March 2001 Archives
In a security notice on the subject, Microsoft admitted: "This vulnerability could enable an attacker to potentially run a program of her choice on the machine of another user. Such a program would be capable of taking any action that the user himself could take on his machine, including adding, changing or deleting data, communicating with web sites, or reformatting the hard drive."Naturally, there's a patch available, but there's no telling what new holes the patch introduces. Mind you, Microsoft has no gratitude for the guy that found the bug. Update: Mike informs the that I, or The Register, or somebody, got a couple of incidents mixed up. Guninski discovered other bugs that Microsoft wasn't thrilled with having revealed, but not the (latest) IE bug.
Some parties within the computer industry seem to be focusing on "simplifying" computers by offering more restrictive user interfaces that focus on a few focused tasks at the expense of general utility. Perhaps such interfaces should best be viewed as "training wheels" to be discarded as the user becomes more comfortable with operating the computer. Unfortunately, too many companies seem more interested in limiting the abilities available to their customers — at least without buying their latest whiz-bang product. This new essay reminded me of Greg Knauss's recent piece on the UNIX underpinnings of Mac OS X, which talks about the power waiting under the hood for anyone willing to explore the system. In addition, Neal Stephenson's famous In the Beginning... essay explores (among many other ideas) the fallacy "...that hard things can be made easy, and complicated things simple, by putting the right interface on them."I think this general purpose, mix and match, constantly changing nature of the personal computer is what makes it so special. It is a "platform" on which we can use computing power and digital equipment to do many things. It is customizable, and able to do things unforeseen when it was designed and built. An example of the power and importance of this nature are the fact that with the simple addition of a little software (Netscape or AOL) and perhaps an inexpensive piece of hardware (a modem or sound card), most personal computers bought in the 1990's were able to be used for browsing the Web, Instant Messaging, or streaming media. Netscape and RealNetworks, fledgling companies at first, didn't have to get people to buy much extra hardware (though they sometimes needed to buy a little), nor learn much more than their own service's special needs. Later on, Napster changed our view of navigating the world of music without planning on the part of PC manufacturers. Adding a CD burner made things even better.
Being hard to learn, very dangerous (prone to crashes if we don't pay careful attention, and even then not totally safe), and in constant need of maintenance (like getting fuel and oil), etc., has not held our society back from becoming dependent upon the automobile. It's just one of the things we need to learn and keep up with. My grandparents never learned to drive, and were dependent upon their children and others to be taken around. Did they like to be dependent on their "assistants"? Were they better off? I doubt it, but they were afraid to take a chance and or didn't have the time to learn so much. They were not ignorant individuals -- they were educated and very capable people who were successful in their fields.
It is nice, I suppose, to have the upcoming Windows Update site for Windows XP become a clearinghouse for updated device drivers, which can be painful to gather up from obfuscated hardware vendor sites. That still doesn't ease my concerns about what else Microsoft might install For My Own Good.This still won't play in the business world, where IT managers still won't be wanting their users installing (or having installed on them, without them knowing) stuff they haven't approved and decided to roll out themselves. So there'll still have to be some kind of escape hatch for them. From the home user's perspective too there's a certain amount of sense in making sure the updates aren't too invisible and too automagical, but Microsoft likely won't agree. Microsoft has been known to roll out service packs that break the software worse rather than fixing it. You might also want to maintain some control over which of the things you thought were apps decide to turn themselves into a part of the operating system.
I beg to differ. The RIAA does want to make things difficult for legitimate purchasers; copying music within the bounds of Fair Use is a perfectly legitimate use of a purchased product. I have no interest in purcasing a CD that I cannot rip onto my hard drive for my own use and convenience."Nobody wants to make things difficult for legitimate purchasers," says Cary Sherman, general counsel of the Recording Industry Association of America, which is helping the labels examine the new techniques. "But if piracy continues to spiral out of control, [copy-protecting CDs] will become more and more attractive an option -- even if it has some negative impact on some listeners."
I did end up going to see Henry Rollins on Friday night, and it was a good show. Henry just turned 40; yes, he has mellowed out since the Black Flag days, but that's a very relative thing. He's still more intense than you are, so shut up. This was one of his spoken word shows; I'm not sure where you draw the line between spoken word and stand-up comedy, but I was laughing my ass off. He mentioned a couple of concepts which I'd never heard described in that way before, but seem incredibly appropriate:
Plot-lost: Having lost the plot of one's own life, and not being really clear on what you're expected to do next. This is as good a description as any of what drove the Narrator from Fight Club nuts. I think this describes a lot of us out there; we go through the early years of our life trying to live up to the expectations of others, and when we finally become "mature" enough to decide our own direction, we realize we've never learned how.
