er, 'up at the top'. one tries to avoid using words like "right at". otherwise people will look for it at the top right. i'm so glad the clue level is higher here so i don't have to remember these things.
That's why you don't say "Press F1" you say "hit the F1 key" (no most users will not strike the key with a hammer when you say "hit"). If this boggles them, you say, "should be right at the top". Then it's "hit the return key" if they're on a mac or most unix boxen, or "hit the enter key" if they're on a PC. Any good tech will know whether it's called Enter or Return to avoid lots of confusion.
I'm just genuinely glad I never worked for external customer support, so users had to at least be able to find their ass with a map and compass in order to work there. Still, I've asked people what kind of computer they're running, and they say "NEC Multisync" (pronouncing NEC "neck" of course).
Actually, unlike trademarks, you cannot lose a copyright by failing to defend it. There is, however, probably a statute of limitations on the actual offense, which is of course renewed each time it's exploited. Simply send them a cease and desist letter and tell them you hope that legal action will not be required. If that doesn't work, give 'em a lotta shit for PR if they're a company. Unless there's actual monetary damage, there's not any point in getting a lawyer though.
> Without careful butt-covering, someone could take your public domain code, hang theircopyright notice on it, and claim it as their own.
The phrase "your public domain code" is an oxymoron. No one owns PD code, and no one *can* claim ownership of PD code. You can stick a wrapper around PD code and call it your own, but you can't prevent anyone else from using the original PD code.
> given the facts that the sourcetrees of the BSD's are more closed than the average Linux sourcetree.
What on earth are you talking about? I get the source on the CD, I can change it, I can submit it, I can get it accepted, or I can fork the tree and distribute the changed version as my own. How is this closed at all? Linus doesn't take every last kernel hack everyone submits to him, yunno. Sometimes his right-hand-man Alan Cox has to maintain a forked version for months.
I use KDE, but it has some real annoying bugs. I'm using 1.1, tell me if they're fixed in 1.2. When you have the phone connectivity I have, you don't download the latest and greatest every day, and frankly you also get tired of watching your software versions like a hawk anyhow. But I digress...
Session management: you can't save your session whenever you like, only when you quit. There is no option NOT to save your session when you do quit. Not like session management in any desktop environment, whether win (explorer windows), CDE, gnome, or kde has ever been anything more than a joke anyhow, so I never really use it and would like to keep it off.
Desktop pager: It constantly loses all but the first two desktops. The remaining two lose their names.
Panel: No usable web browser button on the panel. Something like CDE's sdtwebclient would be nice, which uses netscape -remote, or some similar voodoo with hotjava.
Tooltips: Those damn useless tooltips for those equally useless desktop folders pop up unbidden and over any foreground window when the mouse just grazes one, and don't go AWAY unless you "swat" them away with the mouse. Major annoyance, and I can't seem to disable them.
General dumbness: The CD player applet from the panel really amazes me. Click it, it launches. Click play, it plays the CD. Okay, nice. Now click it again, and it launches a NEW instance. Close the rogue instance and it stops the playback. DUH. If there's ever a use for KUniqueApp, this one is *it*.
Help in most apps: the content usually isn't too great, but also, clicking help several times launches multiple instances. Should only be one help instance per app (with an option to clone off the help window)
The notepad app: triple-click doesn't work. Triple click (and sometimes quadruple click) are nice features that work across many text editors including notepad on win and emacs on *nix. Minor annoyance, but enough to really irk me (since i copy and paste lines all the time). The toolbar buttons are also really miniscule.
Bug reporting: it's arcane and bureacratic, relying on specially formatted emails. Some bugs have remained open for over a year now. So I just gripe here instead.
The DDK comes with an MSDN subscription, which costs roughly as much as a license for Troll Tech's Qt. This isn't expensive by any stretch. If a company making *hardware* doesn't have the budget to purchase even a DDK, I don't see any hope for them.
So perhaps, embedding something like "Clinton and his people need a bullet through the head" and "We will make Oklahoma City look like a firecracker" would trip it off? Or would it be smart enough to see the quotes? How about if I just put it at the end without any surrounding sentences?
