If you normally use tapping with touchpads, you should note that the touchpad for the MacBook Pro allows right clicking by tapping with two fingers. The touchpad can also detect three-finger taps, but for some reason, OS X ignores them; Ubuntu, on the other hand, allows full use of the touchpad as a three-button mouse, though the driver is currently rather poor.
I would actually almost prefer that the laptop not have the one actual mouse button that it does - it generally just gets in the way and generates spurious clicks when there is the slightest hint of shear force on the frame.
I work at a school district. I see 17-year-olds all the time. Yes, they are children. They act without considering the consequences to themselves or others. They are irresponsible and generally stupid, with a few exceptions.
But when laws or requirements put restrictions on minors, there aren't exceptions, and those few minors who are responsible and intelligent are often forced to break rules and even the law in order to do things that no rational person, considering the situation, would deny them (I remember, for example, one person who had to hide from OSHA for years in order to do research in his lab), and are often punished and restricted in entirely unjust ways (if a black person were thrown out of a college merely because of his colour, the country would be up in arms, but when one of the top students at a college is thrown out entirely because of his age, it is simply avoiding liability; the same situation exists for many courtrooms).
This is, of course, a problem with the government, but it is hard to change laws when one has no vote.
This seems to have become a widespread problem with the general public's understanding of Creative Commons, as the FSF had warned. Another example may be found in Obama's main website, which the article mentioned was licensed under a Creative Commons licence. If one goes to the site, a CC logo is visible on the bottom of the front page, but unlike just about every other CC logo, it gives no information about the actual licence being used, and doesn't link to any specific licence (it actually isn't even a link). The Terms of Use has no mention of Creative Commons or licensing whatsoever.
It seems that either there are people in the campaign who don't understand how licensing works, or the term is just being used for publicity purposes; but considering that CNN appears to also be making the same mistakes, my guess is that the former is the actual problem.
As another poster noted, there is no limit mentioned there. There is an example of 5 GB, but nothing about using more being prohibited.
As an example, I commonly transfer several gigabytes of data from experiments off of internal websites, and this could easily use several hundred gigabytes of data per month. However, this would still fall under their acceptable uses.
The last time I used an Apple Authorised Service provider, they took a month to replace the hard drive of my iBook, and they conveniently also replaced my DVD/CD-RW drive with a straight DVD drive. When I demanded an explanation of this (considering it wasn't even broken in the first place), they insisted that I was mistaken for about a week, and when I had proven to them that they had, they claimed that Apple had shipped them a DVD drive in a DVD/CD-RW box, which meant another month of waiting. This experience, along with Apple's actual support demanding that I give them a credit card number before speaking to me about an obvious warranty claim (despite this being a breach of contract on their part), caused me to not even consider buying another Mac for over 6 years.
Dell, on the other hand, never took more than 24 hours to fix anything, had excellent on-site service, and was very professional. Unfortunately, the hardware quality was unrelated to the service quality, since the motherboard on the laptop broke every 2 months or so (and hard drive ~2 years, keyboard ~4 months, hinges ~6 months, case ~1 year). The cost of replacement parts Dell ended up having to pay for under the three year contract on that laptop was likely higher than the price I had paid for the laptop and contract to begin with.
This isn't really Photoshop either. According to the article, it will "be even simpler than Photoshop Elements", and "is likely to be offered via a partner", which appears to imply that it will be tied to some service, as Adobe has done with Photobucket in the past.
The article used as the source for the linked article, which is much more informative, makes it rather clear that the product is meant to compete with programs like Picasa.
LyX is the difference between having slightly more elegant.tex files, and getting an hour more of sleep a night when writing your thesis because you can edit in a GUI and don't have to debug your.tex files.
That depends. LaTeX does have a very steep learning curve, but an adroit user can write in LaTeX itself far faster than in LyX (and faster, I believe, than in nearly any other system), especially for papers with heavy math content. The \def and \newcommand commands are extremely useful in this regard: simply define things that you will need often, and then use them. This can mean the difference between:
\begin{equation} r = 1 + \epsilon\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}\sum_{m=-n}^{n} \left( F_{nm}(t)\mathcal{Y}_{nm}(\theta,\phi)\right) \en d{equation}
From the article I read, the defence of "I didn't know" in this case was due to him claiming that he had bought the computers with Windows preinstalled, and didn't know that the vendor had used illegal copies of Windows, not that he didn't know that copying Windows was illegal - a very different matter, regardless of whether he was telling the truth.