High on Context: Experiencing something in an intoxicatingly appropriate moment for that particular experience. Losing yourself in the moment. I wish I could explain this better, but I'm sure we've all had moments like that, and I hope you can understand the kind of thing I mean.
Also, the venue was pretty cool itself. Just wish I'd figured out exactly where it was before I parked at the opposite end of the U. City loop. Hopefully, I'll be able to bring myself to go to more shows there.
Unfortunately, hardware manufacturers are showing signs of paying more attention to content providers (Note: not content producers) than to their actual customers.A key problem is that partial measures aren't particularly useful. Security locks are foolproof only when all brands of stereos, computers and MP3 players use the same antipiracy technology, leaving consumers little choice but to accept it. When products with no protections have been left on the market, consumers have purchased those instead.
This consumer trend has been evident for years. Circuit City's Divx DVD player, designed to control the use of digital videos, died a quick market death. Sony's Vaio Music Clip was the only music player to add early versions of the SDMI's proposals, but the technology was removed after negative reviews and slow sales.
Gosh darn it, don't you hate it when science gets in the way of campaign rhetoric?Faced with vague instructions to purge the website of anything Clinton, a duty to protect Alaska's wildlife, and a new boss rumored to be hell bent on oil, USFWS Alaska public affairs representatives Karen Boylan and Bruce Woods felt they were walking a fine line without a map.
A few days before Bush took office, they posted a new version of the website that attempted to preserve the scientific information on the potential impacts of drilling, without putting the new administration in an awkward position. Boylan calls it "Version B." It's roughly what appears on the website now.
A lot of web folks were up in arms, on one side or another, about a month ago when Jeffrey Zeldman drew a line in the sand against standards-incompliant browsers. There's been a lot of fascinating discussion in the web design community (both professional and amateur) ever since, a discussion that has inspired me to start working on my own redesign based not only on strict standards compliance, but on reasonably degrading style sheets. (Besides, I started looking at the page size of my table-based layout; ouch.) I'm just starting with my design experiments, but I'm sure I'll be able to post my new design RSN.
A recent article over at evolt suggests that the woeful state of standards compliance is as much the fault of the HTML editor makers as the browser makers.
Perhaps things have changed since I last tried to work with WYSIWYG web editors, but the code they produced was pretty hideous at the time, for no good reason. They generally produced quirky, non-compliant, nearly unreadble (by most coders, let alone other editors) code in situations where clean, compliant code would have worked just as well, and probably more reliably in a variety web browsers, past, present, and future.Wouldn't it be nice if the editor, or other non-dedicated tool (page layout tool, for instance), could notify the developer when he/she is creating inaccessible code? Wouldn't it be nice if all those positioned <div>s were re-ordered, with prompting to the user, so that a screen reader could make sense of the content when linearized? Maybe it could coach the user for page titles instead of leaving blank <title>s everywhere. Perhaps it could tell the user that "click here" is an unacceptable string of text to make into a hyperlink. How about warning when a frame has no navigation in it? Image maps without text links? Lack of meta information? And the list goes on.
I guess that's why my tool of choice is a simple yet powerful text editor which gives me a lot of helpful functionality (browser preview, syntax highlighting, and even HTML checking in the latest version) without getting in my way. Also, there's something about working with the source that helps me better understand what the web can do. Clean source code makes it a lot easier to learn from the web. Besides, writing layout in a text file was the root of web design, way back in the beginning.
The War on Fair Use continues, as does Microsoft's campaign to limit what users can do with their computers."England has a bold plan to improve the PC and make it a secure delivery system for audio and video," says Microsoft. England's solution involves "making minor modifications to the PC's hardware to allow Microsoft to make a secure version of the Windows Media Player". So clearly, this is at least a part of the Secure PC.
The particular minor modifications aren't specified, but the net effect is: "Essentially, this would turn the PC into a record player as far as music is concerned, while preserving the other open aspects of the computer. Record companies could release their records in an encrypted, unable to be copied Windows Media Audio format that would only work on the secure version of the Windows Media Player. A similar arrangement could be reached with the movie studios for film distribution."
