Well Harassment is not the only interesting thing... wasting their (and their company's) time is pretty much interesting too, and that also works with salespeople coming to your door etc. Just look interested and discuss their wonderful product with them for maybe 15 or 20 minutes until you finally say you weren't going to buy anything anyway.
Well if the French decide that way, maybe that gives us in Germany some hope. But currently it is assumed that Germans have to expect a price increase of about 180 DEM ($90) for a basic fully-equipped PC. Fees are currently expected to be put on PCs, Scanners, Printers, CD Writers and DVD drives. These fees will be shared between the the German Author's Rights Society (GEMA), the "VG Wort" (the Literature counterpart of the musically oriented GEMA), and the "VG Bild-Kunst" (Same thing for artists, filmmakers and photographers). A fee on scanners that surpass a certain speed in terms of pages per minute has been existent for quite a while already. At least the fees in Germany are significantly lower than those in France.
Since the views of the societies listed above and the hardware manufacturers are not exactly consensual, the case is expected to be taken to court.
Personally, for the standard user's desktop I don't see a necessity to speed up the cpus even more. A 1.5GHz CPU, a Gfx card with external power connectors, a 100GB hard drive, is nothing but overkill for someone who writes documents and spreadsheets, communicates via email and surfs the web a little. I myself (even though a CS student and not your standard PC user) see no reason in upgrading my K6-233 and replace it with something that allows me to keep my radiator turned off all winter and requires me to keep a fire extinguisher near, except for the child in me that wants to play with cool stuff...
So the advantage of these technologies is imho that it allows us to produce systems that are only as powerful as the current ones but drastically reduce power consumption and heat emission as well as overall system cost. And since we're pretty much on a way to a mobile market, that is exactly what we need.
Of course, for server technology faster processor speed is quite a lot more interesting... and personally, of course it would be fun to have a 10GHz PC with a 5GHz gfx chip and 2 gigs of RAM as well as a TByte of HD and one awesome 24" flat screen on my desk just for the show:-)
Maybe you have noticed in the 3rd screenshot that in the background there is Windows C code (at least, as I recall, GetDlgItemText and a variable called hDlg look suspicious)... looks like they've screwed it up... which means, whoever did it can't be a true geek:)
...what us hackers really need is not a keyboard that allows fast typing of text in any spoken language. I can do alright with that on a standard qwerty (uh, qwertz where i come from) keyboard. But everyone who ever coded and used a powerful editor such as emacs needs a completely different key layout... especially in the german layout where the pipe symbol is <altgr>+"<", the @ is at <altgr>+"q", and the backslash at <altgr>+"ß", and <altgr> definitely being one of the keys that won't work with touch typing. And typing things like
is what's really killing your fingers on a standard qwerty keyboard. The datahand idea is maybe not too bad. but I'd rather be able to move my hands around freely while having the "keyboards" strapped to my hands, and the whole thing working wireless of course - and optimized for coding. For the good ol' letter I'll stick with qwerty.
Somehow I'm reminded of this idea that came up in the German hacker movie '23' and got me interested... why not change weeks to contain 6 days 28 hrs each instead of 7 days 24 hrs each? It would surely fit _my_ biological clock (and that of probably quite a number of hackers living a kind of 'nocturnal' lifestyle...)
You shouldn't feel all THAT safe... it just means that the pictures They SELL are at 19 inch, the ones that they DON'T SELL are more interesting and most likely at a higher resolution... so better stay inside;-)
I don't think that, in the end, it really matters whether a GPLized BeOS will take away market share from Linux. OK, as a Linux user and admirer I would prefer Linux to gain rather than lose market share; but to me (and probably to the FSF as well) there is a higher goal that prevails: the GPLization of another big OS product moves the Free Software movement one big step ahead. After all, it is not about Linux gaining market share, but Free Software gaining market share, and providing the users with more possibilities to do their computer work with truly Free products. Prom this point of view, Linux is just one way to promote Free Software, but in the long term, we can't force anyone to keep sticking to Linux. It's all about providing more choice within the Free Software domain. And whenever a big software product moves to GPL, it is most importantly a big success for Free Software and its philosophy.
Minitel is (apparently) pretty much what German BTX ("Bildschirmtext", or "screen text") used to be some years ago. BTX has "evolved" into T-Online, still being a German telecom daughter, which is now also Germany's largest Internet Provider. Some years back it has enhanced BTX to an improved - though still obsolete and often expensive - version with better graphics and backward compatibility (by now, they've given it the fancy name "T-Online Classic"...). One of the few (sort of) useful features remaining is online banking, which is using its own interface again. But to my knowledge the BTX and T-Online interfaces are pretty much dead here too, except for the banking part. So basically the Telecom here has noticed that this system is obsolete.
So, it's kinda interesting to see Yahoo use a technology that most likely will vanish rather soon. Or, are they planning a good ol' BTX site too?
