After a couple of decades experience with developing windowing widget toolkits on multiple platforms, would it be possible for the W3C to come out with specifications for widgets, themes, etc. using SVG?
I was looking at 100 year old newspapers from a small town in AL about 5 years ago. Yellowed, brittle, crumbly. Half of those old newspapers were useless to amateur pawed geneologists who were slowly contributing to their demise by even attempting to turn the pages.
Then, there's the tons of valuable paper records that get passed to random descendents of record keepers (eg, Grandpa has a bunch of records of marriages, births, baptisms from some old church from 60 years ago that doesn't exist).
If you make dead tree records I'd recommend making multiple copies that get distributed to different people in different places, preferably on acid-free paper.
The biggest enemies of geneological records, IMHO, are
uncaring descendents chucking out a bunch of "junk",
their antecedents who never even bother to tell them or, better, write down who the hell is in those old photos, etc., and
the odd house fire that consumes everything that can burn.
What is going on in Russia IS a little scary, but is it really any different that buying the same information from one the businesses operating in the US like choicepoint?
It is different - slightly.
In Russia, information is manufactured so that their kangaroo courts can convict slightly shady characters like Mikhail Khodorkovsky on different artificial trumped-up charges.
In the USA, Choicepoint is contracted to manufacture a suspiciously faulty system and a trumped up list of "felons" to be barred from voting in a critically contested election in a critically contested state.
But you are right: in both countries information is used to manufacture artificial felons for political and monetary gain.
But the fact is most of these terrorists don't mind your freedom, they mind US foreign policy which is supporting their dictators and exploiting their peoples. They are not fighting the US, they are fighting the US' ruthless protection of corporate interests overseas.
A good explanation of the usual misunderstanding suffered my fellow countrymen.
But the same explanation can be applied to U.S. domestic opposition. We mind that US domestic policy is supporting our dictators and exploiting our people. And we're not fighting the US, we are fighting the US ruthless protection of corporate interests domestically.
The parallels are real and probably explain so much why the powers that be can so easily delude many gullible Americans into equating the domestic opposition with "terrorists".
The problem with gas prices is that the U.S. Economy is so incredibly sensitive to it's price. Simple stuff like agriculture, is something like 90% based on the price of gas (between the fertilizers, transportation, and actual farm equipment, 90% of the costs come down to how much gas does it take to do that step).
You might have been able to get away with saying that back in the 1970's before the run-up in oil prices alerted Americans to the precariousness of their energy situation.
As a result, now, after 30 years of forward-thinking energy policies we're in a so much better situation.
[Please pardon the sarcasm; I'm just a little bitter and incredulous these days....]
But it breeds the worst kind of patriotism where people will unquestioningly do whatever their leaders want and will rarely protest against them.
A significant revelation and learning experience in school for me was listening to a history teacher enumerate the causes of WWI, including nationalism.
Then I started thinking, "What's the difference between patriotism and nationalism?"
But then, those who don't take the time to learn history are doomed to repeat it. Take Vietnam, for instance...
I don't think it's been proven yet that higher intelligence of homo sapiens is a sustainable trait in the long run.
And if that's not enough of a downer for you, then consider the possibility that what we call intelligence, all the higher thinking that has allowed us to consider mathematics and science, might just be an artifact of an evolutionary development of deviousness and deception (the back door man).
Win2K was by far much better than Microsoft's earlier OS offerings in terms of reliability and security.
It's like they finally realized that desktop PC monopoly didn't get them a free pass into the mainframe and server market. Realizing that, they actually produced a credible OS that wouldn't get themselves laughed at. MS has intelligent people that can do a great job (if they're not tasked with creating obstacles and artificial cross-ties in the company's product lines.) Like they did with IE before the Netscape threat was effectively vanquished.
Win2K will be humming along for many years to come.
Got any links to sites describing real, live firefox exploits and the problems they've caused?
No, but I've heard innuendo describing potential exploits based on fairly contrived vulnerabilities in Firefox that have helped to slow the rate of adoption of Mozilla/Firefox as an alternative browser at MyCorp.
I've never experienced an exploit on Mozilla/Firefox or known anyone else to have experienced an exploit on Mozilla/Firefox.
