Actually, although yes we do have a lot of vocabulary from Latin via Norman-French, it's far from the majority or 'core' - it's just an overlay. And English separated from other Germanic languages gradually after the invasions of Britain - in the early period what became the various Germanic languages (Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, plus some minors depending on how you classify) were not really separated either. For instance, if you read Beowulf you'll find that the hero of the tale is a Dane, from what is now southern Sweden (Skåne) who served a Gothic (the part of modern Sweden just north of Skåne ) king, and he needs no translators to talk to any of the other characters, who come from areas that now would speak at least 3 or 4 different languages.
In the case of languages that close together, any attempt at the kind of analysis you're talking about is probably going to find the 'noise' outweighs the signal.
On just what criteria do you solemly pronounce Earth as the planets 'real name?' Are you saying all the other names she has, both in English and other languages all around the world, are somehow fake names?
Anyway, Earth is also a God(dess) name, cognate to the Swedish 'Jord' who was, as the tales go, was the daughter of Night and the mother of Thor, one of whose titles was 'earth-born' or son of the earth.
The problem here is that would define many moons as planets, and they're already pretty well established as a separate category (all the way back to Sumer.) So let's add to your definition one the Sumerian astronomers used - a planet must have it's own path, it's own orbit around a star, rather than orbiting another object.
I'm no weather expert either, I have read a good deal written by people that are of course. I have also been doing statistical analysis for, oh, about 20 years now (not continuously, but it's been part of my job for most of that time.)
The journals I referred to are the ones here on slashdot - no file hosting here though.
The assertion that '38 was the warmest year on record is, again, something you can see plainly in the data from NASA. Just look at the table. It's +150 (1.5 degrees above baseline.) In 2003 we almost
reached that point again (+145), but 2004 was another cold snap (down to +78).
The outlier elimination and error correction you're worried about has already been done on that dataset, btw. Or at least NASA claims they did that, and it's my impression they generally are competent in such areas, no?
And yes, of course there are graphs there, my apologies for speaking imprecisely. What I meant was there are no graphs (so far as I can see) for the latitudes we are talking about - the 64-90 degree band that encompasses the arctic. There are some nice graphs collapsing those readings with a number of others (90-23.6 in particular,) but none of the arctic region alone, that I could find, which is why I graphed it myself.
Well, you're certainly capable of graphing it out. Go ahead, give it a try. Compare the 1918-1938 trend line to the current (1967-2004) one.
I think you are well aware Mr Monkey, that if Debian, Suse and Red Hat commit, the rest will follow (for instance Ubuntu will pick it up naturally next time they snapshot debian unstable).
I hit enter too quickly, so sue me. Should have mentioned this too:
but the average temperature looks like it's climbing.
Read what I wrote - I said quite clearly that it is rising through much of the time period, and that we're in a warming period now. I was just pointing out that it's not as dramatic a warming trend as the one leading up to '38, and the absolute temparature is less as well (because we haven't quite made up for the big drop in the 60s.)
I also remember back in the 70s the big scare was 'global cooling.' Just like we have a barrage of articles in the newspapers and so on about global warming now, there were scare stories and calls for political action back then on the theory that we were making the world colder, and if we didn't return to pre-industrial life we would cause an ice-age.
I think there's a real tendency in certain circles for blowing these things all out of proportion. We get a decade of cooling, or of warming, and either way it's a harbinger of impending doom, and evidence we're messing everything up. Well a decade, or even a century, isn't even a blink of an eye in terms of climate patterns, and any responsible climatologist would tell you that.
I graphed it out in SPSS and plotted the trends, what I saw was exactly what I described. If we could upload graphics to our journals *cough* I'd show you my graphs. I didn't see any graphs at the site I referred you to, what graphs are you referring to?
One of the assertions you originally challenged - that '38 was the warmest year - doesn't require any graphing to verify, it's set out plainly in the table.
"Scientists" whose conclusions are those you've already decided are true are scientists and it's 'borderline evil' to question them (even though REAL science, as opposed to faith-based scientism, is based on the imperative to question,) while those whose conclusions disagree with what you've already decided are true are just propogandists.
Junkscience.org, to the best of my understanding, doesn't do science - they report on it. However there are plenty of top-knotch scientists whose work supports their view. Don't defame them simply because they don't produce the results you want to hear.