What sort of math have you been doing where you need a calculator with symbolic manipulation? Could you give some examples of places where using the calculator for non-arithmetic purposes would be faster than just doing the calculations by hand?
The TI-89 is nowhere near the level of Mathematica or Maple in terms of symbolic manipulation. I'm rather certain that it can't calculate residues, integrate a variety of basic functions like gaussians, do decent discrete or continuous fourier transforms without external packages, and so on.
People who can't figure out how to solve equations that the TI-89 can solve probably need to be taking more math courses rather than relying on the calculator, which will only hurt them in the future.
My TI-89 is also from around that time (probably circa 1999/2000), and has never had any problems. Could it be that newer models aren't as reliable? I know that this is the case with my HP graphing calculator (a 49g+ that a student left in my lab and never claimed), and would highly recommend against buying one unless you plan on buying an older model used. Recent HP calculators are no longer actually designed or made by HP, and have significant design and reliability issues. Wikipedia has a good description of the problems in its HP-49 article. I've heard that older HP calculators are far better.
But my suggestion, especially if you plan on going into a scientific field, would be to either not use a calculator at all, or use any basic scientific calculator you can find. Graphing calculators in general are rather useless if one is competent in mathematics, and tend to just hinder work and learning. Arithmetic can be done on any scientific calculator, and most algebra and calculus is faster and easier to do on paper or in one's head. The graphing is generally so rudimentary as to not be very useful: one should be able to remember what graphs of basic functions will look like, and inputting data into graphing calculators is slow enough that using one for graphing measured data isn't very useful, especially since the graph won't be usable for presentations anyway. Learn how to use Matlab, Mathematica, Gnuplot, or some other serious program for graphing, and you will fare much better.
The only time I use a calculator these days is to do basic arithmetic when I need something better than an order of magnitude estimate, or, if Mathematica/Matlab can be called a calculator, when I need messy algebra/calculus/numerical computations done that are far beyond the abilities of a graphing calculator. I've scarcely used my TI-89 or HP-49g+ at all in the last 8 years or so - I don't even know quite where they are.
In my interpretation, that doesn't mean any third party in general, it means any third party that the party with the written offer chooses. An arbitrary third party wouldn't have the written offer, and so wouldn't be eligible.
The idea behind that section is that someone who has a binary under the GPL but hasn't requested the source shouldn't be required to acquire the source before distributing the binary. With that section, they can distribute the binary and rely on the original provider to provide the source directly.
Nevertheless, this has come up a few times before on Slashdot. For example, see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=212978&cid=173 29266 - as can be seen, the interpretation of that particular point is quite difficult. I am considering asking the FSF directly about the section.
It should also be noted that they only need to provide the modifications to people who buy the iPhone, or third parties with a written offer that could be included with the iPhone.
Just because something is licensed under the GPL doesn't mean that the modifications need to be given to everyone.
This wouldn't block just MySpace. As a few examples, it would also block Amazon, CNET, (possibly) the BBC, Yahoo, Sourceforge, any large and commercial Linux projects (Ubuntu, MySQL,...), all commercially-run bugzilla systems, all commercially-run forums, all commercially-run wikis, most blog sites, GMail (due to the chat part) and most other Google services, and a variety of other sites.
If I recall correctly, the definition of social networking sites used in the act caused it to include an absurd variety of sites, including most bug tracking sites, Slashdot, Wikipedia and all other wikis, nearly all forums, many blog sites, some mainstream news sites, Amazon, Yahoo, and so on.
In essence, any site which is commercially operated, and allows users to create profiles or web pages and communicate with other users, would be restricted in schools and libraries. In addition, any site allowing real-time communication would be considered a chatroom and thus banned in those situations.
The term "anonymous account" is used in some policy documents, and thus continues to be used to refer to IP users, even though the majority of users will readily agree that user accounts provide better anonymity. The term is more an oddity of a large bureaucracy than an example of ignorance.
Interestingly enough, even not answering the phone can still result in charges for the receiver of the call with US providers. T-Mobile USA, for example, charges a few dollars per call for calls to cell phones roaming outside thet US even if they aren't answered.
