Hmmm, no good reasons to send Word attachments? How about formatting, tables, graphics, password-protection, spelling/grammar checking, highlighting, correction/collaboration. All supported by the fact that (as RMS admits) most computer users can read Word documents - even if it's a scaled down Wordpad reader.
You're an wrong on a whole bunch of things here:
a) If you really, truly need these formatting features (tables, graphics, etc.) use an open format, like PDF, PS, HTML+PNG+JPEG or even RTF.
b) Spelling and grammar checking do not depend on the use of Word; they can be implemented in any editing software. Emacs, for instance, does spell checking quite neatly using flyspell.
c) If you're relying on Words' password system to keep something secret, then kill yourself now and make the world a better place.
d) There are much better systems than word for collaboration: have you ever looked at CVS or RCS?
Don't be a moron. Richard (that's a really clever joke there, by the way, it certainly helps support your argument) is not claiming that use should use ASCII to send any of the message types that you've listed. For European, Asian, Greek, Cyrillic and Latin messages, I'd imagine you'd use Unicode. One of the encodings for Unicode is UTF-8, which surprise, surprise, equivalent to ASCII for 7-bit characters.
For scientific and mathematical messages, I think thet point is that the message body is supposed to hold the message body, ie plain text conveying a message. If your sending your thesis, or a draft scientific paper or something, send it as an attachment. As an attachment, you could send it in a real scientific or mathematical format, like MathML or LaTeX or DocBook, etc...
Perhaps you haven't noticed that Info documentation looks a little different to the man pages, and that most tools (even GNU tools) come with both. Info pages are meant for software manuals, while man pages are meant for command references. It's really quite simple: man pages didn't do what he wanted (hyperlinked software manuals), so he created something to supplement them with.
Face it if you take away the profits from the dealers, make it safer and legalise it while showing how pathetically uncool you end up when you do use, I suspect we will have much lower take up rates. Just about every case of serious corruption in Australian police services has to do with Drug money and most police services employee reps say legalisation will be the only long term way to get rid of corruption. Amen!
You outlaw marajuana and hate speech, but with me you get one or the other....
br.
Interestingly, the part of Australia that I live in, the ACT, has some of the nicest marijuana laws in the world (that I've seen, anyhow). Basically, the cops don't care, unless you really piss them off, in which case they might give you a A$50 fine.
Not all Australians are like this, in fact a lot of us are quite ashamed of our current governments.
The Federal government, which passed the previous lwas that tried to restrict ISPs, did so, a) because they (erk, they call themselves the Liberals) are quite a conservative party to begin with, b) because they were trying to win the vote of an even more conservative member of parliament, and c) because it was easy and popular to do.
The reason for this new law is less clearcut; the party in power in NSW (Labor) is the supposedly more Left-leaning of the two biggest parties. I suspect that it purely a populist move. Politicians in Australia seem to be determined to prove that they can be even more conservative and out of touch than Americans, obvously.
Isn't that a little like making a date for the prom with the ugly girl, knowing full well that once you've made the cheerleader jealous, she'll go with you after all?
Hmmm, perhaps this isn't the best analogy for Slashdotters;)
...but there is no such thing as 'ripping mp3s'. You rip the tracks of a CD, then you encode it with an encoder. These a two very different processes, which are better accomplished (IMHO) by using different tools (perhaps linked using the excellent Grip).
Down here in Australia, nearly everyone is stuck on 56k. ADSL costs A$95 a month for 256kb/64kb with a 3GB a month cap. Ouch. Even worse, cable is only available in two cities in the entire country.
Firstly, I set up a junkbuster proxy on my box. Getting rid of all those stupid banners really does help, especially when I'm reading sites like *shudder* CNet or *shudder**shudder* ZDNet, with ther huge middle of the page Flash modem-killers. This feeds into a Squid caching proxy; it really does seem to help a fair bit. Thirdly, I run a BIND caching DNS server. Of course, there are plenty of other DNS servers around, but BIND is the one I saw first, so that's what I'm using.