That Mozilla/Firefox was even considered as an alternative browser by corporate IT was only because of some inescapable platform diversity, the discontinuation of IE for Macintosh, and the mind-numbing volume of exploits for IE on Windows.
They (the peak oil doom crowd like the site I referenced) assume that the peak itself will be a catastrophic moment. I'm not sure I believe that. I think we've just seen the start of a steady,
Kunstler's book about the long decline down the tail of Hubbert's peak agrees with you.
While I agree with much of Kunstler's pessimism, I believe he dismisses the propects of technological innovations too quickly. Not that such innovations will be a panacea and enable everyone in the world to increase their per capita energy consumption to the exhorbitant levels of the American average, but that innovations will cushion what would otherwise be a very jarring hard landing.
Nuclear power will be an important ingredient to our energy future, but implementing it safely with a well-thought out plan for waste holding will require leadership with a strong record of credibility. An irrational debate between emotional extremists on both sides of the issue is going to be too costly for all of us.
If this is an embarassment to Microsoft, many Free, Open software packages of every sort, from Apache to Linux to OpenBSD to OpenSSH have been so embarassed.
Who could forget the profound of depth and breadth of the OpenBSD security exploit of late winter 2002 that affected millions of people worldwide, leaving them without power in the dark, the cold, and wondering if life would ever go on the same.
To this day I see teens at the mall with cowed looks because of the horrific imprint that the OpenBSD security event made on their childhoods.
keypad was a wart they hung on the side of the phone when they realized that a full keyboard wouldn't work.
Will the day come that cell phone CPU power, color display screen quality and network connectivity (BW/latency) be sufficient that we'll want and be able to get one that connects via Bluetooth or USB to a QWERTY keyboard and a mouse?
It's way cheaper to reverse engineer something than to create something new.
That's an significant oversimplification.
If "something" is more complicated in its behavior it can be quite time-consuming (i.e., expensive) to reverse engineer than if an application behaves more simply. Imagine reverse engineering Windows 98, or Office XP, or the entire Linux kernel without seeing any code.
But Larry might be right in this way: customers are fed up with overly complicated applications that break a lot, lock them in to a vendor, are expensive to develop for, etc. If the world demands simpler applications that interact more predictably, then the majority of applications will be reverse-engineered.
But I'm more optimistic that there's plenty of room at the top for innovation and business opportunity to manage growing complexity of many simple interacting commodity components.
that copyright should expire when the protected work has been unavailable from the owner for a fixed period, typically 1 year.
Change that from "owner" to "creator" and it's worth considering.
Otherwise, transferability from owner to owner gives rise to the current travesty where Walt Disney's stockholders are getting money which was originally intended to provide Walt a greater incentive to produce more creative works. It doesn't seem the incentives are working, last I checked, Walt was still dead.
How about then,
copyright should expire when the protected work has been unavailable from the creator for a fixed period, typically 5 years.
which allows creators to sell the rights and gain if they don't want to become distributors. But the expiration clock starts ticking at the time of sale.
If it was implemented in a fair way, TCPA could be a very good thing.
Yes, it could.
Unfortunately, there is simply too much money to be made by using TCPA as the ultimate vendor lock-in that the incentive for implementing it in an unfair way will be irresistible.
Since TCPA can be sold plausibly as under the rubric of improving security the ill effects of which many PC owners have felt firsthand, and the initial screw settings loose, most consumers will walk right into it.
Slashdot Mirror
After a couple of decades experience with developing windowing widget toolkits on multiple platforms, would it be possible for the W3C to come out with specifications for widgets, themes, etc. using SVG?
Frightful.
I was looking at 100 year old newspapers from a small town in AL about 5 years ago. Yellowed, brittle, crumbly. Half of those old newspapers were useless to amateur pawed geneologists who were slowly contributing to their demise by even attempting to turn the pages.
Then, there's the tons of valuable paper records that get passed to random descendents of record keepers (eg, Grandpa has a bunch of records of marriages, births, baptisms from some old church from 60 years ago that doesn't exist).
