that's why I use *PAPER* when I'm not in front of my computer! I don't want a damn PDA or whatever these things are called; for these cases where I have to write down a bit of info at a random place, a good old piece of paper, or a post-it note, will do. even laptops I find kind of distasteful; their keyboards suck, their screens suck, and they're way too expensive. I just don't care enough to play Tetris on a train, I'll read a book, or just think about how I'll do something (which is a very important part of work, and requires no computer).
Netscape very rarely crashes on me. I *have* seen the occasional SIGBUS or SIGSEGV, but it's been weeks or months since I got one (not that I use Netscape for hours and hours every day either, but I do run it once or twice a day on average). This is Netscape 4.08 or so, running under Linux, using only the Communicator part, and with JavaScript disabled. I suspect that the JavaScript part may be significant.
the part where you turn your algorithm into English can just as well be done by hand... the important point for legal (and, to a lesser extent, practial) purposes is that the resulting English can be turned back into usable source code automatically. I did something like that for Perl once, but it has a long way to go to make it really usable... feel free to improve:)
I wrote a Plain English --> Perl translator a couple years ago, to make a point about source code vs. speech. Of course the subset of Plain English it understands is quite limited, but certainly enough to express your average bit-twiddling crypto algorithm.
if you rarely see an uptime greater than one month under Linux, it must be because you haven't been looking for it. the last two linux PCs I installed (and that were meant to be turned on all the time) have uptimes of 248 and 237 days respectively. and I didn't do anything special in installing them, either, just put a redhat from cdrom, update a few rpm's from the redhat's errata pages, and recompile a kernel. and they're not idle either.
staying within your argument: you're willing to do uninteresting work for more money so you can work less hours and then entertain yourself more. but then look at the average quality of your life: a nasty part and a good part doesn't make a very good average. OTOH, a job that you reasonably enjoy, and still makes you enough $$ to leave you time to get "entertained", you probably could get a better average that way. from there we can add two things: 1) that you probably don't need as much money as you think you do, if you start looking at where it actually goes, and at whether some of these forms of "entertainment" are actually worth it, and 2) that there are other (and even more rewarding) things to do with your time than getting "entertained".
colour me unconvinced. this "Hierarchy of Needs" seems to mean that in advanced societies people give more of their attention to the "higher" levels. as far as i can see, this is 1) not quite true, and 2) not the same as what Linus is saying. switching from "looking for food & sex" to "looking for entertainment" (even assuming the switch is made; i'm extremely doubtful about the sex part) doesn't actually go up in any way, unless the entertainment itself is "up there". now, in Linus' case it is, because Linus is a hacker and hackers will consider "entertainment" things that they actually ifnd interesting. but that's not what is being sold as "entertainment" out there. in an "entertainment" society, people will (and do) mostly relieve their boredom with time wasters, not with meaningful thought/exploration/discipline/etc. technology makes life easier, but I don't see it making society any wiser (and complexity does not equal wisdom).
actually, no, i'ts not even close. however much antivirus sw vendors may keep bragging about their heuristic virus detection algorithms, it's ultimately a lost game (and equivalent to the halting problem for turing machines, to boot). there's no way any piece of software can identify all possible bits of code that will simulate a bsod and and retrieve the p3 number before intel's program turns it off.
i have to agree with the "it's a trojan" side of things, too; this program just demonstrates that whenever you run untrusted binary code on your system, it can fuck you up. big news... NOT.
the real problem is not with having a serial number on p3's, it's with idiotic Intel trying to sell the idea that browsers should retrieve this number and pass it around.
I look forward to the day mozilla has the ability to do this, so I can hack it (or get patches, I'm sure many people will be making those) to send random numbers.
ahem. so who is working on all these Linux products that companies are announcing, if not people employed to do Linux work? for that matter, *I* am be employed to do Linux work.
no kidding! it makes me wonder if Babelfish does much actual parsing, or if it's just a glorified word-by-word translator with some rules to patch up the biggest syntactic differences. or don't the Babelfish guys know that English always puts non-single-word adjuncts *after* their heads?
this is the biggest load of bullshit I've read in a long time, and posted by a well known and more-or-less respected person to boot!! if he can't tell the difference between censorship (coming as an imposition from an authority) and smart and practical choice on the user's part (including automation, killfiles, ever heard of them??), then it's definitely a lost case.
