1. Over the past five years, some additional costs will appear in the Linux column due to the learning curve in adopting a new technology.
One could also argue that over the past 5 years there were substantial additional costs of NT/W2K adoption as a result of the MS learning curve.
End-users went from WinNT 4.0 to W2K, and the platform is now on the brink of.NET. Technologies have varied considerably at all levels, a good example is ODBC, RDO, CDO, ADO, OLEDB, etc. etc. Or perhaps DDE, OLE, OLE32, COM, DCOM, COM+ are your flavors of tech change. There's always MS-SQL, which has remained fairly stable but did undergo significant change from the 6.x series to >7.
From a purely network perspective, you were forced from a PDC/BDC configuration into the Microsoft Active Directory environment, and all of this changed how you could integrate with MS Exchange.
While Linux (UNIX in general...) has embraced many of these paradigm shifts, there has been very little advancement that has obviated platform skills from one significant release to another. On the other hand, skills acquired with W2k are not necessarily applicable to WinNT or.NET. For that matter, setting up a pure-W2k AD configuration to work with PDC/BDC and WINS is not entirely plug & play unless you have gone through a certain MS upgrade path.
How does Linux require more care & feeding? I don't understand, my experience has been the exact opposite. Whenever I patch a Linux box it continues to function properly, similiar maintainence on a W2K server (with a subsequent reboot) invariably leaves me with a new problem. BTW, patches to W2K servers are far more frequent and require longer download times than any Linux patches -- even when a new kernel is required Linux is still faster.
I think Giga has the right perspective here, if you don't know what you're doing of _course_ it's going to require more care & feeding. I'm eager to read this report, there is another MS sponsored study coming out 1Q2003 that should be equally interesting....
Hmm, and how else would you propose establishing a unified authentication mechanism?
It might be more politically correct if my PayPal account gave me the option to create a PayPal account or a Passport account, but the truth is it's a lot easier to maintain if there is a single source for the user database. In this case, it just happens that MS has the proper Internet real estate to ensure that their SSO becomes the most popular.
Unfortunately, I'm not convinced a web-based infrastructure is the right solution (ala: Passport). For that matter a distributed network identity authority (ala: Liberty Alliance) isn't all that much better.
I think the time has come for *real* identity management, biometric authorization by means of a physical connection to a computer. Let's get rid username/password management before it gets the better of us.
While most developers wouldn't know third normal form if it landed in their lap, things are much better than they use to be.
Today even if an attempt wasn't made to build a good data model the developers will usually recognize this failure; whereas, before the advent of widespread commercial software (Oracle, DB2, Informix, Sybase, etc.) it was often acceptable that all your data was in one big ASCII flatfile somewhere.
The software development process has greatly improved in the last 5-10 years. While software hasn't specifically gotten all that much better, the processes for producing good software have been advanced.
Here is my list in ascending order;
1. The Internet and the web. Access to resources like USENET archives and online vendor documentation have greatly improved the development process. For example, a defect in a popular Java Application Server was causing me considerable difficulty, and a quick check of the vendors website indicated SP1 would fix my issues.
2. Acceptance of high-level interpreted languages. While Smalltalk tried to make this happen, it wasn't until Java, Perl and ASP (VBScript) that this trend became popularized as computer hardware started catching up. Developers no longer have to author their own implementations of String(), and many other common functions are readily available.
3. Object oriented development.
4. The relational database server and ANSI-SQL. Developers today are versed in the methods of normalization, and dependencies on home-grown datastores has virtually disappeared.
5. Modular / packaged code. While this isn't a recent development, it has become a best-practice and this has greatly improved the development process.
6. Revision control best-practices. There are still many organizations who version sourcecode using a copy command, but the vast majority of pro shops now use some form of source code control.
7. Open source software. IMHO, this is key to the next wave of development and it has already had an enormous impact.
A variety of software development lifecycle models have helped professional developers learn how to manage projects, but this still needs work particularly from the perspective of management. It's quite possible OSS will obviate the need for many ongoing commercial software development efforts, and while the last decade has been about software teams getting bigger the next decade can really be about the team getting smaller.
Once the teams can leverage existing OSS code, wheel re-invention becomes less necessary and code can be written under-budget (cheap) and on-time (fast).
I couldn't agree more. We are meddling with forces we do not comprehend, and for that matter we are attempting to control mis-understood biological mechanisms in the process.
While there are many potential benefits if we can accomplish this kind of genetic engineering, it's not clear that we are entirely ready for this. One must also ponder the potential for limited success, what will we do if some hideous Frankenstein creature results from this? If this creature goes awry will we be able to "kill" --- Is this moral / ethical?
That's been my experience also; but I tend to follow this rule of thumb for all my boxes --- even (gasp) WinNT systems.
Currently I've got one Windows box at home, who's sole purpose is to play Empire Earth and Siege. After my XP box got struck by lightning (how ironic considering the other problems I was having with it...) I replaced it with a Walmart PC with Gentoo and haven't looked back.
I think W2K will be my last Windows box. At work all my development systems are Linux.