I believe that a better name for these policies would be "zero judgement"; I also feel that universally harsh penalties are going to make students even more reluctant to approach school officials with a problem until too late.Society has given up on these kids. In what is certain to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, we have declared them to be incapable of redemption -- and we have washed our hands of them. And while this can be understood, if not condoned, in the case of the high profile crimes which led to the adoption of these harsh policies, the statutory lines are never drawn finely enough to limit their application to such cases. Inevitably children who do not fit the profile of the unsalvageable are swept up as well.
I don't have that much faith in the potential of McCain-Feingold even in its most basic form — the problems with political campaigns in this country run much deeper than one single source of funding — but something has to give.At the moment, it seems a daunting prospect to foment a civil uprising based on a systemic corruption so broad as to be almost ungraspable. But McCain has an unfortunate ally waiting in the wings: the coming recession.
As it takes hold, the anger and bitterness toward a political culture geared to serving only the biggest campaign contributors will become a tinderbox waiting to explode. The resignation will turn into revulsion as the casualties of our current system — those without the money and connections to get bailed out or, for that matter, get a patients' bill of rights or decent schools — continue to mount.
Yeesh, and I was considering applying for that particular American Express card. So much for that idea; I'm more than a little leery of letting the Big M manage my credit card services.Microsoft is convinced that the company and its partners can charge for services and content if they deliver value to consumers and businesses. During its HailStorm launch event Monday, Microsoft disclosed five partners using the services. American Express, for one, plans to use Passport to authenticate Internet purchases made with its Blue card. At the same time, the company will utilize MSN Messenger, which also relies on Passport authentication, to alert customers when their bills are due. The instant messenger alerts, which include possible fraudulent-use warnings, would be dispatched to PC, pager or cell phone.
My solution to matching socks: Always buy the same brand in one of two obviously different colors. Launder with other clothes at laundromat. Big pile of white socks, big pile of black socks; pick two socks off the same pile. Discard excessively worn socks as needed. Replace missing or discarded socks as necessary, at $10-12 for four pairs, at national chain department store.
Their solution to matching socks: Buy packages of ten discreetly numbered pairs of socks; match by number. Launder with care to avoid fading numbers. If individual socks are lost, discard matching socks or try and remember which other numbers are without mates. Replace in sets of ten pairs, at $55 through (Flashturbation-based) web site and wait for shipment. Note that replacement socks have same numbering as any remaining original socks.
Of course, they'll have customers. There may have been only one born every minute in Barnum's day, but the population is much larger now. [link via Brad]
The nice thing about a weblog is the responsibility is only to your own needs. [via Media News]"Ideas wake me up sometimes," Tolcher said from her home on a recent afternoon when I finally phoned her in hopes of penetrating the mystery. "If it's not my back waking me up, it's ideas. I just don't know how it happens. My mom would have said, `Well, you know, Cheryl was hit by a car when she was 4.'"
"If I had to write something every day, oh my God, that's gotta be awful," she said. "To be compelled to have something amusing and profound to say, that's more responsibility than I think I could muster."
Unfortunately, this is probably too good an idea for the marketing weasels up in Redmond. Even if they were willing to treat their customers with respect, their release schedule is too rigid to allow such a change, or even proper beta-testing.This really does sound like a good idea that would go some way towards removing one of Product Activation's major negatives, and would also incidentally show .NET technology doing something useful. If you're changing your hardware, then the key you got when you first installed XP probably won't work on the new hardware, so you could log in and deactivate, then once you'd got the new hardware up and running you'd just activate again, as you had on the first install.
As the evangelist goes on: "1. User knows they are going to make a major hardware change (new MB and HD at once, etc). They can simply deactivate, change hardware, and reactivate when done. All done over the net, no phone calls to MS in most cases, and very little hassle to the end user."
Bob Frankston writes about where real innovation comes from; he seems to have a better understanding of the term than some people do.Could you imagine what would happen if we could choose what we want to watch instead of the few dozen choices (out of millions of possible choices) that the cable companies provide? Could you imagine the chaos and disaster that would ensue of the cable and telephone companies didn't have the ability to limit our connection to the Internet?
Frat rat politics.But. In the same way that my sister and her friends had a visceral reaction against Al Gore, I have an automatic gag reflex at the sight of another frat-boy son of privilege grab-ass his way through life only to head the party that unblinkingly rails against Affirmative Action. Even the younger, nonracist wing of the G.O.P. can have a nasty undertone to its actions -- witness this week's passage of the abhorrent and corrupt bankruptcy bill, which came with "Welfare-queen"-type moralizing about "personal responsibility" and "people driving away from bankruptcy court in BMWs."
