I said only the fussiest would need more control over color management than the windows color profile system gives them. (Few people need features that the color profile system can't handle). Obviously, anybody who cares about getting colors right (or as close to right as the monitor/video card combination will allow) need a way to make color profiles, and the pucks are surely worlds easier than the old color card systems used before them.
Actually IIRC windows has some fairly extensive color profile support built in, which probably could handle everything everybody but the most picky professional would want.
(That is not to say that a colorimeter would not be needed, but that in theory at least, one could be used to create a color profile for the display, and hand that to Windows for use. Attempting to create a color profile by hand without such a tool would be a long and arduous task, and would require special color samples, AIUI.)
Do you live in a third world country and have flies on your face? Home Basic
Actually Vista Starter was the version intended for third world countries.
Regular users choose Home Basic if they are too cheap to upgrade what comes by default on the $600 laptop, or literally only use the computer to check e-mail, etc.
Home Premium is what the average home computer was intended to have. IT has the features to be used as a Media Center PC, if you want. Otherwise it contiains most of the features microsoft thinks Home users might want.
Vista Ultimate on a home computer is intended for those with special requirements for "professional" features, and for power users. It has basically everything.
It seems to me that, before the switchover, they should mandate annoying 1 or 2 minute "commercials" (in progressively increasing frequency) saying something to the effect that "This is an analog TV station, it will not work past X, this is how to get a converter box". The key would be to *only* show these commercials on analog stations, perhaps even have shorter ones saying "Your TV is ready for the switchover" on digital ones, satellite, and cable. I don't watch TV, so I don't care much, but it was a challenge figuring out if it was receiving digital channels or not since it's the same content on both. I basically had to judge based on reception artifacts, so I suspect many people are assuming their "new" TVs are ready...
Parts of that do have. They have mandatory commercials and news segments. It would be nice to have special commericals that are format specific. Analog would warn about the switchover.
Digital would remind people that they have everything they need and starting at the switchover date they can use the old channel numbers again.
Satellite and cable cos should use their commercial replacement systems (yes they do own special equipment to allow them to replace commercials in the original feeds) with the least annoying possible commercial that reminds viewers that they will not be impacted, and thanks them for choosing $NAME_OF_PROVIDER.
If the whole system was well run, the government would have mandated such commercials, and provided examples to the companies. They would also mandate inclusion of some special tag in the analog and OTA digital feeds to make it easy for the cable and sat providers to detect and replace the commercials.
The "translation" feature you mention is actually wuite simple, and believe it or not is as much a feature of gtk as QT4. GTK has skinning support to change the appearance of widgets. This support is comprehensive enough that skins can be designed to make GTK components look like QT components. Some part of KDE or QT4 includes a feature to translate QT4 skins (themes?) into GTK skins.
Now none of that is really magic, and I believe the reverse should be possible too, although Gnome might be lacking special support for that.
I agree that KDE generally should not worry about mice at all, except perhaps to have a nice user interface tool to make adjusting some x11 mouse properties easier. However, pairing bluetooth devices requires user interaction, which means a desktop environment must expose those interacting portions of the pairing process. That is the issue here.
Ideally, That would be true, but there is a slight issue here. Paring usb devices generally does not require user interaction, but pairing bluetooth devices generally does. The devices can be in discoverable or non-discoverable mode. (That includes the computer, since a computer can be a bluetooth client in addition to being a bluetooth host). Then devices generally need to exchange a key pair with each other, which generally requires user interaction on one of the two components, etc.
Anything involving user interaction needs to be surfaced up to the level of the desktop environment, so that things are not hidden on the console that ran startx.
USB generally does not require any such interaction, so the desktop environments generally have little code dealing specifically with USB. (They may have some code notifying people if a USB 2.0 device is plugged into a USB 1.X port, but thats about the extent of it).
The simple facts are that he (a truck driver!) is collecting detailed information about some of the worlds least efficient nuclear bomb designs. Bombs with the same amount of equal quality fissile material can be made far more powerful. No terrorist orginaization would want to create such wasteful bombs, so the information he is publishing is not very dangerous at all. Besides, a lot of the difficulty in making even an inefficient nuclear bomb at all obtaining the weapons grade fissile material.