Overall, with a bit of fiddling, it makes being stuck on a 56k suck slightly less.
OT, but...
I don't think that MS artificially limiting the encoder bitrate will help Ogg at all. Rather, it will encourage XP users to use wma, which, conveniently, is installed right along side the mp3 encoder.
Can you imagine your (mother|father|grandparents|dog) saying "Hmm...this mp3 sounds shoddy, I think I'll go install this complete other encoder that I've never heard of that none of my friends use", rather than "Hmm...this mp3 sounds shoddy, I think I'll use this other encode that's right here, endorsed by MS and compatible with 90% of the PCs bought in the past two years"?[1]
The way that I'm trying to help Ogg amongst my friends is by encoding all my CDs in Ogg format, and sharing them around. If anyone wants to listen to them, they have to go and get the Winamp (or Sonique, etc...) plugin to listen to it. This way, a whole lot of my friends have been exposed to this new format. A few of them have liked the quality enough to try to figure out how to encode their own CDs in this format.
[1]True, I can't see anyone I know saying either, but this is Slashdot; don't let the facts get in the way of a good point, right?
Why not set up a Free and free peer-to-peer scientific publishing system based on Freenet, with one difference: documents do not get deleted from the cache?
How would it work? Simple:Each participating University provides a server and bandwidth, and each paper is just posted onto their server, signed with GPG. As people search for documents, the docs will gradually propogate around the network, until everyone has a copy. Everything is signed, so if you doubt the integrity of a document, just go and get someone's public key and check. Of course, to eliminate the possibility that someone in the future would forge someone else's key to repudiate a document, you'll need to spread keys far and wide as well. Perhaps professional societies like AIP would be better as a key repository.
Of course, if this is too method of document dissemination is too slow, a few of the big universities could set up rsync servers; littler ones could rsync themselves to one of these big servers each night, say.
Fortunately, there is some Free competition for this part of their scheme as well. The DotGNU project, announced last week (LWN article here), aims to develop a completely independent project with similar aims to.NET, with two important differences. One, it is Free Software, and thus cannot be used to lock people into proprietary solutions. Secondly, it actually is addressing the problem of security and privacy.
IMHO, if they can raise enough interest (and funds) this is the horse to back. With the current mainstream business interest in Free Software (and OSS), and growing dissatisfaction with MS, perhaps this could be (FS|OSS)'s 'killer app'.
Unfortunately, you have to be using either Netscape or IE to do the qualification test...Of course, maybe the actual test is whether you can figure out how to forge your HTTP headers;)
Here's my semi-conspiracy theory for the day:
Imagine that you want to make Linux more user friendly, easier for people familiar with Windows or MacOS to switch to. You decide that you the solution is to build a new file manager and release it as Free Software, but you need money to bay for programmers, computers, bandwitdt, etc. What could be the solution?
Maybe you could start your own company, and get venture capital to pay for it all. With all the Linux hype at the time, it's probably not too hard to find. You come up with some vague but plausible sounding plans for making money at some point in the future with 'backend services' or 'web integration' or whatever buzzwords you can come up with. Now, you're going to release your file manager under the GPL, so you code away for a year or two, and then reach a v1.0 release. All of a sudden, you announce that you have no money left, and no chance of making any soon. You go bust, the venture capital company loses a bit of cash, and the community gets an outstanding piece of software FOR FREE. That's right, you just got a venture capital company to pay for it, and now the source is out there, Free for the taking, with source code!
Doesn't this sound like the ultimate investment hack?
Slashdot Mirror
Amen, brother!
Hmmm, no good reasons to send Word attachments? How about formatting, tables, graphics, password-protection, spelling/grammar checking, highlighting, correction/collaboration. All supported by the fact that (as RMS admits) most computer users can read Word documents - even if it's a scaled down Wordpad reader.