Sure. My source is the NASA GISS Surface Temperature Analysis data, you can review it here. Pay attention to the arctic band, the column here marked 64N-90N. For each year, the number indicates the deviation from an arbitrary baseline, in this case that baseline is set by the average temperature from 1951-1980. The unit of deviation is.01 degree C, and the measurements are signed - so for instance if you see -5 for a year, that would mean the average temperature was.05 degrees C below the baseline, and if you see 15 that would mean.15 degrees C above the baseline.
The data starts when systematic measurement began, in 1880, considerably below our baseline. It continues downward, reaching the lowest dip in 1887 at -184. (I think in the broader term we were already in a warming trend there, the end of the little ice age I mentioned, but in the very short term there at the beginning of the data it is getting colder.) Although, of course, there's considerable variation year to year, after 1887 you'll see generally a mild trend toward warming, up until there's a very sharp drop in temperature in the second decade of the 20th century, reaching another trough in 1918. After that, you have a very sharp rising trend which reaches its peak in 1938. That was the warmest year on record so far. Then there's another cooling phase, down to a new trough in 66 - after which you get a flat line (I don't mean the temperature stayed the same - it fluctuates every year, but if you draw the graph you'll see it's fluctuating around without a real trend up or down) until around 1980 when the current warming trend begins.
None of the readings so far have matched that of 1938, and the slope of the current trend is quite a bit gentler than that of the warming period from 1888 to 1938 as well.
This deserves to be read, and if I have to burn a little karma to get it seen there's no better use.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
Actually, the goal of that site is anti-propaganda. There is so much horse shit being peddled by grant-chasing scientists, someone has got to blow the whistle. Some of what passes for scientific discovery nowadays is massaged statistical noise that would shame the creators of the Bible codes.
Don't just believe either the detractors or the defenders of junkscience.com - go check it out for yourself. It's a website devoted to debunking some of the more pernicious and pervasive myths of our time.
Of course the authors there have their own point of view, like everyone else, and of course you, the reader, should accept the responsibility to actually think and make up your own mind about things, instead of mindlessly parroting whatever you're told by anyone. So double check their sources. Check the data - see for yourself.
We have more than 100 years on documented data on the length of glaciers and they have been getting smaller at an accelarated pace.
But you're looking at a tiny fraction of a long term oscillation there. Ice ages and warm periods have been alternating in *geological time* - looking at 100 years and pretending it means something is sort of like trying to figure out the shape of a car by examining the curve of the frontmost millimetre.
We're on the tail end of a little ice age - it's probably on net a good thing that mean temperatures are rising, regardless of the cause, and it's pretty certain that they would be rising at this point with or without us anyway. Warmer temperatures may mean several things, both good and bad, as might colder temperatures.
Besides which, the arctic regions were actually warmer, and arctic temperatures were rising more rapidly, in the early part of the century, than they are now. Which makes it quite difficult to take all the alarmism seriously.
You just keep a hashtable of all your executables, make sure the first thing that loads after the kernel is the module that checks them all out, and run a TSR that blocks write-access to those files, or allows it and updates the tables instead if given an override. Same thing I used to do on DOS. Sort of goes back to the earlier discussion about 'default deny' and 'enumerating badness.'
The problem is by choosing the short-run-suboptimal choice, the users may never get the long-term benefits you want/claim, because they don't use it or stop using it. Or rather a much smaller number of them will, which is NOT a good thing.
And if you choose to mimic MS, you may wind up with a greater number of people using your system in the short term. But the system will simply be a cheap copy of MS, playing right into their hands. In a few years (or months, or days) those users will go back to 'the real thing.' On the other hand, give them a better system, and yes, uptake will be slower, but it will be more real and lasting.
It's better, IMOP, to serve a smaller number of users well, than a larger group poorly. I think that's a more solid growth strategy, yes, but even if it wasn't, I'd still prefer it. FOSS doesn't have to be popular to succeed.
Now, that's a rather contrived and extreme analogy, but it shows the point.
A bit too contrived and extreme for me to find it relevant, actually.