Now his material is extremely accurate, coming from both logical analysis which has found inaccuracies in some published records. (Some records include masses of components that imply absurd material densities, so those measurements get discarded), measurements of the actual shell casings, and leaked information from those who actually built those bombs. Most of those people are customers of his book, and have publicly stated that very very few of his details remain inaccurate.
The most common inexpensive laptop graphics chip is the Intel 915 chip. That chip is so worthless it is not even funny. A computer with that chipset cannot even play the Sims 2 without issue, and that game by no means a graphics intensive game.
Laptops with that graphics chip cannot run Aero. The only other real issue is the one gigabyte issue. Vista does not work well at all with anything less than 2 GB. But at the beginning, many people bought "vista ready" computers that had that worthless graphics chip and only 1 GIG of RAM.
They lied to shift hardware. To avoid pissing off Intel. They therefore need to give you WHAT YOU PAID FOR - you paid for a machine that was stated it could run Aero capably, so you should get that. No more No less.
Here in the UK, that'd be the retailer's problem. After all, it was they who sold you the product (complete with Vista capable sticker), it's their problem if it later transpires it isn't Vista capable. (In the real world, you'd almost certainly have no end of trouble getting a refund or a free upgrade in a case like this, but that's not really the point)
I'm surprised that this isn't the case in the US, frankly. What's the point in retailers if they're not responsible for the products they retail?
In most cases a the point of retailers is that they are they only way to get a product new without buying it in bulk. To buy from the manufacturer usually requires an enormous order, usually exceeding what 30 retailers could move in a year. So in most markets only distributors buy from the manufacturer. To buy from the distributor usually requires a purchase around the size that an average retailer could move in a year. Only by buying from a retailer can you buy just one.
Not all markets are like this. The computer market is a major example of a case where consumers can by directly from the manufacturer in small quantities. But try buying a razor directly from the manufacturer sometime.
Broadband saves times. Even the worst system where the connection is not really always on- but is on demand, take no more than 2 seconds to access the net, while dial up connections generally take a minimum of 30 seconds or more.
Broadband systems do not block the phone lines, even temporarily. For an e-mail only user this can still make a difference, because when on dial-up then cannot afford to risk checking their email while expecting an important phone call, but nothing prevents them from doing that when they have dialup.
Keeping the computer patched is much easier on broadband than dial-up, and don't think that this is not important for those who only connect for short periods at a time. They can most certainly get infected.
When their friends/family send them email with absurdly large photos attached, it does not take half an hour to download the message.
The false positives generated by GMail's spam filtering don't piss you off in the least? Not even the fact that you have no direct personal control over the process at all? Nor the fact that, unlike other services like Yahoo, you can't effectively disable it by passing it through, allowing you to use your own more tuned and effective local spam filtering solution (i.e. PopFile)?
It is easy to bypass the spam system, but the way to do it is not obvious. Create a new filter, with just an asterisk in the has the words field. That ensures the filter applies to all messages, even a sender-less, subject-less, body-less email. Then on the actions page select "Never send it to Spam". Apply the filter. Now the spam filtering is bypassed, and no messages will ever end up in the spam folder.
Could you please cite the law (or more likely federal regulation) in question? I'm reasonably confident no such law exists. Basic location information can always be obtained by cell tower triangulation, but the listening in feature is to the best of my knowledge non-existent.
You are right. I would not be shocked to find out that this new coincides with a new release of Blackberry OS President Edition, which has been audited by the security analysts over at the NSA, and found to be secure enough for the presidents use with personal information.
True, but that is a fairly limited exception in a special case. Most illegal evidence is still inadmissible. Besides, I would not be surprised to find the Supreme Court completely reversing this ruling at some point.
>Hmmm, what probably cause was given to search the kid's phone?
NONE! None is needed. As I understand it under the law in most states school officials have the legal right to search *anything* on school premises for any reason at all!
As I understand it schools usually have near blanket permission under state law to search pretty much anything on the school property without requiring any permission at all. For example, lockers may be searched at any time and for any reason. Book-bags may be searched. (It is my understanding that some inner city schools in really bad neighborhoods has what amount to airport-style security checks at the entrance. Thus book-bags, purses, etc. would be be searched every day as a part of arriving at school!)
