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User: snowgirl

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  1. Re:How about a link to the downloadable videos? on Novell/Linux Parody on Apple's Mac vs PC Ads · · Score: 1

    I call them "boys", too. It's kind of funny how offended they get sometimes. *laugh*

    But they're so cute and silly... and they act like boys. hehe

  2. Re:Sucks to be a monkey. on New Monkey Species Found in Uganda · · Score: 2, Funny

    What are you talking about, I think they're adorable!!!

    Well, unless they start flinging poo....

  3. Re:Glass Effect and Screenshots on Windows Vista, More Than Just a Pretty Face · · Score: 1

    no, it was pretty simple enough to move it to another desktop (I have multi monitors) and take a screenshot that way.

    But it would kind of be nice if things realized that they're painting to the clipboard, and they could avoid just doing a straight copy, and actually give a simple white or alpha-blended effect instead.

    Wishful thinking, I know, but it's just kind of a quirk more than something really bothersome.

  4. Re:Glass Effect and Screenshots on Windows Vista, More Than Just a Pretty Face · · Score: 1

    Someone doesn't particularly pay attention to the gender of the poster. Let me repeat my user name here for you to get an idea of which gender I am. Snowgirl.

    Ok, I know it's really hard to believe that there are actually girls on the internet, but trust me... it does happen.

    As it so happens, I work at Microsoft, and I didn't want my screenshot to include a tab that showed the Google logo in it.

  5. Re:Glass Effect and Screenshots on Windows Vista, More Than Just a Pretty Face · · Score: 1, Redundant

    This is percisely what I'm refering to.

  6. Glass Effect and Screenshots on Windows Vista, More Than Just a Pretty Face · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's kind of unfortunate that the Glass effect is transparent. If you take a screenshot of a single window, it will pick up whatever is behind the window.

    So, say you have something you don't want to show up in your screenshot, but it's behind the Glass effect. It will show up in the screenshot.

    Not normally that big of a deal, but it's kind of annoying taking a screenshot of a "single window" and picking up content from other windows.

  7. Re:The depth figure doesn't make sense... on Enormous Amount of Frozen Water Found on Mars · · Score: 1

    Not to mention that enormous volcano bigger than Texas... I mean, wouldn't you have to cover that up too to declare it as "surrounding the entire surface"?

  8. Re:Oh, you laugh on Microsoft Quietly Releases Windows 2003 SP2 · · Score: 1

    Ya, this is important to people, oh wait, most people would at the very least go to a freaking Hotspot or the library and slam the update on a Flash USB or CD... So why on hell did you download this via dial up again? :)


    Win2k SP4...

    On their official page of release dates: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/260910
    Windows 2000 Service Pack 4
    Release date: June 26, 2003

    I would say this was in the range of "some people just had dialups at that time".
  9. Re:XP x64 as well on Microsoft Quietly Releases Windows 2003 SP2 · · Score: 1

    Didn't seem to change much, if anything.


    Microsoft is no longer planning to push out anything like Windows XP SP2, where there are vast changes to the OS during a Service Pack. You're actually seeing the ideal case right there, where nothing has gone wrong.
  10. Re:Fine on New Mexico Might Declare Pluto a Planet · · Score: 1

    Forget even that it has an extremely inclined orbit around the Sun.

    It also orbits along with Charon around a point between the two where their combined center of gravity is. Technically, they both orbit each other, with Charon orbiting slightly more around Pluto than Pluto orbits around Charon.

    Either way, both Charon and Pluto fail to meet any of the given conditions proposed, as neither orbits the Sun, and neither orbits the other... literally, they orbit around nothingness, which orbits around the Sun.

  11. Re:FUD on Solid Capacitor Motherboards Introduced · · Score: 1

    I kind of doubt at this time that it's a "sucker born every minute" sort of thing at this time. I'm sure that people introducing "electrical vacuum-tubes" might have had a bit of a hill to climb as people thought they were trying to sucker them into something, but fortunately for us, transistors actually did catch on.

    So, while my first instinct is "how do you make a solid capacitor? Doesn't it work by keeping a charged capacitance between two nearby electrical circuits seperated by a vacuum?" But hey, I'm sure I would have wondered the same thing about transistors.