But anytime you break with a fairly established convention/expectation, you better have a darn good reason (not "I prefer cancel on the left/right/top"), and explain that reasoning to the user and the end benefit to dealing with reworking their expectations/habits. Doubly so since many of them may end up having to switch between conventions on a daily basis.
Well that's exactly what I find so annoying about these 'desktop' projects. I get used to the *nix conventions, and yes, I switch OS quite a bit, and switching conventions when I do is jarring enough - but having to switch them inside the same OS? I like my *nix boxes to at least act like *nix boxes - it's maddening when one program understands that ctrl-w means delete word, but the next suddenly decides to pretend it's running on Windows and closes the window instead.
As I said, KDE is definately not the worst offender. But I don't believe copying Windows is ever a good idea. It's giving up the high ground - without a fight.
I started my computer experience on a Sinclair. Over the years I worked with various micros - Commodore, Apple, Atari, and Texas Instruments come to mind. I worked on Vax systems. Eventually I got a 286 and became the lab 'guru' with DOS. I was supporting several locations with around 50 PCs when we transitioned to Windows and Netware (with some work done on timeshared HP-UX,) as well as later having to manage the transition from Netware to NT on the server side (talk about bad decisions from management) and I supported several hundred machines running a mixture of Windows 98/ME and NT4 a little later on. I've also been using Linux-based Operating Systems since early Slackware, and I'm typing this now on my Apple Powerbook. So it's not that I don't know Windows (although I've managed to avoid any extended contact with XP) but just that I have a broader perspective I think.
A linux-based system, in usability terms, is as good or as bad as the applications you're running on it. Unfortunately, most of them are a bit lacking in that area, but what I find truly frustrating is when the projects that have the resources to do something about that wind up mimicing Windows instead. That, and the boneheads that decide usability is something you achieve by stripping out any controls that the very lowest level of user isn't likely to use, rather than putting in the work to devise a good, usable interface that leaves the control in the hands of the user without getting in the way.
I think the 'usability groups' should put some effort into recruiting people with NO computing experience, and also some with high levels of general computing experience, but it's my impression they seem to deliberately select only people with a low technical interest and a high level of exposure to one system - MS Windows. Naturally, if you limit the group to people meeting that profile, they're going to tell you to be more like Windows. This is rigging the game to produce a specific outcome, and not a good one in my opinion.
Listening to those usability groups is exactly why I don't find your software very usable, personally. Of course there's another unnamed project that's notably worse, but that doesn't change the fact that there's a huge difference between good interface design, and copying MS (which has always had a very tenuous grasp on the notion of UI design, beyond copying Apple, badly.)
In another post in this article you advised 'looking at the bigger picture' even when it means doing something that seems suboptimal in the short run. Yes, if you don't mimic windows, in the short run some (definately not ALL) users are going to think you're less usable because you're not what they're accustomed to. But if you look at the long run, the benefits of doing things right are more than worth the small inconvenience to a subset of potential users, in my opinion. Particularly when balanced against the other subsets of potential and actual users, who find this crap annoying beyond belief.
Possibly that's because I'm NOT used to windows, of course.
So what you do is customise software. This is probably where MOST coders make their money, and always has been. The availability of standardised Free Software packages to build on has only expanded this market.
I could see them opening a lot of more-or-less random connections on, say, edonkey. Because they would be getting file lists, doing source exchanges, looking for things... but on bittorrent they can't really do that, they have to start from a tracker, don't they?
Or do you mean they're just aiming to reduce the usability of the network, without regard to whether the nodes they're 'jamming' are engaged in distributing legally redistributable files or not?
Can we take it as read that I DO understand the difference between theft of proprty, and the unlawful redistribution of information ?
If we take it as read that you do understand the difference, but you persist in calling copyright infringement 'theft' anyway, then we must conclude that you're being deliberately deceptive, or trolling.
and I really don't see why it was labelled 'off topic'... even 'flamebait' might have been more accurate
I agree. Troll would have been even better.
If one wants to deal only with ethical people, don't create programs that will attract a highly disproportionate amount of unethical people.
You're working hard to imply that there is an ethical problem with the use of P2P technology, or with what PeerGuardian did, which was making available a list of IPs that were used to sabotage P2P technology in order to allow P2P users to avoid the sabotage. I don't see it, and you haven't given any basis for it.