Unfortunately, most of the unlawful search and other illegal evidence laws apply primarily to the police, not to actions taken by others. Often times, if somebody else obtains the evidence, even illegally it can be used by the prosecution in the case. The party that obtained the evidence illegally could potentially be subject to prosecution as well, but that is not surprising.
Now not all evidence works like this. For example phone recordings in some states may be inadmissible as evidence if the state's rules regarding it are not met, even when neither party is the police. But in most cases, as long as it was not the police (or prosecution) that obtained the evidence illegally it is admissible.
Now in this case, this is moot. No warrant was necessary. Anybody (police or otherwise) may search property without any warrant if the owner of said property agrees to the search, and any evidence obtained is admissible. In general, although there are exceptions such as probable cause, law enforcement requires warrants to search a person's property against his/her will. Private individuals never need a warrant to do this, although usually searching of property by a private individual against the property owners will is a crime. However, school officials generally have the legal right to search any property on school grounds. Thus the evidence was lawful.
IANAL, but all the above is my understanding of how it works.
That is easy under Windows Vista, if you have already initialized Microsoft Update. (All of the Window/Microsoft update platform seems to have been decoupled from the browser except IIRC for how one upgrades to Microsoft Update.).
Debian's installer most certainly has a GUI, but it is an optional one, and is not the default. (at least not the default as of etch. I'm not sure about the Lenny installers). Furthermore, those that know what they are doing well enough to want to custom partition should be running the installer in expert mode, which has less hand-holding.
While fairly common knowledge, far from everybody is familiar with it. Even many people who have seen the movie are unaware of the book, and especially the book's original title.
Elsewhere on that site it notes that additional minutes cost around 40 cents each, which is pretty darn expensive, although not completely unreasonable given the costs of satellite communications.
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I said only the fussiest would need more control over color management than the windows color profile system gives them. (Few people need features that the color profile system can't handle). Obviously, anybody who cares about getting colors right (or as close to right as the monitor/video card combination will allow) need a way to make color profiles, and the pucks are surely worlds easier than the old color card systems used before them.
Actually IIRC windows has some fairly extensive color profile support built in, which probably could handle everything everybody but the most picky professional would want.
(That is not to say that a colorimeter would not be needed, but that in theory at least, one could be used to create a color profile for the display, and hand that to Windows for use. Attempting to create a color profile by hand without such a tool would be a long and arduous task, and would require special color samples, AIUI.)
Do you live in a third world country and have flies on your face?
Home Basic
Actually Vista Starter was the version intended for third world countries.
Regular users choose Home Basic if they are too cheap to upgrade what comes by default on the $600 laptop, or literally only use the computer to check e-mail, etc.
Home Premium is what the average home computer was intended to have. IT has the features to be used as a Media Center PC, if you want. Otherwise it contiains most of the features microsoft thinks Home users might want.
Vista Ultimate on a home computer is intended for those with special requirements for "professional" features, and for power users. It has basically everything.
It seems to me that, before the switchover, they should mandate annoying 1 or 2 minute "commercials" (in progressively increasing frequency) saying something to the effect that "This is an analog TV station, it will not work past X, this is how to get a converter box". The key would be to *only* show these commercials on analog stations, perhaps even have shorter ones saying "Your TV is ready for the switchover" on digital ones, satellite, and cable. I don't watch TV, so I don't care much, but it was a challenge figuring out if it was receiving digital channels or not since it's the same content on both. I basically had to judge based on reception artifacts, so I suspect many people are assuming their "new" TVs are ready...
Parts of that do have. They have mandatory commercials and news segments. It would be nice to have special commericals that are format specific. Analog would warn about the switchover.
Digital would remind people that they have everything they need and starting at the switchover date they can use the old channel numbers again.
Satellite and cable cos should use their commercial replacement systems (yes they do own special equipment to allow them to replace commercials in the original feeds) with the least annoying possible commercial that reminds viewers that they will not be impacted, and thanks them for choosing $NAME_OF_PROVIDER.