Dogma: putting choice in the hands of users is ALWAYS good. an ignore button is choice. the ability to share ignore lists (and I'm sure that'll come in due time, adn I'm sure Katz will hate it, probably because he'll be on some of them) is choice too. repeat after me: choice is good.
I completely agree with this. I use Netscape on a near-daily basis (and it's often the main reason why I'll start X), and I sure would have hacked a whole bunch of little cool things in it (you know, itches to scratch), if I had the source to the same Netscape I was using. But I don't; I use 4.0something (never saw the difference with 4.5 anyway), and the mozilla builds are slowly getting there, but I'm not enough of a purist to use them. I look forward to the day when mozilla comes near beta, so I can switch over, and finally get some motivation to do minor hacks on it, esp. in teh area of giving the user much more control about what goes on with the browser.
no real need to feel sorry for them.. most likely they don't really care if it's true or false what you entered, because all they want is the number of "members" at the end of the week/month/year, and the spamhouse they sell the stuff to isn't going to check the info anyway (as if they could!).
for that matter, most of my registrations are full of crap too, with throwaway email addresses (not a new one every time though, just a generic one that I can take out of/etc/aliases if it starts getting too much spam), and my country of origin has so far switched from Burma to Iceland, through Switzerland, Andorra, Bhutan and Sri Lanka.
sit your mom in front of a PC with a windows95 cdrom and the manual from micros~1 that comes with it, and ask her to install it. In the general case, if she manages to do it, it will take a long time and be a very frustrating experience.
so you don't; you just install it for her, together with GNOME or KDE, and tell her what button to push on to get wordperfect and netscape, and initiate/terminate a net connection.
same if you're running windoze, except for the GNOME/KDE part...
no, it does make sense. some people may already have an old 14" monitor that they want to reuse, or can get a 2nd hand one for next to nothing. advertising a $299 PC w/o saying that it comes w/o a monitor is a cheap trick, but actually offering a PC without a monitor is a good idea. hell, if I was going to buy myself a new PC now, I'd keep my monitor...
actually, the French are not the only ones taking that (stupid) position. the Spanish have a "royal academy of the language" too, and I think the German have something approaching. It's stupid, but not uncommon.
it doesn't work if you're sane enough to have javascript disabled.. and then if you enable it it's just another site designed to screw with your mind. fun for 5 minutes, but not a new idea... jodi.org wins, though.
I've seen 3 really good movies recently... Buffalo 66, Life is Beautiful, and Celebrity. I've also seen a really bad one, but it's french so you've probably never heard of it.
Slashdot Mirror
that's why I use *PAPER* when I'm not in front of my computer! I don't want a damn PDA or whatever these things are called; for these cases where I have to write down a bit of info at a random place, a good old piece of paper, or a post-it note, will do. even laptops I find kind of distasteful; their keyboards suck, their screens suck, and they're way too expensive. I just don't care enough to play Tetris on a train, I'll read a book, or just think about how I'll do something (which is a very important part of work, and requires no computer).
err... I mean "using only the Navigator part", of course.. not Communicator. I read my mail at the console most of the time, with mutt.
Netscape very rarely crashes on me. I *have* seen the occasional SIGBUS or SIGSEGV, but it's been weeks or months since I got one (not that I use Netscape for hours and hours every day either, but I do run it once or twice a day on average). This is Netscape 4.08 or so, running under Linux, using only the Communicator part, and with JavaScript disabled. I suspect that the JavaScript part may be significant.
the part where you turn your algorithm into English can just as well be done by hand... the important point for legal (and, to a lesser extent, practial) purposes is that the resulting English can be turned back into usable source code automatically. I did something like that for Perl once, but it has a long way to go to make it really usable... feel free to improve :)
it's all here
if you rarely see an uptime greater than one month under Linux, it must be because you haven't been looking for it. the last two linux PCs I installed (and that were meant to be turned on all the time) have uptimes of 248 and 237 days respectively. and I didn't do anything special in installing them, either, just put a redhat from cdrom, update a few rpm's from the redhat's errata pages, and recompile a kernel. and they're not idle either.
staying within your argument: you're willing to do uninteresting work for more money so you can work less hours and then entertain yourself more. but then look at the average quality of your life: a nasty part and a good part doesn't make a very good average. OTOH, a job that you reasonably enjoy, and still makes you enough $$ to leave you time to get "entertained", you probably could get a better average that way. from there we can add two things: 1) that you probably don't need as much money as you think you do, if you start looking at where it actually goes, and at whether some of these forms of "entertainment" are actually worth it, and 2) that there are other (and even more rewarding) things to do with your time than getting "entertained".