We're clear, are we not, that P2P is not used for theft?
While it can be used for copyright infringement, which some people might feel poses an ethical problem, that is FAR from the only use of it, so even if we grant that copyright infringement is ethically problematic for the sake of argument, that still doesn't mean there is anything ethically wrong with using and defending non-infringing use of P2P.
So really, I have to say I think you're indulging in that old, dishonourable, and definately ethically problematic game of 'blame the victim' here.
Society is rife with unethical people these days, unfortunately, and if you look carefully you can find one in nearly any organisation, regardless of whether the organisation itself is ethically questionable or not.
Indeed, I loaded the safepeer plugin for azureus a few days ago (correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it uses the peerguardian list) and the console is just FULL of blocked connections. I was a little shocked at the number.
However, looking through the logs, I wonder if it's being overly aggressive. It seems like it's blocking, for instance, all government addresses, and lots of 'private customer' addresses at major ISPs. Perhaps I'm just misunderstanding the classification categories?
I don't actually share anything that the *IAA types are likely to be looking for, which makes it even stranger that so many blocked addresses are trying to connect to me. Or, again, I may be just completely misunderstanding something...
Pretty much. It would perform a little better, particularly on things like MySQL. But for most people the increased performance would be too minor to notice.
And it would have been considerably later to market, since a lot of underlying infrastructure stuff would have had to be ported. That's one reason they didn't do it.
Yes, this 'IP' nonsense is invariably a sign of someone that either doesn't understand what they're talking about, or doesn't want YOU to understand what they're talking about (or possibly both.)
As to them registering their trademark first, that's true. However, that's not the end of the story. The trademarks are not identical - googles is 'Gmail' while theirs is 'G-Mail.' Gmail is a rather obvious abbreviation for 'Google Mail.' Their trademark is apparently UK only, and it doesn't sound like they've done much with it, in fact it's not clear from TFA they've done anything with it. I don't see how anyone could take seriously the idea that google is profitting from the other guys brand-identity (what trademark is supposed to protect.) Who had even heard of their trademark before this? At most a handful of their subscribers, who presumably are not going to be suddenly confused as to which is which.
IANAL, but google has some very good ones, and I'm sure they would have agreed to royalty payments if they didn't think they could win the court case pretty easily.
You like to compile and run the greatest, latest and untested in exchange for a 10% boost in performance, good for you, you are doing the community a service.
Some of us like to compile older stable tried-and-true versions from source so we can get the compile-time options set the way we want them.
You should see how much faster some gui apps are when you eliminate GNOME support. How much smaller your memory footprint is when you remember to strip debugging symbols (which, believe it or not, distributors sometimes don't do) and remove support for features you don't need. And so on...
Simple fact is if you want full control of your system you need to be comfortable with using software, not just plugging in binaries. If you don't want to do that, there are plenty of people out there making generic binaries you can use, and that's fine, but why the hostility towards people that prefer to use software?
One thing that really, really ticks me off is jackasses that try to justify violation of property rights with the language of libertarian/free-market ideas. Which is exactly what you're doing.
It's HER phone, dude. If she doesn't want you calling her, then don't call her. Respect her property.
Call her once, innocently, ok. She makes it clear she doesn't appreciate it, you better not do it again. If she puts her number on a do-not-call list, and I don't care if the federal government is administering it or not (OK, I do care, I'd rather someone more trustworthy do the job, but regardless) that's giving you notice she doesn't want to be called, so don't call her! If you were a door-to-door salesman-leafletter-fundraiser or whatever, and she had a sign up in her front yard saying 'no solicitations' would you open the gate and go on up and bang on the door anyway?
Why is this so difficult for people to understand?
I used to work in telemarketing on and off, years ago, before the do-not-call lists and before the laws came around. I know I worked for several places that were respectable, legitimate businesses, and I know that when we called someone that was offended by the call at those places we immediately apologised and hung up, and put the number in our OWN do not call list, without even being asked. Because we didn't want to waste our time or theirs by calling them again and annoying them. When the do-not-call lists started these companies didn't mind a bit, it only helps.