First we had phone numbers. Then we invented Vanity numbers because 1800-NUMBERS is just better to remember than 1800-686-2377. Then the WWW allowed us to use convienient names such as www.company.com, and to make it even easier things like internet keywords came up because some URLs still were hard to remember. So for what reason should we ever step back to using numbers again? Any rational explanation?
Hmm well, I'll surely enjoy people trying to remember my IPv6 address in a couple of years - come visit me at 12FB:8A6F:73E4:55E4:DEAD:C0DE... maybe I'll make it sooo much easier to remember my site address by giving them www.1234761234124612346.com... sounds good...
I think (La)TeX and/or (K)LyX can do quite a nice
job, as can KWord or AbiWord. But what we need
desperately is
A modern standardized unified printing
system with Gnome/KDE front ends.
A proper system-wide font management, rendering
and printing system. I hate all the hassle with
making TrueType fonts work in different apps,
from AbiWord to StarOffice and others. OK,
ghostscript does TTF, but font names seem to be
interpreted differently in the apps than in gs.
Basically it's just plain Chaos. And using TeX
with TTF fonts? Hmm, forget it. This is what's
really keeping Linux from being a good pub-
lishing alternative.
A modern full-featured (and font-enabled)
vector drawing prog. OK, there are progs like
Sketch or Sodipodi or KIllustrator, but when
it comes to fonts especially - same problem.
That's mainly what keeps me using CorelDRAW.
Unfortunately. The moment I have a GPL
replacement in Linux I'll finally reformat
my HD and destroy Windoze (ok, there's the
question of multimedia and wave/midi editing,
but that's another topic)
GNU/Linux is just not ready for this. But I hope
(and believe) we will get there...
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,
And people are stupid, wicked, or daft,
And you feel that you've had quite enouuuuuuuuuuuugh . . .
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour.
It's orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it's reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
Through an outer spiral arm at forty thousand miles an hour
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars,
It's a hundred thousand lightyears side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand lightyears thick,
But out by us it's just three thousand lightyears wide.
We're thirty thousand lightyears from galactic central point,
We go round every two hundred million years.
And our galaxy is only one of millions and billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whiz.
As fast as it can go, that's the speed of light, you know;
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space
Cause there's bugger-all down here on earth!
What's probably going to bother you much more than the outcome:
Had Gore won, what would Joe Lieberman have stated in his Address? would he still have contested the result and asked for a complete hand recount?
Had Gore won, what would Bush have said? Would he still have stated that one recount is enough and the law has to be accepted?
Or, take the whole story from election day up to now, write it down and exchange the names of Gore/Bush, Lieberman/Cheney, and other Democrats/Republicans. Sounds possible too, right?
Just to conclude that it doesn't matter what arguments you bring up when supporting one or the other party's current behavior.
Maybe the next election there's e-Voting[tm], a simple user interface ("push here if you want X to be President") and a secure electronic network gathering these votes and counting and hopefully not get stuck because of some cpu bug:)
First, thanks for that metric system comment, as a German who has spent some time in the States before I can relate to that and have to say that frenchman is absolutely right:))
As to the "well-educated" etc. part: here's the way I see it:
Assume you are the boss of some company seeking a specialized employee for some purpose. Your search narrows down to two candidates for the job. You check their resumees. One of them is quite a charismatic and friendly-looking guy. Unfortunately he has proven himself to lack some of the in-depth knowledge that is needed for the job. The other guy to you seems kind of boring, a little too serious. His resumee shows, though, that for eight years he has been working as a specialist in just the area you need him in, and he display profound knowledge and _experience_ for the job. OK, he doesn't seem as nice a person. Here's the million dollar question? Which one will be employed?
Hmm, maybe the answer to this question has something to do with whether the boss is a geek or a marketing guy:)
Kinda messing up terms here...
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
As we all know, Linux isn't an OS either. It's just a kernel. So is every Unix system, usually. Of course. But here's the difference - maybe Linux (or Unix) by itself isn't an OS, but then there are things like _GNU/Linux_, which imho _is_ an OS. In that sense, Mac OS X is also just a Unix-like kernel with extra software around it. I don't see a difference there. GNU/Linux with GNOME on top of it seems pretty much the same as Darwin/UNIX with Aqua on top. If anyone claims that Unix or Linux by itself is an OS, he or she might want to talk to RMS on that...
Wouldn't it be a good start to make the standard GNU utils available under MacOS X? I mean, that way free software makes its way further into the Mac systems.
Well... surely nothing can top Mozilla's layout and especially CSS handling. But, darn, it's _extremely_ slow, especially with JavaScript. The "perfect" browser for me be a GNOME browser with Mozilla's power and just some speed enhancements maybe...