The auction in question appears to have been bulled, but at the time of the Reg piece, the bidding had passed $200; if I'm reading this correctly, somebody bid over $6500 before eBay noticed.This is a free monkey phone call from me. This is a real auction, no joke. When you pay, I will call you and make this sound "ee EEEE ee EEEE eee EEEEE"...it's kind of like a monkey shrieking sound. Not a big fat monkey..and not like a gorilla...but like a monkey that's the size of a chihuahua...you know, like that old Taco Bell dog. So this monkey sound will be like "ee EEEE ee EEEE eee EEEEE"
You won't be misled by overoptimistic analysts if you follow my 523 Rule when factoring market research into your wireless plans. Here's how it works. Unless a research firm has accurately tracked a market for five years, take its current analysis and double the length of time predicted, then cut the size of the market to one-third. For example, Jupiter predicts there will be 96 million wireless Internet users in the U.S. by 2005. My 523 Rule transforms this into 32 million wireless Internet users by 2009.
The short-term nature of economics vs. the long-term economics of nature.Economics discounts the future. Ten years from now, $2 will be worth $1. You could invest that dollar at 7 percent and double it in ten years. So a resource 10 years from now is worth only half what it's worth now. Take it now. Turn it into dollars.
The Earth says: nonsense. Those invested dollars grow in value only if something worth buying grows, too. The Earth and its treasures will not double in 10 years. What will you spend your doubled dollars on if there is less soil, dirtier water, fewer creatures, less beauty? The Earth's rule is: Give to the future. Lay up a fraction of an inch of topsoil each year. Give your all to nurture the young. Never take more in your generation than you give back to the next.
When you fly on a forest fire you aren't out there just winging it, blasting away with your water bucket on any flamey thing you see. You have structure and rules present that try to insure the aircraft on the fire are being used effectively and safely. Up above the fire, above everybody, being flown around in a fast, radio-packed airplane, is a person called Air Attack. Air Attack is in charge of the flying part of the fire. Air Attack keeps track of the location of every aircraft on the fire and what those aircraft are doing. Air Attack knows who the fire crews on the ground are and what their tactical situation is. Air attack zooms around the fire watching how the fire is behaving. Air Attack rules.My favorite part is the love-hate relationship this guy seems to have with the fires he battles; fire is the enemy, yet he expresses a sense of awe at the power and terrible beauty that a massive fire can display.
A critical look at the actions taken during the group's most recent meeting appears to contradict a lot of her claims....more people may well see the value of ICANN -- a neutral arbiter making sure that you can reach anyone from anywhere, and an antitrust enforcer, though one without the full force of a government, and constrained by the contracts it signs, such as the one it inherited with Network Solutions (NSI).
...ICANN has to be accountable to a broad community, whereas New.net et al. do not. ICANN needs to be more open, especially in its dealings with NSI/VeriSign, which of course is tough to do in contract negotiations. But they are now -- as planned, and as appropriate -- soliciting and listening to input, which will surely shape the terms of the final contract.
Writing an advice column isn't about helping people. One poor sap sends a question, I write a response, and millions of people (literally millions) read the column. So, I ask you, SKM, who's the column for? Poor saps with questions? Or millions of readers nursing sad and prurient interests in the sex lives of others? It's for the millions, of course. The primary objective of this advice column--of all advice columns--is to amuse readers, not help letter-writers. This is the advice-column industry's penultimate dirty little secret. (The industry's ultimate dirty little secret? The meth lab in Ann Landers' basement.) After all, if advice columnists really wanted to help people, we'd write them back personally, not publish their letters in newspapers where their friends and family might recognize them.
You knew they were going to show their true colors eventually.To our valued Starbucks customer: Just wait until you see the exciting changes we've got in store for you as part of our new Phase Two. When you finally see what we've got brewing here at Starbucks, you'll have no choice but to love it.
Even if Microsoft is truly committed to interoperability (and if you believe that, I have a top-level domain to sell you), do they really expect to overcome all the ill will they've engendered among the Linux / Open Source / Free Software community?One reader at Linux Today, which linked the CW story, suspects that MS would rely on a sort of involuntary attrition to move .NET customers away from Linux and towards Salvation. "So I naively install .NET on my Linux servers and over time come to depend on it. Then a few years down the road M$ says "due to lack of customer interest, we're dropping support for Linux. If you want to use .NET you'll need to replace your Linux servers with W2.005K," the reader says.