It's only fly-by-nights and rip-offs, the very same companies that have convinced so many people that once didn't mind telemarketing calls to quit taking them, that now feel like somehow their 'interests' need to be balanced against the interests of the person who actually owns the phone. THESE are the only people I've heard suggest, as you just did, that people that don't want their phone calls should 'get a second line.'
There is no balancing to be done - the person who owns the phone decides and that's the end of it.
To talk about 'free speech' in this context is just a slap in the face to anyone that cares about free speech. You have the right to speak, sure. You don't have the right to use my equipment to transmit it, however, and that's the issue here. It's her phone, and she has no more obligation to invite you to call her than she has an obligation to invite a door-to-door salesman in for tea and cookies.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, although yes we do have a lot of vocabulary from Latin via Norman-French, it's far from the majority or 'core' - it's just an overlay. And English separated from other Germanic languages gradually after the invasions of Britain - in the early period what became the various Germanic languages (Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, plus some minors depending on how you classify) were not really separated either. For instance, if you read Beowulf you'll find that the hero of the tale is a Dane, from what is now southern Sweden (Skåne) who served a Gothic (the part of modern Sweden just north of Skåne ) king, and he needs no translators to talk to any of the other characters, who come from areas that now would speak at least 3 or 4 different languages.
In the case of languages that close together, any attempt at the kind of analysis you're talking about is probably going to find the 'noise' outweighs the signal.
On just what criteria do you solemly pronounce Earth as the planets 'real name?' Are you saying all the other names she has, both in English and other languages all around the world, are somehow fake names?
Anyway, Earth is also a God(dess) name, cognate to the Swedish 'Jord' who was, as the tales go, was the daughter of Night and the mother of Thor, one of whose titles was 'earth-born' or son of the earth.
The problem here is that would define many moons as planets, and they're already pretty well established as a separate category (all the way back to Sumer.) So let's add to your definition one the Sumerian astronomers used - a planet must have it's own path, it's own orbit around a star, rather than orbiting another object.
I'm no weather expert either, I have read a good deal written by people that are of course. I have also been doing statistical analysis for, oh, about 20 years now (not continuously, but it's been part of my job for most of that time.)
The journals I referred to are the ones here on slashdot - no file hosting here though.
The assertion that '38 was the warmest year on record is, again, something you can see plainly in the data from NASA. Just look at the table. It's +150 (1.5 degrees above baseline.) In 2003 we almost
reached that point again (+145), but 2004 was another cold snap (down to +78).The outlier elimination and error correction you're worried about has already been done on that dataset, btw. Or at least NASA claims they did that, and it's my impression they generally are competent in such areas, no?
And yes, of course there are graphs there, my apologies for speaking imprecisely. What I meant was there are no graphs (so far as I can see) for the latitudes we are talking about - the 64-90 degree band that encompasses the arctic. There are some nice graphs collapsing those readings with a number of others (90-23.6 in particular,) but none of the arctic region alone, that I could find, which is why I graphed it myself.
Well, you're certainly capable of graphing it out. Go ahead, give it a try. Compare the 1918-1938 trend line to the current (1967-2004) one.
RTFA. Debian is not in. Neither is Slackware.
I hit enter too quickly, so sue me. Should have mentioned this too:
Read what I wrote - I said quite clearly that it is rising through much of the time period, and that we're in a warming period now. I was just pointing out that it's not as dramatic a warming trend as the one leading up to '38, and the absolute temparature is less as well (because we haven't quite made up for the big drop in the 60s.)
I also remember back in the 70s the big scare was 'global cooling.' Just like we have a barrage of articles in the newspapers and so on about global warming now, there were scare stories and calls for political action back then on the theory that we were making the world colder, and if we didn't return to pre-industrial life we would cause an ice-age.
I think there's a real tendency in certain circles for blowing these things all out of proportion. We get a decade of cooling, or of warming, and either way it's a harbinger of impending doom, and evidence we're messing everything up. Well a decade, or even a century, isn't even a blink of an eye in terms of climate patterns, and any responsible climatologist would tell you that.
I graphed it out in SPSS and plotted the trends, what I saw was exactly what I described. If we could upload graphics to our journals *cough* I'd show you my graphs. I didn't see any graphs at the site I referred you to, what graphs are you referring to?
One of the assertions you originally challenged - that '38 was the warmest year - doesn't require any graphing to verify, it's set out plainly in the table.