One point for Perl: say you got a homepage at some ISP who lets you do CGI. You can't tell what machine he's using, so you need platform-independent stuff... so use Perl. (you might as well use shell scripts... - as long as the server is Unix:) ) But then again, if it's your own Linux box, why not use C? I did that myself, seems somewhat more secure to me...
Slashdot Mirror
... HDTV will be totally obsolete by the time they actually have all their court troubles and everything straightened out...
I'd say we should encourage Fox Entertainment, Inc. or Matt Groening to sue Pillsbury back for calling their mascot "D'Oh"-boy.
This site has a gallery of different ways to conceal decss source code, including pics.
Well Harassment is not the only interesting thing... wasting their (and their company's) time is pretty much interesting too, and that also works with salespeople coming to your door etc. Just look interested and discuss their wonderful product with them for maybe 15 or 20 minutes until you finally say you weren't going to buy anything anyway.
Well if the French decide that way, maybe that gives us in Germany some hope. But currently it is assumed that Germans have to expect a price increase of about 180 DEM ($90) for a basic fully-equipped PC. Fees are currently expected to be put on PCs, Scanners, Printers, CD Writers and DVD drives. These fees will be shared between the the German Author's Rights Society (GEMA), the "VG Wort" (the Literature counterpart of the musically oriented GEMA), and the "VG Bild-Kunst" (Same thing for artists, filmmakers and photographers). A fee on scanners that surpass a certain speed in terms of pages per minute has been existent for quite a while already. At least the fees in Germany are significantly lower than those in France.
Since the views of the societies listed above and the hardware manufacturers are not exactly consensual, the case is expected to be taken to court.
Personally, for the standard user's desktop I don't see a necessity to speed up the cpus even more. A 1.5GHz CPU, a Gfx card with external power connectors, a 100GB hard drive, is nothing but overkill for someone who writes documents and spreadsheets, communicates via email and surfs the web a little. I myself (even though a CS student and not your standard PC user) see no reason in upgrading my K6-233 and replace it with something that allows me to keep my radiator turned off all winter and requires me to keep a fire extinguisher near, except for the child in me that wants to play with cool stuff...
So the advantage of these technologies is imho that it allows us to produce systems that are only as powerful as the current ones but drastically reduce power consumption and heat emission as well as overall system cost. And since we're pretty much on a way to a mobile market, that is exactly what we need.
Of course, for server technology faster processor speed is quite a lot more interesting... and personally, of course it would be fun to have a 10GHz PC with a 5GHz gfx chip and 2 gigs of RAM as well as a TByte of HD and one awesome 24" flat screen on my desk just for the show :-)
Maybe you have noticed in the 3rd screenshot that in the background there is Windows C code (at least, as I recall, GetDlgItemText and a variable called hDlg look suspicious)... looks like they've screwed it up... which means, whoever did it can't be a true geek :)
I guess you are talking about 'Gattaca' here.
...what us hackers really need is not a keyboard that allows fast typing of text in any spoken language. I can do alright with that on a standard qwerty (uh, qwertz where i come from) keyboard. But everyone who ever coded and used a powerful editor such as emacs needs a completely different key layout... especially in the german layout where the pipe symbol is <altgr>+"<", the @ is at <altgr>+"q", and the backslash at <altgr>+"ß", and <altgr> definitely being one of the keys that won't work with touch typing. And typing things like
void main(int argc, char ** argv) {int c = some_func_here (argv[0]);
printf ("Result: \n", c);
}
M-x M-s M-x M-c
is what's really killing your fingers on a standard qwerty keyboard. The datahand idea is maybe not too bad. but I'd rather be able to move my hands around freely while having the "keyboards" strapped to my hands, and the whole thing working wireless of course - and optimized for coding. For the good ol' letter I'll stick with qwerty.
Somehow I'm reminded of this idea that came up in the German hacker movie '23' and got me interested... why not change weeks to contain 6 days 28 hrs each instead of 7 days 24 hrs each? It would surely fit _my_ biological clock (and that of probably quite a number of hackers living a kind of 'nocturnal' lifestyle...)
You shouldn't feel all THAT safe... it just means that the pictures They SELL are at 19 inch, the ones that they DON'T SELL are more interesting and most likely at a higher resolution... so better stay inside ;-)
I don't think that, in the end, it really matters whether a GPLized BeOS will take away market share from Linux. OK, as a Linux user and admirer I would prefer Linux to gain rather than lose market share; but to me (and probably to the FSF as well) there is a higher goal that prevails: the GPLization of another big OS product moves the Free Software movement one big step ahead. After all, it is not about Linux gaining market share, but Free Software gaining market share, and providing the users with more possibilities to do their computer work with truly Free products. Prom this point of view, Linux is just one way to promote Free Software, but in the long term, we can't force anyone to keep sticking to Linux. It's all about providing more choice within the Free Software domain. And whenever a big software product moves to GPL, it is most importantly a big success for Free Software and its philosophy.