    Of course, for every sucess (transistors) there's about a hojillion other hoaxes and snake-oils out there... so, I would recommend cautious-optimism. I certainly know a batch of Apple Airports went bad because one or two capacitors were underrated and eventually burst. If this would have extended the life-time from 3 months to 3 years, then it might have been a good trade-off. As for me, I was able to buy it for really cheap (I think like $10 or so) and then after some searching on the net, replaced the capacitors ($2 including solder and iron) and had a nice wireless base point for awhile. (My cat chewed through the power cable, and replacing it hasn't been worth the effort.)

    So, anyways, back on point, anything that increases the reliability of my computer, I'll be happy to see it, as long as it doesn't cost me significantly more. (After all, 3 years is about the standard useful lifetime of a computer, even if the capacitors stay good.)

  12. Re:FUD on Solid Capacitor Motherboards Introduced · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeah, you know, because that's *the* biggest complaint you see on enthusiast/overclocker message boards. Exploding capacitors.

    It could be worse... they could be a company selling a network card to reduce network lag... lol.

  13. Re:OH NOES!!! on Bush Claims Mail Can Be Opened Without Warrant · · Score: 1

    and so forth, then I wouldn't fault you for being rather suspicious of me should my wife turn up dead. :)

    I wouldn't be surprised if you were suspicious also. But you certainly can't ask me in court if I killed my husband, nor can you ask certain people who require confidentiality in order to ensure that they can effectively do their job. So, spirtual advisors, therapists/counsellors, and lawyers (when seeking legal advice).

    So, in many ways, if your therapist asks you to keep a journal, and you write in that you want to kill your husband, then would this be considered confidential material?

    The issue is more accurately what can be used to testify against you? Should a diary be considered confidential, such that it cannot be used to testify against yourself?

    Personally, I kind of think it should.

  14. VIM on Which Text-Based UI Do You Code With? · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    I'm totally for VIM, or do you mean for people to interface with, rather than code in?

    Then I'd probably look at ncurses.

  15. Re:OH NOES!!! on Bush Claims Mail Can Be Opened Without Warrant · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well, I will chalk it up to a difference of terms. As such, yes, we do typically have a right to privacy, and are protected against unreasonable search and siezure. The specific issue that I'm attempting to talk about is how the government can subpoena your personal papers, such as your diary, and use that material against you.

    No matter how private and intimate that you expect a piece of written material to be, the act of writing it down opens it up for legal use, against anyone, even yourself.

    As such, NEVER write about anything illegal you may have done, whether in your diary or not, no matter how secret you believe it may be kept or not. I know some people use a different language for their diary, as such Esperanto is a common choice (despite being intended to be a language that everyone speaks, relatively few people actually speak it), but this is a trivial security layer (you can believe that a lawyer would be able to find someone who speaks Esperanto sufficiently to translate for the court, or any language for that matter).

    Using encryption will only get you as far as the encryption algorithm is strong, so you should have chosen a key, and algorithm strong enough to protect the information for at least the statute of limitations on the activity you're writing about.

    Now, I'm not trying to tell criminals here how to avoid prosecution, I'm trying to tell people how to keep their personal thoughts and beliefs personal, and not have them used against them possibly in a court of law. If you write in your diary, "God, I hate my husband, he's so mean to me, and I feel like I just would like to shoot him!" And he ends up shot, guess what? If they come across it, it's not going to look good for you, especially if you say something like that almost every day.

    If you want something to be private and not used against you in court, leave it in your head, period. And I certainly hope that if technology comes along so that even that information doesn't remain private, that the courts will certainly rule against compelling defendents to subject themselves to disclosing such private information, and determine it to be testifying against onesself. Also, as I mentioned above, the same does not follow for a diary.

  16. Re:The eternal shipped vs. sold on Clearing Up Holiday Sales Rumours · · Score: 1

    I think it's fairly clear that the scalpers were trying to make a ton of money by buying the console for $600 and then turning around and selling it for $1000+. But the scalpers have slowly run into the problem that there are few people even willing to pay the $600 for the console from the stores, let alone the jacked up price that the scalpers were asking.

    So, now the PS3 is back on the shelves? Interesting, although I was still looking for a Wii back in Europe with my sister. While I wouldn't mind having a PS3, $600 is a significant amount of money. I have an X-Box 360 already, so I can wait it out until I can get my hands on a Wii. After all, $250 isn't really all that expensive for me. Especially when the console just looks incredible!