You're lost in doublethink.
"Scientists" whose conclusions are those you've already decided are true are scientists and it's 'borderline evil' to question them (even though REAL science, as opposed to faith-based scientism, is based on the imperative to question,) while those whose conclusions disagree with what you've already decided are true are just propogandists.
Junkscience.org, to the best of my understanding, doesn't do science - they report on it. However there are plenty of top-knotch scientists whose work supports their view. Don't defame them simply because they don't produce the results you want to hear.
Sure. My source is the NASA GISS Surface Temperature Analysis data, you can review it here. Pay attention to the arctic band, the column here marked 64N-90N. For each year, the number indicates the deviation from an arbitrary baseline, in this case that baseline is set by the average temperature from 1951-1980. The unit of deviation is .01 degree C, and the measurements are signed - so for instance if you see -5 for a year, that would mean the average temperature was .05 degrees C below the baseline, and if you see 15 that would mean .15 degrees C above the baseline.
The data starts when systematic measurement began, in 1880, considerably below our baseline. It continues downward, reaching the lowest dip in 1887 at -184. (I think in the broader term we were already in a warming trend there, the end of the little ice age I mentioned, but in the very short term there at the beginning of the data it is getting colder.) Although, of course, there's considerable variation year to year, after 1887 you'll see generally a mild trend toward warming, up until there's a very sharp drop in temperature in the second decade of the 20th century, reaching another trough in 1918. After that, you have a very sharp rising trend which reaches its peak in 1938. That was the warmest year on record so far. Then there's another cooling phase, down to a new trough in 66 - after which you get a flat line (I don't mean the temperature stayed the same - it fluctuates every year, but if you draw the graph you'll see it's fluctuating around without a real trend up or down) until around 1980 when the current warming trend begins.
None of the readings so far have matched that of 1938, and the slope of the current trend is quite a bit gentler than that of the warming period from 1888 to 1938 as well.
This deserves to be read, and if I have to burn a little karma to get it seen there's no better use.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
Don't just believe either the detractors or the defenders of junkscience.com - go check it out for yourself. It's a website devoted to debunking some of the more pernicious and pervasive myths of our time.
Of course the authors there have their own point of view, like everyone else, and of course you, the reader, should accept the responsibility to actually think and make up your own mind about things, instead of mindlessly parroting whatever you're told by anyone. So double check their sources. Check the data - see for yourself.
But you're looking at a tiny fraction of a long term oscillation there. Ice ages and warm periods have been alternating in *geological time* - looking at 100 years and pretending it means something is sort of like trying to figure out the shape of a car by examining the curve of the frontmost millimetre.
We're on the tail end of a little ice age - it's probably on net a good thing that mean temperatures are rising, regardless of the cause, and it's pretty certain that they would be rising at this point with or without us anyway. Warmer temperatures may mean several things, both good and bad, as might colder temperatures.
Besides which, the arctic regions were actually warmer, and arctic temperatures were rising more rapidly, in the early part of the century, than they are now. Which makes it quite difficult to take all the alarmism seriously.
You just keep a hashtable of all your executables, make sure the first thing that loads after the kernel is the module that checks them all out, and run a TSR that blocks write-access to those files, or allows it and updates the tables instead if given an override. Same thing I used to do on DOS. Sort of goes back to the earlier discussion about 'default deny' and 'enumerating badness.'
And if you choose to mimic MS, you may wind up with a greater number of people using your system in the short term. But the system will simply be a cheap copy of MS, playing right into their hands. In a few years (or months, or days) those users will go back to 'the real thing.' On the other hand, give them a better system, and yes, uptake will be slower, but it will be more real and lasting.
It's better, IMOP, to serve a smaller number of users well, than a larger group poorly. I think that's a more solid growth strategy, yes, but even if it wasn't, I'd still prefer it. FOSS doesn't have to be popular to succeed.
A bit too contrived and extreme for me to find it relevant, actually.
Well that's exactly what I find so annoying about these 'desktop' projects. I get used to the *nix conventions, and yes, I switch OS quite a bit, and switching conventions when I do is jarring enough - but having to switch them inside the same OS? I like my *nix boxes to at least act like *nix boxes - it's maddening when one program understands that ctrl-w means delete word, but the next suddenly decides to pretend it's running on Windows and closes the window instead.