Couldn't say it better myself. Do you _honestly_ think that the average consumer with Win98 at home really knows that WinXP is more recent than WinME?
Or for that matter, should they be looking at W2K or XP Pro or Home XP or what? If the operating system were truly intelligent it would simply be "Microsoft Windows" and when you installed you could select "Server Install" or "Workstation Install" or... whatever.
Hm, that sounds a little like Linux distros I'm familiar with...
At any rate, I think MS is clearly using the naming schemes as a marketing ploy. There is nothing whiz-bang about Windows 4.0 but if you call it Win95 instead then you might actually have something. I believe the original argument was if you name products according to the years they were released then the consumer can tell which product is more recent.
This makes sense to me, but with the advent of.NET and XP I'm not entirely clear at all what these product names are for (aside from attempting to generate some buzz in the sales pipeline).
IMHO, the truly frustrating part about all this is that there is no need for all these flavors. Software installation can be an intelligent process, you can ask the consumer when they install the os how they intend to use it. This can not only provide server/workstation varients, but can be used to enhance configuration for a wider variety of applications (eg: gaming platform, developers workstation, sysop console, small server, medium server, clustered environment, etc. etc.).
I wasn't even so lucky -- on Mozilla 1.2b I'm getting a "One moment please..." message. Oh well, I guess they won't ever get any of my money.
TBPH, they probably wouldn't anyway. For this kind of thing to really work right, I think it needs to be "TiVo-ized". That way you could sit down at your TV, pick the movie you want to watch and download it. There would be more control over viewing restrictions and -- let's face it -- who wants to sit in front of their PC monitor to watch a movie when there's a 56" widescreen HDTV in the other room?
While our increasing complexity of machinery will be susceptible to magnetic field shifting, I think our species won't have any trouble surviving.
The scenario of wandering magnetic fields could adversely affect the normal operation of devices that have a dependency on eletromagnetic intereference. This potentially includes power infrastructure, elecromechanical devices, computers, etc.
The biggest danger would be the chaos that could follow the inability for our technologies to work. Some groups would more than likely call this the "end" of the world, and the result could be catastrophic --- looting & rioting -- typical TEOTWAWKI paranoia. While biologically we stand a good chance of surviving just about any major global catastrophy as always the real danger is ourselves.
Actually, that was what inspired me to find a new search engine more than anything else. Suddenly -- one day out of the blue -- www.altavista.digital.com stopped working.
Given what happened to Digital, it's not a huge surprise that this kind of difficulty might surface. It appears this URL works again, but I have no intention of going back.
Google is faster, produces more reliable/pertinent results and since they folded in DejaNews it's pretty much the only search engine I need.
Maybe. Does anyone else remember IBM OS/2? Excellent Windows compatibility was included all the way to OS/2 Warp and yet it didn't turn out to be the Windows killer.
IMHO, the inclusion of emulation layers is the first sign that your system is somehow incomplete or incapable. For that matter, take a look at the entire NT architecture -- the foundation of the Microsoft system is emulation. It can be an OS/2 machine, Win16 or even -gasp- NT....
It could be a nice tool for attracting users with applications that currently only run on Win32, but I'm not sure MS Office is the best example of this. The real issues are going to be legacy apps without Linux counterparts (client/server programs that require ODBC/OLEDB, accounting software, POS, etc.), especially those that support an existing database or proprietary firmware devices. If Crossover can successfully support these, then I think it will have done it's job.
Meanwhile, for those considering a move to Linux they should take a good look at OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord and any of the other myriad authoring solutions for UNIX (Emacs, TeX, etc.)
There also appears to be a View Selection Source option now. So I can highlight a section of a document and view just that HTML source -- very handy for development.
No kidding. There is no money saved here, and what's even more ironic is the MS page discussing "Which Edition is Right for You?" proceeds to tell you basically "Why You Should Buy XP Pro"; are there *any* benefits to using XP Home Edition?
Truth be told, XP Home is fairly useless from a Windows network perspective. While it will let you experience the full force of ICMP, lack of Windows network integration make it entirely braindead. This is the one feature MS should not have skimped on, every edition of Windows should be able to join the Windows Active Directory DC. Meanwhile, it reads like XP Home will only perform data backups that endangers your files.
This is all marketing bunk, from the product to the product description to the testimonial about how much better XP is. The ultimate irony here is that the most vaunted products here (Office and IE) are available for Mac OS X anyway, so the whole reason she switched is entirely moot.
I think the curiosity value is the most significant aspect of this finding. We need to get something orbiting Venus to find out what's really going on, and then monitor for the next 20-30 years to see what happens.
We should also try to understand if this is a new phenomina. It sounds like NASA is basically giving up on this discovery already, while activities like the space station are significant I don't honestly see how a few unmanned probes are going to break the bank.
Remember the Philips DVX3000? It was essentially a PC inside a stereo component form-factor with a tweaked version of Win98. This was one of the early promises of convergence and it gave users the ability to run PC applications on their TV.