You're an wrong on a whole bunch of things here:
a) If you really, truly need these formatting features (tables, graphics, etc.) use an open format, like PDF, PS, HTML+PNG+JPEG or even RTF.
b) Spelling and grammar checking do not depend on the use of Word; they can be implemented in any editing software. Emacs, for instance, does spell checking quite neatly using flyspell.
c) If you're relying on Words' password system to keep something secret, then kill yourself now and make the world a better place.
d) There are much better systems than word for collaboration: have you ever looked at CVS or RCS?
Don't be a moron. Richard (that's a really clever joke there, by the way, it certainly helps support your argument) is not claiming that use should use ASCII to send any of the message types that you've listed. For European, Asian, Greek, Cyrillic and Latin messages, I'd imagine you'd use Unicode. One of the encodings for Unicode is UTF-8, which surprise, surprise, equivalent to ASCII for 7-bit characters.
For scientific and mathematical messages, I think thet point is that the message body is supposed to hold the message body, ie plain text conveying a message. If your sending your thesis, or a draft scientific paper or something, send it as an attachment. As an attachment, you could send it in a real scientific or mathematical format, like MathML or LaTeX or DocBook, etc...
Perhaps you haven't noticed that Info documentation looks a little different to the man pages, and that most tools (even GNU tools) come with both. Info pages are meant for software manuals, while man pages are meant for command references. It's really quite simple: man pages didn't do what he wanted (hyperlinked software manuals), so he created something to supplement them with.
I'm just holding out for Star Trek 12 to be released..it's bound to be a classic!
For fucks' sake man, make sure you close your tags before posting.
Face it if you take away the profits from the dealers, make it safer and legalise it while showing how pathetically uncool you end up when you do use, I suspect we will have much lower take up rates. Just about every case of serious corruption in Australian police services has to do with Drug money and most police services employee reps say legalisation will be the only long term way to get rid of corruption.
Amen!
You outlaw marajuana and hate speech, but with me you get one or the other....
br.
Interestingly, the part of Australia that I live in, the ACT, has some of the nicest marijuana laws in the world (that I've seen, anyhow). Basically, the cops don't care, unless you really piss them off, in which case they might give you a A$50 fine.
Not all Australians are like this, in fact a lot of us are quite ashamed of our current governments.
The Federal government, which passed the previous lwas that tried to restrict ISPs, did so, a) because they (erk, they call themselves the Liberals) are quite a conservative party to begin with, b) because they were trying to win the vote of an even more conservative member of parliament, and c) because it was easy and popular to do.
The reason for this new law is less clearcut; the party in power in NSW (Labor) is the supposedly more Left-leaning of the two biggest parties. I suspect that it purely a populist move. Politicians in Australia seem to be determined to prove that they can be even more conservative and out of touch than Americans, obvously.
Wow, I wanna get some of that time machine action!
FWIW, it renders perfectly under Galeon 0.12.4 with Mozilla 0.9.5.
And of course, it validates quite nicely.
Which editor is better, vi or Emacs?
How is Linux better than Windows?
Why should I choose Linux over *BSD?
(For the humour impaired: it's a joke, goddamit, and not a very good one at that).
They tried locking people up.
They even tried using Disney cartoons.
Now, they've taken it to a new level:
For legal or rightholder-authorised copying only. Don't steal music.
Politely asking.(#6, down the bottom).
Leave the poor CVS server alone: here.
Isn't that a little like making a date for the prom with the ugly girl, knowing full well that once you've made the cheerleader jealous, she'll go with you after all?
Hmmm, perhaps this isn't the best analogy for Slashdotters;)
...but there is no such thing as 'ripping mp3s'. You rip the tracks of a CD, then you encode it with an encoder. These a two very different processes, which are better accomplished (IMHO) by using different tools (perhaps linked using the excellent Grip).
Having a look at this page, it makes me wonder whether Netscape should have put a stricter license on the MPL.;)
Down here in Australia, nearly everyone is stuck on 56k. ADSL costs A$95 a month for 256kb/64kb with a 3GB a month cap. Ouch. Even worse, cable is only available in two cities in the entire country.