Minitel is (apparently) pretty much what German BTX ("Bildschirmtext", or "screen text") used to be some years ago. BTX has "evolved" into T-Online, still being a German telecom daughter, which is now also Germany's largest Internet Provider. Some years back it has enhanced BTX to an improved - though still obsolete and often expensive - version with better graphics and backward compatibility (by now, they've given it the fancy name "T-Online Classic"...). One of the few (sort of) useful features remaining is online banking, which is using its own interface again. But to my knowledge the BTX and T-Online interfaces are pretty much dead here too, except for the banking part. So basically the Telecom here has noticed that this system is obsolete.
So, it's kinda interesting to see Yahoo use a technology that most likely will vanish rather soon. Or, are they planning a good ol' BTX site too?
Can you convince him? If so, how?
And also, I don't think you can compare convincing someone to be of a certain nationality to convincing someone that you are an intelligent being.
Find out about Turing machines at www.turing.org.uk.
First we had phone numbers. Then we invented Vanity numbers because 1800-NUMBERS is just better to remember than 1800-686-2377. Then the WWW allowed us to use convienient names such as www.company.com, and to make it even easier things like internet keywords came up because some URLs still were hard to remember. So for what reason should we ever step back to using numbers again? Any rational explanation?
Hmm well, I'll surely enjoy people trying to remember my IPv6 address in a couple of years - come visit me at 12FB:8A6F:73E4:55E4:DEAD:C0DE ... maybe I'll make it sooo much easier to remember my site address by giving them www.1234761234124612346.com ... sounds good...
I think (La)TeX and/or (K)LyX can do quite a nice job, as can KWord or AbiWord. But what we need desperately is
GNU/Linux is just not ready for this. But I hope (and believe) we will get there...
This just came to my mind... :)
Monty Python
THE UNIVERSE SONG
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,
And people are stupid, wicked, or daft,
And you feel that you've had quite enouuuuuuuuuuuugh . . .
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour.
It's orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it's reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
Through an outer spiral arm at forty thousand miles an hour
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars,
It's a hundred thousand lightyears side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand lightyears thick,
But out by us it's just three thousand lightyears wide.
We're thirty thousand lightyears from galactic central point,
We go round every two hundred million years.
And our galaxy is only one of millions and billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whiz.
As fast as it can go, that's the speed of light, you know;
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space
Cause there's bugger-all down here on earth!
The webql site info reads
Sounds like nothing but a spam e-mail address collector to me.
What's probably going to bother you much more than the outcome:
Just to conclude that it doesn't matter what arguments you bring up when supporting one or the other party's current behavior.
Maybe the next election there's e-Voting[tm], a simple user interface ("push here if you want X to be President") and a secure electronic network gathering these votes and counting and hopefully not get stuck because of some cpu bug :)
First, thanks for that metric system comment, as a German who has spent some time in the States before I can relate to that and have to say that frenchman is absolutely right :))
:)
As to the "well-educated" etc. part: here's the way I see it:
Assume you are the boss of some company seeking a specialized employee for some purpose. Your search narrows down to two candidates for the job. You check their resumees. One of them is quite a charismatic and friendly-looking guy. Unfortunately he has proven himself to lack some of the in-depth knowledge that is needed for the job. The other guy to you seems kind of boring, a little too serious. His resumee shows, though, that for eight years he has been working as a specialist in just the area you need him in, and he display profound knowledge and _experience_ for the job. OK, he doesn't seem as nice a person. Here's the million dollar question? Which one will be employed?
Hmm, maybe the answer to this question has something to do with whether the boss is a geek or a marketing guy
As we all know, Linux isn't an OS either. It's just a kernel. So is every Unix system, usually. Of course. But here's the difference - maybe Linux (or Unix) by itself isn't an OS, but then there are things like _GNU/Linux_, which imho _is_ an OS. In that sense, Mac OS X is also just a Unix-like kernel with extra software around it. I don't see a difference there. GNU/Linux with GNOME on top of it seems pretty much the same as Darwin/UNIX with Aqua on top. If anyone claims that Unix or Linux by itself is an OS, he or she might want to talk to RMS on that...
Wouldn't it be a good start to make the standard GNU utils available under MacOS X? I mean, that way free software makes its way further into the Mac systems.
Well... surely nothing can top Mozilla's layout and especially CSS handling. But, darn, it's _extremely_ slow, especially with JavaScript. The "perfect" browser for me be a GNOME browser with Mozilla's power and just some speed enhancements maybe...
One point for Perl: say you got a homepage at some ISP who lets you do CGI. You can't tell what machine he's using, so you need platform-independent stuff... so use Perl. (you might as well use shell scripts... - as long as the server is Unix :) )
But then again, if it's your own Linux box, why not use C? I did that myself, seems somewhat more secure to me...