Inattentive may be a good description of Dubya; inarticulate and indifferent could apply just as well. Just the same, Dubya is a "disciplined political operator", as Molly Ivins once described him; don't assume that he won't play his image as a blithering idiot to his advantage. [via Ghost]But if Bush is to be criticized here, it's not for being dumb but for being inattentive to the job he was elected to do. Bush's aides are making a cult of how he spends so much less time being briefed and talking about policy than former president Clinton did. Maybe our current president should hit the briefing books a little harder.
It is the height of irony that the folks in the publishing and music industries are proclaiming that without such "anti-piracy measures," we could descend in to a cultural "Dark Ages" as artists become unable to support themselves from their work. Oh no, the Dark Ages was a time when, if you wanted to copy something, you did it by hand. The Dark Ages was a time when, if you wanted to distribute something, you were severely limited in your ability to do so by the constraints of the medium in which the work was transmitted. The Dark Ages was a time when there was only one copy of the Bible in a parish, and the bishop kept it chained in the basement of the cathedral to prevent theft. The Dark Ages was a time when that copy was in Latin, a language you didn't know, and your only access to it was in a controlled environment (the church) at an appointed time (mass) through an appointed channel (the bishop). I, for one, have no desire to return to the Dark Ages. Sadly, though, it appears that some people do have such a desire.
Anybody with children waitng for the next Harry Potter book needs to pick this one up if their kids haven't already read it. At least, that's a good enough excuse for reading it themselves.That's funny because one of the scariest characters in "The Phantom Tollbooth" is the Terrible Trivium, a very elegant gentleman with no face at all. His motto is that "there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing."
Exactly. Someone I've known from childhood says that I can sit at my desk with something real to do and realize that I have to straighten out the paper clips, or there's something happening out the window, or a shopping list that has to be compiled. There's always something. Everyone has that kind of demon in their life; though, like all of the demons in "The Phantom Tollbooth," it's also very particular to me.
I have to laugh when TV snobs dismiss "Buffy" as cheesy kid stuff, because, in many ways, "Buffy" is the most daring show on TV. It's daring because it defiantly and lovingly takes its tone and shape from oft-dismissed genres like daytime soaps, gothic romances, Grade-B horror flicks and supernatural fantasies, and it elevates -- no, celebrates -- these misunderstood and mistreated pop art forms. "Buffy" is an ode to misfits, a healing vision of the weird, the different and the marginalized finding their place in the world and, ultimately, saving it. And "Buffy" never takes advantage of viewers' suspension of disbelief; strange things happen in Buffy's universe, but Whedon and his writers don't screw with the mythology for the sake of convenience. Nothing ever happens here without a darned good explanation, which is more than you can say about "The X-Files."They overanalyze the show (like I said, it's Salon), but still a good read for fans who are trying to convince their friends that the show is more than mere fluff.
I have an aunt and uncle, both Buffy fans, who haven't seen this episode yet because they're vacationing on the other side of the world. I hope nobody spoils this show for them; I have a tape for when they get back. [via Fresh Hell]"Music would have been too easy," Whedon confesses. "It would let things out... it would [tell you] to feel sad. I wanted to not have that safety net. And where there is no safety net, there is nothing that is going to keep people [in the moment] unless they really care."
I'm not sure I buy the "not punitive" bit; at best, it probably has more to do with protecting the school administration (CYA) than the students. Besides, this sort of reaction is probably why they were so reluctant to go to school authorities over the shooter's threats in the first place.Moreover, four students who didn’t report Williams’ threat to shoot up the high school will be barred from campus the rest of the school year for their own safety.
“This is not a punitive action,” Ward said. “There have been comments made that raised my level of concern ... about their safety. My job is to be concerned about all the students’ safety.”
Based on this manifesto, I think the "Obey the Giant" movement has more in common with the All Your Base meme than the Lobster thing going around this week.The FIRST AIM OF PHENOMENOLOGY is to reawaken a sense of wonder about one's environment. The Giant sticker attempts to stimulate curiosity and bring people to question both the sticker and their relationship with their surroundings. Because people are not used to seeing advertisements or propaganda for which the product or motive is not obvious, frequent and novel encounters with the sticker provoke thought and possible frustration, nevertheless revitalizing the viewer's perception and attention to detail. The sticker has no meaning but exists only to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning in the sticker. Because Giant has a Posse has no actual meaning, the various reactions and interpretations of those who view it reflect their personality and the nature of their sensibilities.