colour me unconvinced. this "Hierarchy of Needs" seems to mean that in advanced societies people give more of their attention to the "higher" levels. as far as i can see, this is 1) not quite true, and 2) not the same as what Linus is saying. switching from "looking for food & sex" to "looking for entertainment" (even assuming the switch is made; i'm extremely doubtful about the sex part) doesn't actually go up in any way, unless the entertainment itself is "up there". now, in Linus' case it is, because Linus is a hacker and hackers will consider "entertainment" things that they actually ifnd interesting. but that's not what is being sold as "entertainment" out there. in an "entertainment" society, people will (and do) mostly relieve their boredom with time wasters, not with meaningful thought/exploration/discipline/etc. technology makes life easier, but I don't see it making society any wiser (and complexity does not equal wisdom).
yeah i remember them. i hear a fourth album is coming soon, too.
i have to agree with the "it's a trojan" side of things, too; this program just demonstrates that whenever you run untrusted binary code on your system, it can fuck you up. big news... NOT.
the real problem is not with having a serial number on p3's, it's with idiotic Intel trying to sell the idea that browsers should retrieve this number and pass it around.
I look forward to the day mozilla has the ability to do this, so I can hack it (or get patches, I'm sure many people will be making those) to send random numbers.
"when you were good, you were really, really good. but when you were bad, you were horrid" -- Hail, _Kirk_. must listen to that song again.
ahem. so who is working on all these Linux products that companies are announcing, if not people employed to do Linux work? for that matter, *I* am be employed to do Linux work.
wtf is Chill?
no kidding! it makes me wonder if Babelfish does much actual parsing, or if it's just a glorified word-by-word translator with some rules to patch up the biggest syntactic differences. or don't the Babelfish guys know that English always puts non-single-word adjuncts *after* their heads?
Dogma: putting choice in the hands of users is ALWAYS good. an ignore button is choice. the ability to share ignore lists (and I'm sure that'll come in due time, adn I'm sure Katz will hate it, probably because he'll be on some of them) is choice too. repeat after me: choice is good.
what on earth is mod_oas?
I completely agree with this. I use Netscape on a near-daily basis (and it's often the main reason why I'll start X), and I sure would have hacked a whole bunch of little cool things in it (you know, itches to scratch), if I had the source to the same Netscape I was using. But I don't; I use 4.0something (never saw the difference with 4.5 anyway), and the mozilla builds are slowly getting there, but I'm not enough of a purist to use them. I look forward to the day when mozilla comes near beta, so I can switch over, and finally get some motivation to do minor hacks on it, esp. in teh area of giving the user much more control about what goes on with the browser.
for that matter, most of my registrations are full of crap too, with throwaway email addresses (not a new one every time though, just a generic one that I can take out of /etc/aliases if it starts getting too much spam), and my country of origin has so far switched from Burma to Iceland, through Switzerland, Andorra, Bhutan and Sri Lanka.
so you don't; you just install it for her, together with GNOME or KDE, and tell her what button to push on to get wordperfect and netscape, and initiate/terminate a net connection.
same if you're running windoze, except for the GNOME/KDE part...
no, it does make sense. some people may already have an old 14" monitor that they want to reuse, or can get a 2nd hand one for next to nothing. advertising a $299 PC w/o saying that it comes w/o a monitor is a cheap trick, but actually offering a PC without a monitor is a good idea. hell, if I was going to buy myself a new PC now, I'd keep my monitor...
actually, the French are not the only ones taking that (stupid) position. the Spanish have a "royal academy of the language" too, and I think the German have something approaching. It's stupid, but not uncommon.
it doesn't work if you're sane enough to have javascript disabled.. and then if you enable it it's just another site designed to screw with your mind. fun for 5 minutes, but not a new idea... jodi.org wins, though.
I've seen 3 really good movies recently... Buffalo 66, Life is Beautiful, and Celebrity. I've also seen a really bad one, but it's french so you've probably never heard of it.
yep, I found Starship Troopers hilarious too. I don't know if it was intended that way, but I sure hope so ... I'm definitely not seeing WC though.
blah blah blah french fries.