If you make dead tree records I'd recommend making multiple copies that get distributed to different people in different places, preferably on acid-free paper.
The biggest enemies of geneological records, IMHO, are
That's 0x as in 05 as in 2005.
And, if things go like they usually do for standards committees,
will extend the establishment right past 2010:)What is going on in Russia IS a little scary, but is it really any different that buying the same information from one the businesses operating in the US like choicepoint?
It is different - slightly.
In Russia, information is manufactured so that their kangaroo courts can convict slightly shady characters like Mikhail Khodorkovsky on different artificial trumped-up charges.
In the USA, Choicepoint is contracted to manufacture a suspiciously faulty system and a trumped up list of "felons" to be barred from voting in a critically contested election in a critically contested state.
But you are right: in both countries information is used to manufacture artificial felons for political and monetary gain.
GDP of Vietnam = US$227.2 billion.
Market capitalization MSFT = US$243.5 billion
Granted, MSFT's income is only about US$36 billion, but they don't have to maintain a country.
And while Vietnam can muster a fairly impressive sized army, MSFT has Steve Ballmer.
You mean our society is not structured to reward the ethical behavior?
Something is not right.
Who should be blamed and ridiculed for this lapse and transgression?
A good explanation of the usual misunderstanding suffered my fellow countrymen.
But the same explanation can be applied to U.S. domestic opposition. We mind that US domestic policy is supporting our dictators and exploiting our people. And we're not fighting the US, we are fighting the US ruthless protection of corporate interests domestically.
The parallels are real and probably explain so much why the powers that be can so easily delude many gullible Americans into equating the domestic opposition with "terrorists".
Security? The same argument may be applied to politicians running the economy and creating legislation and regulations, too.
Perhaps we ought to look into education so our peasants aren't so damn gullible to the wiles of politicians.
The problem with gas prices is that the U.S. Economy is so incredibly sensitive to it's price. Simple stuff like agriculture, is something like 90% based on the price of gas (between the fertilizers, transportation, and actual farm equipment, 90% of the costs come down to how much gas does it take to do that step).
You might have been able to get away with saying that back in the 1970's before the run-up in oil prices alerted Americans to the precariousness of their energy situation.
As a result, now, after 30 years of forward-thinking energy policies we're in a so much better situation.
[Please pardon the sarcasm; I'm just a little bitter and incredulous these days....]
But it breeds the worst kind of patriotism where people will unquestioningly do whatever their leaders want and will rarely protest against them.
A significant revelation and learning experience in school for me was listening to a history teacher enumerate the causes of WWI, including nationalism.
Then I started thinking, "What's the difference between patriotism and nationalism?"
But then, those who don't take the time to learn history are doomed to repeat it. Take Vietnam, for instance...
Otherwise, it's not fair.
Fairness has a price, like everything else in a free market economy.
I don't think it's been proven yet that higher intelligence of homo sapiens is a sustainable trait in the long run.
And if that's not enough of a downer for you, then consider the possibility that what we call intelligence, all the higher thinking that has allowed us to consider mathematics and science, might just be an artifact of an evolutionary development of deviousness and deception (the back door man).
Have a nice day.
I'm a fervent Linux fan, but I'm also logical.
Win2K was by far much better than Microsoft's earlier OS offerings in terms of reliability and security.
It's like they finally realized that desktop PC monopoly didn't get them a free pass into the mainframe and server market. Realizing that, they actually produced a credible OS that wouldn't get themselves laughed at. MS has intelligent people that can do a great job (if they're not tasked with creating obstacles and artificial cross-ties in the company's product lines.) Like they did with IE before the Netscape threat was effectively vanquished.
Win2K will be humming along for many years to come.
No, but I've heard innuendo describing potential exploits based on fairly contrived vulnerabilities in Firefox that have helped to slow the rate of adoption of Mozilla/Firefox as an alternative browser at MyCorp.
I've never experienced an exploit on Mozilla/Firefox or known anyone else to have experienced an exploit on Mozilla/Firefox.
That Mozilla/Firefox was even considered as an alternative browser by corporate IT was only because of some inescapable platform diversity, the discontinuation of IE for Macintosh, and the mind-numbing volume of exploits for IE on Windows.