Sounds like a hideously inefficient and inelegant way to do things (send every mail out to the internet — a bottleneck at one comapny's servers — just to fetch it right back) as well as insecure.Norton's e-mail anti-virus program actually hijacks your mail. It replaces your existing pop3 mail server (say cringely.com) with pop3.norton.antivirus.com. It changes your account name, too (in my case replacing "bob" with "bob/cringely.com"). The program leaves your SMTP connection as is, which means it only scans incoming mail. And all that incoming mail is going through the Norton server, which has your password (nabbed from Outlook, just like a virus might do) and could allow your e-mail to be read by anyone with access to the Norton server. In fact, the whole thing feels like a virus, doesn't it?
So, take kids at risk of a catastrophic breakdown due to the various stresses of the school environment, and make their environment even more hostile. What a great idea!Juvonen says she has never seen a study indicating that cops-in-schools programs have any benefit. She says such programs please school officials because they send a visible message "that our community is doing everything we can, that parents have peace of mind when they drop off their kids at the middle school because there's police standing at the front door."
But students might feel differently. "There is some preliminary evidence to show that in these schools where they have metal detectors and use security checks -- where the physical safety issues are very salient -- that that's where kids' anxieties are heightened. It's a constant reminder of how unsafe the school is."
And why is Intel doing a "wireless 1394"? What is wrong with BlueTooth? Answer: BlueTooth is not a specification controller by Intel. And Microsoft thinks we should all be "renting" our software. I'm not surprised since the only business model that many companies seem to trying these days is one that collects money every month from every household. No one wants to "sell" a product, they only want to "rent" something or provide a "service". These products and services are usually proprietary and have carefully crafted and limited functionality. As an example, just WHAT is Tivo "selling" anyway?
In my opinion if you are someone, like myself, that needs and uses low cost general purpose computers then you should start praying that there will be some hardware vendor left selling such a computer and that you will be able to run some general purpose OS and adequate applications software. And I would say it will be unlikely that such a computer will have an Intel processor or that any of that application software will come from Microsoft. This possible future must be driving product planners at Intel and Microsoft crazy.
The Secret Service, FBI, and Garbarino agree that profiling students who may have traits similar to those of school shooters isn't an effective remedy. The big concern with profiling is that it can include about 25 percent of the students who have similar characteristics to school shooters, Garbarino said.[via Lake]
And one's even flogging a sort of ink-jet food printer hitched to your PC that deposits artificial flavors on a potato chip. You gotta be awfully hungry to chow down one of those. A sign we're at the imminent downfall of Western civilization.The sad thing is, I can actually think of one site I wouldn't mind smelling; however, I don't think taste without texture would work even there.
It is the starting point. Weak light emission has been demonstrated at low temperatures using other methods but our new approach is efficient and works at room temperature.Optical silicon may dramatically reduce the size of future chips.
An example of this knowledge deficit, according to Perry, is that of the 30,000 to 50,000 computer viruses routinely quoted in figures from the antivirus industry, only 800 have ever infected anybody's computer and "only 200 are in circulation".
"The rest are 'zoo' viruses - which are emailed to antivirus companies by virus authors themselves and never make it into the wild," said Perry.Of course, that still doesn't absolve users from needing to learn some basic "don't take
Features like automatic formatting that inserts headlines where you don't want them, or Web site publishing that uploads a whole site instead of a single page can be axed with the click of your mouse. Even the animated-paperclip help system is switched off by default.It also seems to be sticking to the same file formats as the 2000 edition of the suites. Unfortunately, the package includes some less-welcome features, such as a cumbersome validation process. Besides, what can you think of an upgrade best defined in terms of what it doesn't do?
Hollywood and the recording industry have been pushing all manner of legal and technical strategies to take absolute control over the way we view, listen to and read digital information. In the name of preventing piracy, the entertainment moguls are treating every customer like a thief. They are herding us all into a pay-per-view system where we have no rights at all to use the material we buy as we see fit.As tired as I often get of Richard "Free Software Über Alles" Stallman's rhetoric, I still think his right to read essay is worth revisiting from time to time, because the future he envisions seems to be coming ever closer.