If the whole system was well run, the government would have mandated such commercials, and provided examples to the companies. They would also mandate inclusion of some special tag in the analog and OTA digital feeds to make it easy for the cable and sat providers to detect and replace the commercials.
The "translation" feature you mention is actually wuite simple, and believe it or not is as much a feature of gtk as QT4. GTK has skinning support to change the appearance of widgets. This support is comprehensive enough that skins can be designed to make GTK components look like QT components. Some part of KDE or QT4 includes a feature to translate QT4 skins (themes?) into GTK skins.
Now none of that is really magic, and I believe the reverse should be possible too, although Gnome might be lacking special support for that.
I agree that KDE generally should not worry about mice at all, except perhaps to have a nice user interface tool to make adjusting some x11 mouse properties easier. However, pairing bluetooth devices requires user interaction, which means a desktop environment must expose those interacting portions of the pairing process. That is the issue here.
Ideally, That would be true, but there is a slight issue here. Paring usb devices generally does not require user interaction, but pairing bluetooth devices generally does. The devices can be in discoverable or non-discoverable mode. (That includes the computer, since a computer can be a bluetooth client in addition to being a bluetooth host). Then devices generally need to exchange a key pair with each other, which generally requires user interaction on one of the two components, etc.
Anything involving user interaction needs to be surfaced up to the level of the desktop environment, so that things are not hidden on the console that ran startx.
USB generally does not require any such interaction, so the desktop environments generally have little code dealing specifically with USB. (They may have some code notifying people if a USB 2.0 device is plugged into a USB 1.X port, but thats about the extent of it).
The simple facts are that he (a truck driver!) is collecting detailed information about some of the worlds least efficient nuclear bomb designs. Bombs with the same amount of equal quality fissile material can be made far more powerful. No terrorist orginaization would want to create such wasteful bombs, so the information he is publishing is not very dangerous at all. Besides, a lot of the difficulty in making even an inefficient nuclear bomb at all obtaining the weapons grade fissile material.
Now his material is extremely accurate, coming from both logical analysis which has found inaccuracies in some published records. (Some records include masses of components that imply absurd material densities, so those measurements get discarded), measurements of the actual shell casings, and leaked information from those who actually built those bombs. Most of those people are customers of his book, and have publicly stated that very very few of his details remain inaccurate.
Crud. I of course meant "Vista Capable", not "Vista Ready".
The most common inexpensive laptop graphics chip is the Intel 915 chip. That chip is so worthless it is not even funny. A computer with that chipset cannot even play the Sims 2 without issue, and that game by no means a graphics intensive game.
Laptops with that graphics chip cannot run Aero. The only other real issue is the one gigabyte issue. Vista does not work well at all with anything less than 2 GB. But at the beginning, many people bought "vista ready" computers that had that worthless graphics chip and only 1 GIG of RAM.
Those computers could not possible run Aero.
They lied to shift hardware. To avoid pissing off Intel. They therefore need to give you WHAT YOU PAID FOR - you paid for a machine that was stated it could run Aero capably, so you should get that. No more No less.
Here in the UK, that'd be the retailer's problem. After all, it was they who sold you the product (complete with Vista capable sticker), it's their problem if it later transpires it isn't Vista capable. (In the real world, you'd almost certainly have no end of trouble getting a refund or a free upgrade in a case like this, but that's not really the point)
I'm surprised that this isn't the case in the US, frankly. What's the point in retailers if they're not responsible for the products they retail?
In most cases a the point of retailers is that they are they only way to get a product new without buying it in bulk. To buy from the manufacturer usually requires an enormous order, usually exceeding what 30 retailers could move in a year. So in most markets only distributors buy from the manufacturer. To buy from the distributor usually requires a purchase around the size that an average retailer could move in a year. Only by buying from a retailer can you buy just one.
Not all markets are like this. The computer market is a major example of a case where consumers can by directly from the manufacturer in small quantities. But try buying a razor directly from the manufacturer sometime.
Broadband saves times. Even the worst system where the connection is not really always on- but is on demand, take no more than 2 seconds to access the net, while dial up connections generally take a minimum of 30 seconds or more.