However, am I correct in interpreting that section as meaning that the distributor is only obligated to provide the source to any third party that the party receiving the binary chooses? The part in question is:
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
As can be seen, the offer is written, and only needs to be given to the receiving party. The intent is clearly to allow the actions in (c) - so that the receiving party can distribute copies of their binaries without having a copy of the source while still fulfilling the obligations and spirit of the licence.
You should note that this doesn't even work for everything. Newer Dell laptop power adapters use three wires, with one wire reserved for confirming that the power adapter was made by Dell. The BIOS prevents the batter from being charged by other adapters. And thus, Dell can make the adapters as unreliable as they please, and no manufacturer can compete with them.
100% Microsoft Word compatibility is impossible. While complete compatibility with specific versions might be feasible, Word is notorious for being incompatible among versions.
When pushing port blocking to ISPs, take care to not make them overzealous. I had one client whose home ISP blocked ports 25, 465, and 587 outbound. There is no legitimate reason that I know of for blocking the submission port. Per RFC 4409, section 4.3, SMTP-AUTH is mandatory on the submission port.
Oh dear, I shouldn't post at four in the morning.
I would point out the tortuous and at times obviously incorrect grammar I used in the comment, but would likely only make further errors.
The requirements for packaging for Windows is fundamentally different than for Linux. The differences between distributions can be extremely large as Geekmeister mentioned, much larger than differences between versions of Windows, and there are innumerable places where things could vary.
How would a universal package for apache, for example, know how to set up starting and stopping the service? Different distributions put the scripts in different places, and use different formats and conventions for the scripts. In future versions of Ubuntu, the scripts won't even be shell scripts, and will be handled in a fundamentally different way. The meaning of installed dependencies is also different. USE flags in Gentoo would have to be considered, for example.
In order to make a package format that would work for everyone, the system would have to resemble autoconf, and check for every imaginable aspect of each system. Like the configure scripts of autoconf, doing so would make installation absurdly slow. The package format would also have to include many versions of files with the same purpose, making the packages very large.
In short, perhaps such a package format could be made, but it would be inferior to the formats that already exist. In fact, this is the case. Formats like autopackage and klik exist, but they are markedly inferior in terms of stability, reliability, elegance, and usefulness for non-trivial packaging requirements, and usually only used for end-user applications with few dependencies.
Slashdot Mirror
If you normally use tapping with touchpads, you should note that the touchpad for the MacBook Pro allows right clicking by tapping with two fingers. The touchpad can also detect three-finger taps, but for some reason, OS X ignores them; Ubuntu, on the other hand, allows full use of the touchpad as a three-button mouse, though the driver is currently rather poor. I would actually almost prefer that the laptop not have the one actual mouse button that it does - it generally just gets in the way and generates spurious clicks when there is the slightest hint of shear force on the frame.
But when laws or requirements put restrictions on minors, there aren't exceptions, and those few minors who are responsible and intelligent are often forced to break rules and even the law in order to do things that no rational person, considering the situation, would deny them (I remember, for example, one person who had to hide from OSHA for years in order to do research in his lab), and are often punished and restricted in entirely unjust ways (if a black person were thrown out of a college merely because of his colour, the country would be up in arms, but when one of the top students at a college is thrown out entirely because of his age, it is simply avoiding liability; the same situation exists for many courtrooms).
This is, of course, a problem with the government, but it is hard to change laws when one has no vote.
This seems to have become a widespread problem with the general public's understanding of Creative Commons, as the FSF had warned. Another example may be found in Obama's main website, which the article mentioned was licensed under a Creative Commons licence. If one goes to the site, a CC logo is visible on the bottom of the front page, but unlike just about every other CC logo, it gives no information about the actual licence being used, and doesn't link to any specific licence (it actually isn't even a link). The Terms of Use has no mention of Creative Commons or licensing whatsoever.
It seems that either there are people in the campaign who don't understand how licensing works, or the term is just being used for publicity purposes; but considering that CNN appears to also be making the same mistakes, my guess is that the former is the actual problem.
As another poster noted, there is no limit mentioned there. There is an example of 5 GB, but nothing about using more being prohibited.
As an example, I commonly transfer several gigabytes of data from experiments off of internal websites, and this could easily use several hundred gigabytes of data per month. However, this would still fall under their acceptable uses.