> By contrast, outsiders are likely to see the mascot in its original setting, as a mythological demon/devil. Insiders get it, outsiders are pushed away.
Uh no. Unless they have a freakin redwood up their ass, they see a cute little getup reminiscent of many football teams. Matter of fact their first impression is that they were inspired by such a mascot. They see the penguin, they also think "mascot". You're the one coming off as stuffy and elitist now for thinking people are that stupid and all share your hair-trigger reaction to religious iconography.
You mangle your key, you mangle the algorithm. This will create weaknesses and make it that much easier to break in a cryptanalysis attack.
Now by "contorting and breaking" messages and/or keys, there's a technique called "chaffing" that does something similar. Hides your truth in loads of bullshit, and a key will tell you which is which. You can even use this trick with the message in plaintext. Basically it's like agreeing beforehand that only the middle line in this message is useful:
your CO's order attack at dawn has been rescinded
(Okay, not quite useful since they'd still be alert at dawn after that anyhow, but you get the idea).
BTW, remember that RSA is almost never used to encrypt the content of a message, it's just too slow. It's just used to encrypt the exchange of a key for a symmetric cipher like DES. It's still the weakest link, and little consolation if your attacker monitored you from the start (which you do have to assume), but there are replacements for that link. Not to mention that Twinkle could probably generate keys it would take itself eons to break.
Makes me wonder what percentage of my memory and HD are going to be taken up by crypto overhead in the future though.
KDE makes MDI easy, and there's some MDI kde apps, like kvirc, so they had the ability and a precedent to cite. But the majority of kde apps are non-MDI and prefer it that way. I do hope that they include the ability to run in SDI mode or at least detach windows out of MDI.
What would be heaven would be to create MDI master windows on the fly based on rules. Imagine a "window group", like desktops, only in individual windows. Each window you open stays in the window group, so if it's an SDI window, it opens a new SDI window, if it's MDI, it opens in that MDI window. I'd love to keep all my slashdot windows accessable with one click on the taskbar.
Actually their stockholders are by and large, probably wholly ignorant of the whole fiasco, and if they know anything about it, they are clucking their tongues and sighing at silly legal departments trying to squeeze licenses out of end-of-life intellectual property. Because that's what legal departments *do*, among their other jobs. R&D develops, Marketing pushes it out, Sales keeps it rolling, Legal holds it up. Sometimes Marketing wants R&D to keep leveraging old tech, sometimes they push for the impossible. Sales wants Marketing to transfer technology the market won't accept, or find new ways to sell the same junk in different colors. Legal tries to find ways to create licenses for products that are only marginally theirs (e.g. IBM has a patent on LZW too) and tries to keep leveraging IP when it has long since become commoditized. Every department has a shifting concept of what's important now, and they don't all overlap.
> I'm glad that all the important scientific discoveries were made before we had patents and intellectual property.
You honestly believe this? This is just so unbelievably laughable that I just can't bring myself to argue with any of the other points. I don't have the skill to debate anyone who exists on another plane of reality, sorry.
Netscape hasn't needed a plugin to show PNG for a long time. It still doesn't support alpha blending, making it still useless for background-independent antialiasing, but it still does view them.
Of course, with no animated PNG support, MNG notwithstanding, that means all those annoying banner ads will be in javascript... or applets.
Actually, that's the problem with Mir, its skin is too corroded. In a few years, it would start leaking air like a sieve. Things put in space take a hell of a lot of sandblasting from micrometeorite impacts that there's no atmosphere to protect from. So it's not even good for parts.
I suppose they could sell it too, but bridges seem to be the more popular model in that product line.
Slashdot Mirror
er, 'up at the top'. one tries to avoid using words like "right at". otherwise people will look for it at the top right. i'm so glad the clue level is higher here so i don't have to remember these things.
That's why you don't say "Press F1" you say "hit the F1 key" (no most users will not strike the key with a hammer when you say "hit"). If this boggles them, you say, "should be right at the top". Then it's "hit the return key" if they're on a mac or most unix boxen, or "hit the enter key" if they're on a PC. Any good tech will know whether it's called Enter or Return to avoid lots of confusion.