Broadband systems do not block the phone lines, even temporarily. For an e-mail only user this can still make a difference, because when on dial-up then cannot afford to risk checking their email while expecting an important phone call, but nothing prevents them from doing that when they have dialup.
Keeping the computer patched is much easier on broadband than dial-up, and don't think that this is not important for those who only connect for short periods at a time. They can most certainly get infected.
When their friends/family send them email with absurdly large photos attached, it does not take half an hour to download the message.
etc.
The false positives generated by GMail's spam filtering don't piss you off in the least? Not even the fact that you have no direct personal control over the process at all? Nor the fact that, unlike other services like Yahoo, you can't effectively disable it by passing it through, allowing you to use your own more tuned and effective local spam filtering solution (i.e. PopFile)?
It is easy to bypass the spam system, but the way to do it is not obvious. Create a new filter, with just an asterisk in the has the words field. That ensures the filter applies to all messages, even a sender-less, subject-less, body-less email. Then on the actions page select "Never send it to Spam". Apply the filter. Now the spam filtering is bypassed, and no messages will ever end up in the spam folder.
Could you please cite the law (or more likely federal regulation) in question? I'm reasonably confident no such law exists. Basic location information can always be obtained by cell tower triangulation, but the listening in feature is to the best of my knowledge non-existent.
You are right. I would not be shocked to find out that this new coincides with a new release of Blackberry OS President Edition, which has been audited by the security analysts over at the NSA, and found to be secure enough for the presidents use with personal information.
True, but that is a fairly limited exception in a special case. Most illegal evidence is still inadmissible. Besides, I would not be surprised to find the Supreme Court completely reversing this ruling at some point.
>Hmmm, what probably cause was given to search the kid's phone?
NONE! None is needed. As I understand it under the law in most states school officials have the legal right to search *anything* on school premises for any reason at all!
Disclaimer: I'm still NAL.
As I understand it schools usually have near blanket permission under state law to search pretty much anything on the school property without requiring any permission at all. For example, lockers may be searched at any time and for any reason. Book-bags may be searched. (It is my understanding that some inner city schools in really bad neighborhoods has what amount to airport-style security checks at the entrance. Thus book-bags, purses, etc. would be be searched every day as a part of arriving at school!)
Unfortunately, most of the unlawful search and other illegal evidence laws apply primarily to the police, not to actions taken by others. Often times, if somebody else obtains the evidence, even illegally it can be used by the prosecution in the case. The party that obtained the evidence illegally could potentially be subject to prosecution as well, but that is not surprising.
Now not all evidence works like this. For example phone recordings in some states may be inadmissible as evidence if the state's rules regarding it are not met, even when neither party is the police. But in most cases, as long as it was not the police (or prosecution) that obtained the evidence illegally it is admissible.
Now in this case, this is moot. No warrant was necessary. Anybody (police or otherwise) may search property without any warrant if the owner of said property agrees to the search, and any evidence obtained is admissible. In general, although there are exceptions such as probable cause, law enforcement requires warrants to search a person's property against his/her will. Private individuals never need a warrant to do this, although usually searching of property by a private individual against the property owners will is a crime. However, school officials generally have the legal right to search any property on school grounds. Thus the evidence was lawful.
IANAL, but all the above is my understanding of how it works.
I'll meet you on P3X-834, to discuss this similarity in naming systems.
That is easy under Windows Vista, if you have already initialized Microsoft Update. (All of the Window/Microsoft update platform seems to have been decoupled from the browser except IIRC for how one upgrades to Microsoft Update.).
Debian's installer most certainly has a GUI, but it is an optional one, and is not the default. (at least not the default as of etch. I'm not sure about the Lenny installers).
Furthermore, those that know what they are doing well enough to want to custom partition should be running the installer in expert mode, which has less hand-holding.
While fairly common knowledge, far from everybody is familiar with it. Even many people who have seen the movie are unaware of the book, and especially the book's original title.
Which is better known by the Movie title, an post-movie release book re-release title of: Blade Runner.
Elsewhere on that site it notes that additional minutes cost around 40 cents each, which is pretty darn expensive, although not completely unreasonable given the costs of satellite communications.