The last time I used an Apple Authorised Service provider, they took a month to replace the hard drive of my iBook, and they conveniently also replaced my DVD/CD-RW drive with a straight DVD drive. When I demanded an explanation of this (considering it wasn't even broken in the first place), they insisted that I was mistaken for about a week, and when I had proven to them that they had, they claimed that Apple had shipped them a DVD drive in a DVD/CD-RW box, which meant another month of waiting. This experience, along with Apple's actual support demanding that I give them a credit card number before speaking to me about an obvious warranty claim (despite this being a breach of contract on their part), caused me to not even consider buying another Mac for over 6 years.
Dell, on the other hand, never took more than 24 hours to fix anything, had excellent on-site service, and was very professional. Unfortunately, the hardware quality was unrelated to the service quality, since the motherboard on the laptop broke every 2 months or so (and hard drive ~2 years, keyboard ~4 months, hinges ~6 months, case ~1 year). The cost of replacement parts Dell ended up having to pay for under the three year contract on that laptop was likely higher than the price I had paid for the laptop and contract to begin with.
This isn't really Photoshop either. According to the article, it will "be even simpler than Photoshop Elements", and "is likely to be offered via a partner", which appears to imply that it will be tied to some service, as Adobe has done with Photobucket in the past.
The article used as the source for the linked article, which is much more informative, makes it rather clear that the product is meant to compete with programs like Picasa.
That depends. LaTeX does have a very steep learning curve, but an adroit user can write in LaTeX itself far faster than in LyX (and faster, I believe, than in nearly any other system), especially for papers with heavy math content. The \def and \newcommand commands are extremely useful in this regard: simply define things that you will need often, and then use them. This can mean the difference between:
andFrom the article I read, the defence of "I didn't know" in this case was due to him claiming that he had bought the computers with Windows preinstalled, and didn't know that the vendor had used illegal copies of Windows, not that he didn't know that copying Windows was illegal - a very different matter, regardless of whether he was telling the truth.
Which is useless, of course, since in nearly all cases of preloaded antivirus software the updates require payment.
Why not an HP-35? Programmability is overrated.
If it were not for the short battery life, I could actually use my HP-35 to satisfy all of my calculator needs.
What sort of math have you been doing where you need a calculator with symbolic manipulation? Could you give some examples of places where using the calculator for non-arithmetic purposes would be faster than just doing the calculations by hand?
The TI-89 is nowhere near the level of Mathematica or Maple in terms of symbolic manipulation. I'm rather certain that it can't calculate residues, integrate a variety of basic functions like gaussians, do decent discrete or continuous fourier transforms without external packages, and so on.
People who can't figure out how to solve equations that the TI-89 can solve probably need to be taking more math courses rather than relying on the calculator, which will only hurt them in the future.
My TI-89 is also from around that time (probably circa 1999/2000), and has never had any problems. Could it be that newer models aren't as reliable? I know that this is the case with my HP graphing calculator (a 49g+ that a student left in my lab and never claimed), and would highly recommend against buying one unless you plan on buying an older model used. Recent HP calculators are no longer actually designed or made by HP, and have significant design and reliability issues. Wikipedia has a good description of the problems in its HP-49 article. I've heard that older HP calculators are far better.
But my suggestion, especially if you plan on going into a scientific field, would be to either not use a calculator at all, or use any basic scientific calculator you can find. Graphing calculators in general are rather useless if one is competent in mathematics, and tend to just hinder work and learning. Arithmetic can be done on any scientific calculator, and most algebra and calculus is faster and easier to do on paper or in one's head. The graphing is generally so rudimentary as to not be very useful: one should be able to remember what graphs of basic functions will look like, and inputting data into graphing calculators is slow enough that using one for graphing measured data isn't very useful, especially since the graph won't be usable for presentations anyway. Learn how to use Matlab, Mathematica, Gnuplot, or some other serious program for graphing, and you will fare much better.
The only time I use a calculator these days is to do basic arithmetic when I need something better than an order of magnitude estimate, or, if Mathematica/Matlab can be called a calculator, when I need messy algebra/calculus/numerical computations done that are far beyond the abilities of a graphing calculator. I've scarcely used my TI-89 or HP-49g+ at all in the last 8 years or so - I don't even know quite where they are.