I'm just genuinely glad I never worked for external customer support, so users had to at least be able to find their ass with a map and compass in order to work there. Still, I've asked people what kind of computer they're running, and they say "NEC Multisync" (pronouncing NEC "neck" of course).
Actually, unlike trademarks, you cannot lose a copyright by failing to defend it. There is, however, probably a statute of limitations on the actual offense, which is of course renewed each time it's exploited. Simply send them a cease and desist letter and tell them you hope that legal action will not be required. If that doesn't work, give 'em a lotta shit for PR if they're a company. Unless there's actual monetary damage, there's not any point in getting a lawyer though.
G N U L I X
:)
(I'm gonna kill my 2 score aren't I?)
> Without careful butt-covering, someone could take your public domain code, hang theircopyright notice on it, and claim it as their own.
The phrase "your public domain code" is an oxymoron. No one owns PD code, and no one *can* claim ownership of PD code. You can stick a wrapper around PD code and call it your own, but you can't prevent anyone else from using the original PD code.
> given the facts that the sourcetrees of the BSD's are more closed than the average Linux sourcetree.
What on earth are you talking about? I get the source on the CD, I can change it, I can submit it, I can get it accepted, or I can fork the tree and distribute the changed version as my own. How is this closed at all? Linus doesn't take every last kernel hack everyone submits to him, yunno. Sometimes his right-hand-man Alan Cox has to maintain a forked version for months.
I use KDE, but it has some real annoying bugs. I'm using 1.1, tell me if they're fixed in 1.2. When you have the phone connectivity I have, you don't download the latest and greatest every day, and frankly you also get tired of watching your software versions like a hawk anyhow. But I digress...
Session management: you can't save your session whenever you like, only when you quit. There is no option NOT to save your session when you do quit. Not like session management in any desktop environment, whether win (explorer windows), CDE, gnome, or kde has ever been anything more than a joke anyhow, so I never really use it and would like to keep it off.
Desktop pager: It constantly loses all but the first two desktops. The remaining two lose their names.
Panel: No usable web browser button on the panel. Something like CDE's sdtwebclient would be nice, which uses netscape -remote, or some similar voodoo with hotjava.
Tooltips: Those damn useless tooltips for those equally useless desktop folders pop up unbidden and over any foreground window when the mouse just grazes one, and don't go AWAY unless you "swat" them away with the mouse. Major annoyance, and I can't seem to disable them.
General dumbness: The CD player applet from the panel really amazes me. Click it, it launches. Click play, it plays the CD. Okay, nice. Now click it again, and it launches a NEW instance. Close the rogue instance and it stops the playback. DUH. If there's ever a use for KUniqueApp, this one is *it*.
Help in most apps: the content usually isn't too great, but also, clicking help several times launches multiple instances. Should only be one help instance per app (with an option to clone off the help window)
The notepad app: triple-click doesn't work. Triple click (and sometimes quadruple click) are nice features that work across many text editors including notepad on win and emacs on *nix. Minor annoyance, but enough to really irk me (since i copy and paste lines all the time). The toolbar buttons are also really miniscule.
Bug reporting: it's arcane and bureacratic, relying on specially formatted emails. Some bugs have remained open for over a year now. So I just gripe here instead.
The DDK comes with an MSDN subscription, which costs roughly as much as a license for Troll Tech's Qt. This isn't expensive by any stretch. If a company making *hardware* doesn't have the budget to purchase even a DDK, I don't see any hope for them.
Because the equivalent function in WTS costs even more? Thank you drive through.
Ahem. Who shredded the constitution when he declared the War On Drugs? They all suck. Thank you, drive through.
So perhaps, embedding something like "Clinton and his people need a bullet through the head" and "We will make Oklahoma City look like a firecracker" would trip it off? Or would it be smart enough to see the quotes? How about if I just put it at the end without any surrounding sentences?
No, not that smart methinks.
while (os.worksfor(user)) { user.use(os) }
It's slow. Really Slow. Really Really slow.
I mean start it up and go out for coffee slow. Remember Corel Office for Java? It's that kind of slow. Have I mentioned that it's slow?
Thanks troll, folks like you make me want to switch to FreeBSD more and more each day.