No, I'm not in charge.
I'm not sure that covers modifying software.
I'm not either.
But "modifying software" represents criticism if I've ever seen it.
They (the peak oil doom crowd like the site I referenced) assume that the peak itself will be a catastrophic moment. I'm not sure I believe that. I think we've just seen the start of a steady,
Kunstler's book about the long decline down the tail of Hubbert's peak agrees with you.
Rather than an abrupt panic, he predicts a "Long Emergency".
While I agree with much of Kunstler's pessimism, I believe he dismisses the propects of technological innovations too quickly. Not that such innovations will be a panacea and enable everyone in the world to increase their per capita energy consumption to the exhorbitant levels of the American average, but that innovations will cushion what would otherwise be a very jarring hard landing.
Nuclear power will be an important ingredient to our energy future, but implementing it safely with a well-thought out plan for waste holding will require leadership with a strong record of credibility. An irrational debate between emotional extremists on both sides of the issue is going to be too costly for all of us.
and they'll go for the next du jour in 2006.
Hey, I'm an Ubuntu user for about 5 months now, but I really interested in trying out this du jour Linux!
Do you know where I can download their distro?
If this is an embarassment to Microsoft, many Free, Open software packages of every sort, from Apache to Linux to OpenBSD to OpenSSH have been so embarassed.
Who could forget the profound of depth and breadth of the OpenBSD security exploit of late winter 2002 that affected millions of people worldwide, leaving them without power in the dark, the cold, and wondering if life would ever go on the same.
To this day I see teens at the mall with cowed looks because of the horrific imprint that the OpenBSD security event made on their childhoods.
keypad was a wart they hung on the side of the phone when they realized that a full keyboard wouldn't work.
Will the day come that cell phone CPU power, color display screen quality and network connectivity (BW/latency) be sufficient that we'll want and be able to get one that connects via Bluetooth or USB to a QWERTY keyboard and a mouse?
The counter-counter-argument is that these electric motors need batteries or a motor-gen set which also adds (arguably more) weight to the vehicle.
The counter argument is that these electric motors might grab their power out of the air from something like Tesla's wireless AC power transmission.
That's an significant oversimplification.
If "something" is more complicated in its behavior it can be quite time-consuming (i.e., expensive) to reverse engineer than if an application behaves more simply. Imagine reverse engineering Windows 98, or Office XP, or the entire Linux kernel without seeing any code.
But Larry might be right in this way: customers are fed up with overly complicated applications that break a lot, lock them in to a vendor, are expensive to develop for, etc. If the world demands simpler applications that interact more predictably, then the majority of applications will be reverse-engineered.
But I'm more optimistic that there's plenty of room at the top for innovation and business opportunity to manage growing complexity of many simple interacting commodity components.
that copyright should expire when the protected work has been unavailable from the owner for a fixed period, typically 1 year.
Change that from "owner" to "creator" and it's worth considering.
Otherwise, transferability from owner to owner gives rise to the current travesty where Walt Disney's stockholders are getting money which was originally intended to provide Walt a greater incentive to produce more creative works. It doesn't seem the incentives are working, last I checked, Walt was still dead.
How about then,
which allows creators to sell the rights and gain if they don't want to become distributors. But the expiration clock starts ticking at the time of sale.If it was implemented in a fair way, TCPA could be a very good thing.
Yes, it could.
Unfortunately, there is simply too much money to be made by using TCPA as the ultimate vendor lock-in that the incentive for implementing it in an unfair way will be irresistible.
Since TCPA can be sold plausibly as under the rubric of improving security the ill effects of which many PC owners have felt firsthand, and the initial screw settings loose, most consumers will walk right into it.
Does the AMD64 Fedora handle 32-bit and 64-bit libraries in parallel?
Fedora Core 3 x86_64 seems to, sort of.
My FC3 x86_64 system has both
and other lib64 directories hanging around.I can't say that I fully comprehend how all this works with ld.so, LD_LIBRARY_PATH,. etc.
That is, I'm occassionally beset with complaints from the loader that look like 32 64 bad interaction (eg, some Python stuff).
are very reasonable starting points IMHO.