In my interpretation, that doesn't mean any third party in general, it means any third party that the party with the written offer chooses. An arbitrary third party wouldn't have the written offer, and so wouldn't be eligible.
3 29266 - as can be seen, the interpretation of that particular point is quite difficult. I am considering asking the FSF directly about the section.
The idea behind that section is that someone who has a binary under the GPL but hasn't requested the source shouldn't be required to acquire the source before distributing the binary. With that section, they can distribute the binary and rely on the original provider to provide the source directly.
Nevertheless, this has come up a few times before on Slashdot. For example, see
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=212978&cid=17
It should also be noted that they only need to provide the modifications to people who buy the iPhone, or third parties with a written offer that could be included with the iPhone.
Just because something is licensed under the GPL doesn't mean that the modifications need to be given to everyone.
This wouldn't block just MySpace. As a few examples, it would also block Amazon, CNET, (possibly) the BBC, Yahoo, Sourceforge, any large and commercial Linux projects (Ubuntu, MySQL, ...), all commercially-run bugzilla systems, all commercially-run forums, all commercially-run wikis, most blog sites, GMail (due to the chat part) and most other Google services, and a variety of other sites.
If I recall correctly, the definition of social networking sites used in the act caused it to include an absurd variety of sites, including most bug tracking sites, Slashdot, Wikipedia and all other wikis, nearly all forums, many blog sites, some mainstream news sites, Amazon, Yahoo, and so on.
In essence, any site which is commercially operated, and allows users to create profiles or web pages and communicate with other users, would be restricted in schools and libraries. In addition, any site allowing real-time communication would be considered a chatroom and thus banned in those situations.
The term "anonymous account" is used in some policy documents, and thus continues to be used to refer to IP users, even though the majority of users will readily agree that user accounts provide better anonymity. The term is more an oddity of a large bureaucracy than an example of ignorance.
Interestingly enough, even not answering the phone can still result in charges for the receiver of the call with US providers. T-Mobile USA, for example, charges a few dollars per call for calls to cell phones roaming outside thet US even if they aren't answered.
However, am I correct in interpreting that section as meaning that the distributor is only obligated to provide the source to any third party that the party receiving the binary chooses? The part in question is:
As can be seen, the offer is written, and only needs to be given to the receiving party. The intent is clearly to allow the actions in (c) - so that the receiving party can distribute copies of their binaries without having a copy of the source while still fulfilling the obligations and spirit of the licence.
You should note that this doesn't even work for everything. Newer Dell laptop power adapters use three wires, with one wire reserved for confirming that the power adapter was made by Dell. The BIOS prevents the batter from being charged by other adapters. And thus, Dell can make the adapters as unreliable as they please, and no manufacturer can compete with them.
100% Microsoft Word compatibility is impossible. While complete compatibility with specific versions might be feasible, Word is notorious for being incompatible among versions.
When pushing port blocking to ISPs, take care to not make them overzealous. I had one client whose home ISP blocked ports 25, 465, and 587 outbound. There is no legitimate reason that I know of for blocking the submission port. Per RFC 4409, section 4.3, SMTP-AUTH is mandatory on the submission port.
Oh dear, I shouldn't post at four in the morning. I would point out the tortuous and at times obviously incorrect grammar I used in the comment, but would likely only make further errors.
The requirements for packaging for Windows is fundamentally different than for Linux. The differences between distributions can be extremely large as Geekmeister mentioned, much larger than differences between versions of Windows, and there are innumerable places where things could vary.
How would a universal package for apache, for example, know how to set up starting and stopping the service? Different distributions put the scripts in different places, and use different formats and conventions for the scripts. In future versions of Ubuntu, the scripts won't even be shell scripts, and will be handled in a fundamentally different way. The meaning of installed dependencies is also different. USE flags in Gentoo would have to be considered, for example.
In order to make a package format that would work for everyone, the system would have to resemble autoconf, and check for every imaginable aspect of each system. Like the configure scripts of autoconf, doing so would make installation absurdly slow. The package format would also have to include many versions of files with the same purpose, making the packages very large.
In short, perhaps such a package format could be made, but it would be inferior to the formats that already exist. In fact, this is the case. Formats like autopackage and klik exist, but they are markedly inferior in terms of stability, reliability, elegance, and usefulness for non-trivial packaging requirements, and usually only used for end-user applications with few dependencies.