As I said, KDE is definately not the worst offender. But I don't believe copying Windows is ever a good idea. It's giving up the high ground - without a fight.
I started my computer experience on a Sinclair. Over the years I worked with various micros - Commodore, Apple, Atari, and Texas Instruments come to mind. I worked on Vax systems. Eventually I got a 286 and became the lab 'guru' with DOS. I was supporting several locations with around 50 PCs when we transitioned to Windows and Netware (with some work done on timeshared HP-UX,) as well as later having to manage the transition from Netware to NT on the server side (talk about bad decisions from management) and I supported several hundred machines running a mixture of Windows 98/ME and NT4 a little later on. I've also been using Linux-based Operating Systems since early Slackware, and I'm typing this now on my Apple Powerbook. So it's not that I don't know Windows (although I've managed to avoid any extended contact with XP) but just that I have a broader perspective I think.
A linux-based system, in usability terms, is as good or as bad as the applications you're running on it. Unfortunately, most of them are a bit lacking in that area, but what I find truly frustrating is when the projects that have the resources to do something about that wind up mimicing Windows instead. That, and the boneheads that decide usability is something you achieve by stripping out any controls that the very lowest level of user isn't likely to use, rather than putting in the work to devise a good, usable interface that leaves the control in the hands of the user without getting in the way.
I think the 'usability groups' should put some effort into recruiting people with NO computing experience, and also some with high levels of general computing experience, but it's my impression they seem to deliberately select only people with a low technical interest and a high level of exposure to one system - MS Windows. Naturally, if you limit the group to people meeting that profile, they're going to tell you to be more like Windows. This is rigging the game to produce a specific outcome, and not a good one in my opinion.
Listening to those usability groups is exactly why I don't find your software very usable, personally. Of course there's another unnamed project that's notably worse, but that doesn't change the fact that there's a huge difference between good interface design, and copying MS (which has always had a very tenuous grasp on the notion of UI design, beyond copying Apple, badly.)
In another post in this article you advised 'looking at the bigger picture' even when it means doing something that seems suboptimal in the short run. Yes, if you don't mimic windows, in the short run some (definately not ALL) users are going to think you're less usable because you're not what they're accustomed to. But if you look at the long run, the benefits of doing things right are more than worth the small inconvenience to a subset of potential users, in my opinion. Particularly when balanced against the other subsets of potential and actual users, who find this crap annoying beyond belief.
Possibly that's because I'm NOT used to windows, of course.
You want to make money coding?
So what you do is customise software. This is probably where MOST coders make their money, and always has been. The availability of standardised Free Software packages to build on has only expanded this market.
I can't say that would really surprise me. That sounds like the kind of crap that would make sense to the *IAA.
Still suspect this block list is a bit overly aggressive though, I think I'm filtering around 75% of the address-space.
I could see them opening a lot of more-or-less random connections on, say, edonkey. Because they would be getting file lists, doing source exchanges, looking for things... but on bittorrent they can't really do that, they have to start from a tracker, don't they?
Or do you mean they're just aiming to reduce the usability of the network, without regard to whether the nodes they're 'jamming' are engaged in distributing legally redistributable files or not?
I may not agree with what you're saying, but I'll still defend your right to say it.
If we take it as read that you do understand the difference, but you persist in calling copyright infringement 'theft' anyway, then we must conclude that you're being deliberately deceptive, or trolling.
I agree. Troll would have been even better.
You're working hard to imply that there is an ethical problem with the use of P2P technology, or with what PeerGuardian did, which was making available a list of IPs that were used to sabotage P2P technology in order to allow P2P users to avoid the sabotage. I don't see it, and you haven't given any basis for it.
We're clear, are we not, that P2P is not used for theft?
While it can be used for copyright infringement, which some people might feel poses an ethical problem, that is FAR from the only use of it, so even if we grant that copyright infringement is ethically problematic for the sake of argument, that still doesn't mean there is anything ethically wrong with using and defending non-infringing use of P2P.
So really, I have to say I think you're indulging in that old, dishonourable, and definately ethically problematic game of 'blame the victim' here.