Firstly, I set up a junkbuster proxy on my box. Getting rid of all those stupid banners really does help, especially when I'm reading sites like *shudder* CNet or *shudder**shudder* ZDNet, with ther huge middle of the page Flash modem-killers. This feeds into a Squid caching proxy; it really does seem to help a fair bit. Thirdly, I run a BIND caching DNS server. Of course, there are plenty of other DNS servers around, but BIND is the one I saw first, so that's what I'm using.
Overall, with a bit of fiddling, it makes being stuck on a 56k suck slightly less.
no reg link...
OT, but...
I don't think that MS artificially limiting the encoder bitrate will help Ogg at all. Rather, it will encourage XP users to use wma, which, conveniently, is installed right along side the mp3 encoder.
Can you imagine your (mother|father|grandparents|dog) saying "Hmm...this mp3 sounds shoddy, I think I'll go install this complete other encoder that I've never heard of that none of my friends use", rather than "Hmm...this mp3 sounds shoddy, I think I'll use this other encode that's right here, endorsed by MS and compatible with 90% of the PCs bought in the past two years"?[1]
The way that I'm trying to help Ogg amongst my friends is by encoding all my CDs in Ogg format, and sharing them around. If anyone wants to listen to them, they have to go and get the Winamp (or Sonique, etc...) plugin to listen to it. This way, a whole lot of my friends have been exposed to this new format. A few of them have liked the quality enough to try to figure out how to encode their own CDs in this format.
[1]True, I can't see anyone I know saying either, but this is Slashdot; don't let the facts get in the way of a good point, right?
Why not set up a Free and free peer-to-peer scientific publishing system based on Freenet, with one difference: documents do not get deleted from the cache?
How would it work? Simple:Each participating University provides a server and bandwidth, and each paper is just posted onto their server, signed with GPG. As people search for documents, the docs will gradually propogate around the network, until everyone has a copy. Everything is signed, so if you doubt the integrity of a document, just go and get someone's public key and check. Of course, to eliminate the possibility that someone in the future would forge someone else's key to repudiate a document, you'll need to spread keys far and wide as well. Perhaps professional societies like AIP would be better as a key repository.
Of course, if this is too method of document dissemination is too slow, a few of the big universities could set up rsync servers; littler ones could rsync themselves to one of these big servers each night, say.
Fortunately, there is some Free competition for this part of their scheme as well. The DotGNU project, announced last week (LWN article here), aims to develop a completely independent project with similar aims to .NET, with two important differences. One, it is Free Software, and thus cannot be used to lock people into proprietary solutions. Secondly, it actually is addressing the problem of security and privacy.
IMHO, if they can raise enough interest (and funds) this is the horse to back. With the current mainstream business interest in Free Software (and OSS), and growing dissatisfaction with MS, perhaps this could be (FS|OSS)'s 'killer app'.
or was anyone elses' first thought after reading the headline "wow, those zdnet guys have finally decided to shut the hell up"?
Unfortunately, you have to be using either Netscape or IE to do the qualification test...Of course, maybe the actual test is whether you can figure out how to forge your HTTP headers;)
Imagine that you want to make Linux more user friendly, easier for people familiar with Windows or MacOS to switch to. You decide that you the solution is to build a new file manager and release it as Free Software, but you need money to bay for programmers, computers, bandwitdt, etc. What could be the solution?
Maybe you could start your own company, and get venture capital to pay for it all. With all the Linux hype at the time, it's probably not too hard to find. You come up with some vague but plausible sounding plans for making money at some point in the future with 'backend services' or 'web integration' or whatever buzzwords you can come up with. Now, you're going to release your file manager under the GPL, so you code away for a year or two, and then reach a v1.0 release. All of a sudden, you announce that you have no money left, and no chance of making any soon. You go bust, the venture capital company loses a bit of cash, and the community gets an outstanding piece of software FOR FREE. That's right, you just got a venture capital company to pay for it, and now the source is out there, Free for the taking, with source code!
Doesn't this sound like the ultimate investment hack?
runs on windows
I believe Microsoft already has a product that does this, it's called Windows 2000....