  17. Re:OH NOES!!! on Bush Claims Mail Can Be Opened Without Warrant · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, yes, because if you have reason to believe there's a bomb in a letter that might blow up if you take the time to go to court that's Probable Cause for doing a search, and a search warrant can be retroactively granted by a judge based on their initial evidence. This is all fine and rational and even Constitutional.

    Actually, the legal idea that permits investigating a possble bomb in the mail is Exigent Circumstance not simply probable cause. In the case of Exigent Circumstances they *may* make a warrantless search, but the thing is that there has to be strong evidence that an emergency situation exists, where waiting to get a warrant will result in either destruction of evidence, escape of the suspect, or the key part: to prevent imminent danger to life or serious damage to property.

    If they had probable cause to search the mail, then they should get a warrant to open it. The only time where a warrant isn't necessary is for the reasons given above.

    Of course, we used to have a right to privacy of your person, which covered things like a diary. According to what I heard, this right was never written down, because the consitituonal framers considered it to be such an undeniable right, that it's not necessary to write it down. (After all, you're not required to testify against yourself, why should the government be able to use your diary against you then?) Although, no such right exists anymore, and your diary may be used against you, because it was never written down.

  18. Re:Summary on Mozilla vs Debian Analyzed · · Score: 1

    If I hacked into your slashdot account, and posted messages that conflict with your point of view, would you not be upset?

    Honestly? You can. Make an account called "sn0wgirl" "snovvgirl" or "snowgir1", or anything else that is extremely close to what I use. I'm certainly not a hypocrit, and I would rather people judge my argument based on the merit of the argument, rather than where it came from.

    If people are trusting me solely because they "trust" my name... well, that's stupid.

    It's software. It doesn't want anything. Actually, it can't. Much like information can't want to be free.

    Actually, it's a name, and I wanted to post "and be anthropomorphized, but free first."

  19. Re:When Firefox ceases to be Firefox... on Mozilla vs Debian Analyzed · · Score: 1

    Do you have any experience whatsoever in the area of software development or support?

    Well, I don't know about the author of Speex, but I know I do. I've worked on a significant product that had a number of "rogue patches" that we would not service. Our first response to anyone with a problem is "did you run this from a build in the current CVS, or are you using someone else's code?" Essentially, diagnosing where the version came from in the first place is paramount. Just because the Mozilla IRC people forgot to ask a simple question of "Where did you get your version of Firefox from?" doesn't mean that everyone is incapable of diagnosing a bug correctly.

    The person would have said "Debian", next thing to do is know if Debian made any changes to the FireFox code. Because if you're assuming that the bug is in the code you're working on, that someone else shipped, well that's just silly. Obtain their code, and diagnose the problem from there.

    In an IRC channel that I frequent, I like to tease people sometimes with seemingly odd and random support questions, that are actually very simple if you ask the right question. Like, "Well, when I type notepad c:\autoexec.bat, it doesn't work." First question: "What OS are you running this on?" Answer: "Linux" Resolution: "Uh... that just won't work."

    Using trademarks as a chilling effect on patching open source is stupid. "It's not a chilling effect!" I hear. Well, that's total malarky! FireFox is telling them if they want to have FireFox like all the other distros, then they have to follow MOZILLA'S rules, but it's open source! So, now instead, you have people install Debian and say, "WTF is IceWeasel?" and then wonder why there isn't any support for it. Then if there is support for something that breaks in FireFox, they can't find it with "firefox stupid problem that crashes my webpage", no, they have to know that IceWeasel is FireFox, but Debian can't even SAY that it's 99% FireFox, because Mozilla won't let them.

    So, either you do things according to our unacceptable way, or you harass the people who use your product... your choice. Yeah right, rather you're stuck with a Horned Dilemma, and no way out.

  20. Re:Absurdity on Mozilla vs Debian Analyzed · · Score: 1

    Yeah, down with the GPL, too! It says 'Free unless...' also.

    The issue with the GPL is that GPL say "free unless not free". Basically, it uses existing laws to force people to respect the freedom of others.

    The issue here I have with this trademark stuff is that names should be free, too. Anyone who wants to own their name is silly, and stuck in an out-moded way of doing things.

