The FAQ and the objections answered do a good job of treating these issues.
DNS security does remain a problem, of course. That's an independent problem, one we have to fix at some point.
From the SPF FAQ:
In the words of Bill Cole, "if someone had figured out a way to do TCP spoofing against an arbitrary target on the Internet without compromising higher-value machines than the target as preparation, that capacity is itself so potentially valuable that using it to send spam would be silly.Yes, of course wget followed by feeding each mms to mplayer would work -- if mplayer had the codec. The inability of MPlayer to handle asx files correctly is not the killer issue, it's the lack of the codec.
Incidentally Crossover 1.2.1 ($30) with Windows Media Player 6 does play the stream.
Man, I remember seeing an ad for this in... Popular Science? I had to be content with drooling, no way my parents would get me one. When you removed the LP, it looked like a cool tower with round top, in fake wood grain if I remember right.
The tug takes over pointing -- the Hubble's own gyros are not an issue.
Ideally, instead of complex replaceable gyros in satellites, build it with a "handle" . When the gyros start failing, a space tug grabs on and takes over. Unmanned launches, no worries about STS safety etc. (Maybe satellites are launched with an attached tug -- a "space motor". When it dies, it could be detached and a new motor attached.) That seems the obvious way to deal with putting expensive electronics up there in LEO where the atmosphere will drag you down.
Of course maybe ORC is not the right company, I don't know; but the concept seems obvious and good.
Yes of course there are illegal aliens inside the borders. You can't infringe on citizens' and legal aliens' rights to make up for the shortcomings of the INS or the Border Patrol.
One of the cool programs that NASA Ames (at Moffett Field in Mountain View, Silicon Valley) has is the Aviation Safety Reporting Program for crew. If there's a safety issue on any flight, crew members are encouraged to send in an ASRS report. If you screw up in some way and cause an unsafe condition, and file an ASRS report, you get immunity from any FAA enforcement action related to the incident. Anonymised versions of these incidents are available in the ASRS newsletter "Callback." This program has done many orders of magnitude more for safety than any TSA Code Yella (or whatever the hell it is today) ever did.
Of course this present hysteria-driven incident is repugnant. There is no way to be utterly safe, and infringing on citizens' privacy for some dubious profiling benefit is complete crap. I don't see how it's even constitutional to require gummint-issued photo ID from passengers. In a free society one is not expected to have "papers" to move about in one's own country. It doesn't even increase security: any high-school kid will be able to tell you how to get a fake drivers' license.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and free software has done pretty damn well on the security front. If some pinhead executive wants to pay for "confidence" -- well, I'm sure someone will be happy to take that money off him.
And getting paid more for jumping through silly hoops when you're writing for free? How much more? 10% more than zero is -- zero. The whole thing is silly.