> By contrast, outsiders are likely to see the mascot in its original setting, as a mythological demon/devil. Insiders get it, outsiders are pushed away.
Uh no. Unless they have a freakin redwood up their ass, they see a cute little getup reminiscent of many football teams. Matter of fact their first impression is that they were inspired by such a mascot. They see the penguin, they also think "mascot". You're the one coming off as stuffy and elitist now for thinking people are that stupid and all share your hair-trigger reaction to religious iconography.
You mangle your key, you mangle the algorithm. This will create weaknesses and make it that much easier to break in a cryptanalysis attack.
Now by "contorting and breaking" messages and/or keys, there's a technique called "chaffing" that does something similar. Hides your truth in loads of bullshit, and a key will tell you which is which. You can even use this trick with the message in plaintext. Basically it's like agreeing beforehand that only the middle line in this message is useful:
your CO's order
attack at dawn
has been rescinded
(Okay, not quite useful since they'd still be alert at dawn after that anyhow, but you get the idea).
BTW, remember that RSA is almost never used to encrypt the content of a message, it's just too slow. It's just used to encrypt the exchange of a key for a symmetric cipher like DES. It's still the weakest link, and little consolation if your attacker monitored you from the start (which you do have to assume), but there are replacements for that link. Not to mention that Twinkle could probably generate keys it would take itself eons to break.
Makes me wonder what percentage of my memory and HD are going to be taken up by crypto overhead in the future though.
KDE makes MDI easy, and there's some MDI kde apps, like kvirc, so they had the ability and a precedent to cite. But the majority of kde apps are non-MDI and prefer it that way. I do hope that they include the ability to run in SDI mode or at least detach windows out of MDI.
What would be heaven would be to create MDI master windows on the fly based on rules. Imagine a "window group", like desktops, only in individual windows. Each window you open stays in the window group, so if it's an SDI window, it opens a new SDI window, if it's MDI, it opens in that MDI window. I'd love to keep all my slashdot windows accessable with one click on the taskbar.
Actually their stockholders are by and large, probably wholly ignorant of the whole fiasco, and if they know anything about it, they are clucking their tongues and sighing at silly legal departments trying to squeeze licenses out of end-of-life intellectual property. Because that's what legal departments *do*, among their other jobs. R&D develops, Marketing pushes it out, Sales keeps it rolling, Legal holds it up. Sometimes Marketing wants R&D to keep leveraging old tech, sometimes they push for the impossible. Sales wants Marketing to transfer technology the market won't accept, or find new ways to sell the same junk in different colors. Legal tries to find ways to create licenses for products that are only marginally theirs (e.g. IBM has a patent on LZW too) and tries to keep leveraging IP when it has long since become commoditized. Every department has a shifting concept of what's important now, and they don't all overlap.
Welcome to the weird world of corporations.
> I'm glad that all the important scientific discoveries were made before we had patents and intellectual property.
You honestly believe this? This is just so unbelievably laughable that I just can't bring myself to argue with any of the other points. I don't have the skill to debate anyone who exists on another plane of reality, sorry.
> And for every Windows that rears it's ugly head, there is a Wine. :)
And about a million more whines. Sorry, couldn't resist.
Netscape hasn't needed a plugin to show PNG for a long time. It still doesn't support alpha blending, making it still useless for background-independent antialiasing, but it still does view them.
... or applets.
Of course, with no animated PNG support, MNG notwithstanding, that means all those annoying banner ads will be in javascript
If you traveled at .5 c and ran into an asteroid the size of a small pebble... Blammo. Kinda a crap shoot, ain't it?
Actually, that's the problem with Mir, its skin is too corroded. In a few years, it would start leaking air like a sieve. Things put in space take a hell of a lot of sandblasting from micrometeorite impacts that there's no atmosphere to protect from. So it's not even good for parts.
I suppose they could sell it too, but bridges seem to be the more popular model in that product line.
Try the book of Revelation:
And the star fell upon the third part of the river, and the star's name was wormwood, and many men died of the waters for they had been made bitter.
The ukranian word for wormwood is chernobyl.
Why not? Could it be that metadata can't ever be associated with an inode? tch, just too bad, isn't it.