    It's the art and name that aren't. If you had a project called XYZ, and someone wanted to take your work and distribute it, but change things in it... Would you still want them calling it 'XYZ'?

    Actually, this very thing happened to me. I've worked on PearPC, there were a few developers that released compiled "PearPC" binaries that included patches that we NEVER would accept into the source tree. Did we yell at them for distributing something that we would never call PearPC? No, we in fact told them that it was fine to patch up their binaries and distribute them, in fact, some people liked those patches, but they would never be mainstream patches, and included in the vanilla code.

    Take another group of peoplem, they made a product called CherryOS, they didn't use our name, and in fact, denied that they had ever used our code. Honestly, we wouldn't have had a problem if they had even decided to call it PearPC and sell it for $50 a piece with their changes intact, all we *EVER* wanted from MXS was an acknowlegment that they were using our code. Heck, if they had called it "PearPC", the lineage would have been directly apparent.

    Names should be free the same as code, and information.

  21. Re:Summary on Mozilla vs Debian Analyzed · · Score: 1

    So long as they're lawful, any terms of use are valid.

    But that's the thing, proprietary license *ARE* lawful, but I can object to them on moral grounds.

    The same way I can object to some stupid company being upset that omg, someone might tarnish our image if they can just patch it willy-nilly.

    IT'S OPEN SOURCE. Names want to be free!

  22. Re:Absurdity on Mozilla vs Debian Analyzed · · Score: 1

    Copyrights and Trademarks are two separate things, and should be dealt with as such.

    Oh, so sorry, for a second here, I thought we were talking about FREE software. Why do people think it's ok to own a name, and exert that control over other people?

    If you want the official FireFox, you download it straight from Mozilla. The second I get a copy of FireFox from ANYONE, I have no idea if that FireFox is the original or not.

    They're not "protecting" anything, they're "owning" a name.

  23. Re:Summary on Mozilla vs Debian Analyzed · · Score: 1
    RMS himself doesn't have a problem with what Mozilla are doing

    *utter shock* I totally can't even believe that. [url:http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?artic le_id=10546]

    When management at MIT and ARPA forced an installation of passwords on the MIT computers, RMS had to comply out of fear of losing access to the network that was so important to the free flow of information, but he did it in his own way. He chose his own password to be the empty string, so whenever you needed something from RMS, you could always login using his login name and simply press enter on the password prompt.

    And he encouraged others to do the same by informing them in the computer login screen (the screen which is first displayed when you have entered your login name and password) about which password they had and that he suggested that they change to the empty string, which is much easier to remember and encourages others to join in to freely share information. At one point, he had one fifth of the users on the computer using the empty string password.

    "Anybody who is forcing protection must be doing something interesting"

    This quote, though written much later, tells millions about how the hackers at MIT felt at the time, be it for a locked door or a file on a computer they couldn't access. A locked door at MIT could easily be bypassed by crawling over the ceiling and a major hack was once pulled by a young hacker, who unscrewed all locks on all doors at one night, found out how they worked and then made a master key who would open any door on the floor.


    What's the saying? It takes 20 years for your ideas to become conservative without changing one ideal.

    I personally see the issue as Mozilla believes that they "own" the mark "FireFox", the same as they "own" the code. The GPL was designed to make an eternally free system, where code was available to everyone, such that really, no one "owned" the code. Why now do people think it's ok to own names?
  24. Re:Absurdity on Mozilla vs Debian Analyzed · · Score: 1

    Heh... sorry, I do have a tendancy to overdo it sometimes.

    Debian is pushing yet another IP issue into the light. Copyleft + Trademark = Stupid.

    Basically, Bad FireFox! Free should mean Free! Not "Free unless..."

  25. Re:Summary on Mozilla vs Debian Analyzed · · Score: 1

    I have to agree.

    Honestly, right now, we have Copyleft licenses, free licenses, open licenses, and Creative Commons licenses... but yet Mozilla while choosing to embrace one part of "free" denies freedom somewhere else? That doesn't make sense to me.

    We should have trademark usage license that chalks up to the same level as the Copyleft GPL, and Creative Commons. "You can use this trademark, and modify this trademark in such a way that it could be easily confused with this trademark, so long as you keep THAT trademark free under this same license."

    I think it's totally BRAINDEAD for a project to fork essentially only in name...