Society is rife with unethical people these days, unfortunately, and if you look carefully you can find one in nearly any organisation, regardless of whether the organisation itself is ethically questionable or not.
Indeed, I loaded the safepeer plugin for azureus a few days ago (correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it uses the peerguardian list) and the console is just FULL of blocked connections. I was a little shocked at the number.
However, looking through the logs, I wonder if it's being overly aggressive. It seems like it's blocking, for instance, all government addresses, and lots of 'private customer' addresses at major ISPs. Perhaps I'm just misunderstanding the classification categories?
I don't actually share anything that the *IAA types are likely to be looking for, which makes it even stranger that so many blocked addresses are trying to connect to me. Or, again, I may be just completely misunderstanding something...
Pretty much. It would perform a little better, particularly on things like MySQL. But for most people the increased performance would be too minor to notice.
And it would have been considerably later to market, since a lot of underlying infrastructure stuff would have had to be ported. That's one reason they didn't do it.
The other reason, of course, being the licensing.
Yes, this 'IP' nonsense is invariably a sign of someone that either doesn't understand what they're talking about, or doesn't want YOU to understand what they're talking about (or possibly both.)
As to them registering their trademark first, that's true. However, that's not the end of the story. The trademarks are not identical - googles is 'Gmail' while theirs is 'G-Mail.' Gmail is a rather obvious abbreviation for 'Google Mail.' Their trademark is apparently UK only, and it doesn't sound like they've done much with it, in fact it's not clear from TFA they've done anything with it. I don't see how anyone could take seriously the idea that google is profitting from the other guys brand-identity (what trademark is supposed to protect.) Who had even heard of their trademark before this? At most a handful of their subscribers, who presumably are not going to be suddenly confused as to which is which.
IANAL, but google has some very good ones, and I'm sure they would have agreed to royalty payments if they didn't think they could win the court case pretty easily.
Some of us like to compile older stable tried-and-true versions from source so we can get the compile-time options set the way we want them.
You should see how much faster some gui apps are when you eliminate GNOME support. How much smaller your memory footprint is when you remember to strip debugging symbols (which, believe it or not, distributors sometimes don't do) and remove support for features you don't need. And so on...
Simple fact is if you want full control of your system you need to be comfortable with using software, not just plugging in binaries. If you don't want to do that, there are plenty of people out there making generic binaries you can use, and that's fine, but why the hostility towards people that prefer to use software?
One thing that really, really ticks me off is jackasses that try to justify violation of property rights with the language of libertarian/free-market ideas. Which is exactly what you're doing.
It's HER phone, dude. If she doesn't want you calling her, then don't call her. Respect her property.
Call her once, innocently, ok. She makes it clear she doesn't appreciate it, you better not do it again. If she puts her number on a do-not-call list, and I don't care if the federal government is administering it or not (OK, I do care, I'd rather someone more trustworthy do the job, but regardless) that's giving you notice she doesn't want to be called, so don't call her! If you were a door-to-door salesman-leafletter-fundraiser or whatever, and she had a sign up in her front yard saying 'no solicitations' would you open the gate and go on up and bang on the door anyway?
Why is this so difficult for people to understand?
I used to work in telemarketing on and off, years ago, before the do-not-call lists and before the laws came around. I know I worked for several places that were respectable, legitimate businesses, and I know that when we called someone that was offended by the call at those places we immediately apologised and hung up, and put the number in our OWN do not call list, without even being asked. Because we didn't want to waste our time or theirs by calling them again and annoying them. When the do-not-call lists started these companies didn't mind a bit, it only helps.
It's only fly-by-nights and rip-offs, the very same companies that have convinced so many people that once didn't mind telemarketing calls to quit taking them, that now feel like somehow their 'interests' need to be balanced against the interests of the person who actually owns the phone. THESE are the only people I've heard suggest, as you just did, that people that don't want their phone calls should 'get a second line.'
There is no balancing to be done - the person who owns the phone decides and that's the end of it.
To talk about 'free speech' in this context is just a slap in the face to anyone that cares about free speech. You have the right to speak, sure. You don't have the right to use my equipment to transmit it, however, and that's the issue here. It's her phone, and she has no more obligation to invite you to call her than she has an obligation to invite a door-to-door salesman in for tea and cookies.