Aside from stability issues (the unit managed to crash numerous times during demos), the limited resolution of NTSC made this impractical. From a purely technical standpoint, the DVX3000 failed miserably.
A better example of the failure of convergence might be the CD-I format. In many ways, CD-I was very much like DVD but it failed because only one company was onboard with this format.
So; the lessons of convergence are quite simple. The NTSC television has insufficient resolution to support anything more than video and technology can only converge when standards are readily available to many vendors.
While HDTV is fixing the problems of low-rez TV, this is still 5-10 years away. Microsoft is too early with this kind of technology, but if they can spur the growth of the HDTV market in the process they might be successful. Obviously, the stability issues have been reconciled and the advent of MP3 makes convergence slightly more compelling. Since they are licensing this software technology, it might be possible for MS to make a dent in the home appliance market.
Meanwhile, TiVo is a niche product that solves a problem (recording TV shows without programming a VCR) that happened exactly at the right time (ie: when DVD was making the VCR obsolete). While it's not truly a convergent device, it does demonstrate how a computer can enable your home entertainment system.
I would tend to agree with the premise that single sign-on credentials remain on my local computer, except that when I need SSO the most I'm on a another machine that is not connected to my LAN.
Somehow we need to support a truly distributed model, where I can authenticate securely to a single account from a browser anywhere and immediately access all resources I have been credentials for.
It's really not that simple though. Just about everything you do now requires another account. You want to download the JDK from Sun? You need an account. You want to checkout the latest demo of product X? You need an account.
I must have 100+ accounts on various web sites, I spend most of my time trying to even remember the login I used much less the password. To make matters worse, sites have varying degrees of password requirement. Some sites restrict you to numbers-only, others expect certain lengths or certain combinations of characters. Sometimes there are two passwords to remember, one to logon and another to access certain features of your account. In other cases your logon is chosen for you, it might be your email address or it could be a fixed combination of your first initial + last name -- or maybe it's that with a number after it because someone else already has that login.
Sillyness. No wonder consumers are frustrated. It's still *me* accessing these sites, there should be a better form of distributed authentication in place that can support *me* accross many sites. How is that insecure?
This is the part I just can't fathom. Why can't the disabling of IE be as simple as Add/Remove?
Of course, MS will tell us that IE is part of the "operating system". Somehow I'm just not convinced, they sold the US Gov on the dependency of IE with Windows and now they can't back down. The simple fact is, IE is just another program, and if consumers want to remove it then that is their problem.
Couldn't they just cross-reference the email address with a registered voter in the representatives area? If the email is registered in your district, then it's something you'll want to pay attention to.
This patent is clearly baseless, there were other online auctioning systems in place before this patent was made. Furthermore, eBay had no way of knowing this patent was being processed when they first went into business.
A patent claim should be restricted to systems (ie: real physical items) and cannot be used to protect something as mundane as a business process innovation (ie: IP).
Imagine if there was a patent on a particular compression format, and in the process of implementing compression a developer accidentally "invents" the same format without knowing this format has already been covered by a patent. Now what? Are we expected to spend money researching all the algorithm patents out there and do our best to avoid implementing those models?
Where do you draw the line. It seems intuitive to me that instead of storing the color blue 15 times I should store "15xblue", but am I now infringing on the GIF patent? Somebody needs to put an end to this madness. Imagine if there was a patent on the mystery novel genra, this is what is happening with these kinds of software protections.
Not that it matters, but with Linux it's quite trivial for your parents to share the same desktop. Change the ownership of the desired desktop directory to accomidate both users, this is most easily accomplished by placing both users into a common group, and symlink the desktop directory to both home directories.
Unlike Windows, your desktop really is just a directory, there's no reason why multiple users can't share it (although things can get a tad confusing if both use it at the same time).
Contrast the sample of the Glockenspiel with a LAME encoding -vs- Oggenc. No comparison! You can barely tell the difference between OGG and the original sample, but with the MP3 sample it's quite clear how the attack of the mallet has been obstructed.
Another interesting contrast is ATRAC, which also fails under some circumstances (http://www.minidisc.org/atrac_breakdown.html).
Yes -- these are lossy algorithms so we should expect them to be less than representative of the original sound. But let's at least aim for something of reasonable quality, and I think OGG clearly has MP3 beat in this regard.
Slashdot Mirror
One could also argue that over the past 5 years there were substantial additional costs of NT/W2K adoption as a result of the MS learning curve.
End-users went from WinNT 4.0 to W2K, and the platform is now on the brink of
From a purely network perspective, you were forced from a PDC/BDC configuration into the Microsoft Active Directory environment, and all of this changed how you could integrate with MS Exchange.
While Linux (UNIX in general...) has embraced many of these paradigm shifts, there has been very little advancement that has obviated platform skills from one significant release to another. On the other hand, skills acquired with W2k are not necessarily applicable to WinNT or
This kind of sillyness dramatically affects TCO.
According to the analyst responsible for this study; "Linux requires more care and feeding, basically...".
Read more at InfoWorld.
How does Linux require more care & feeding? I don't understand, my experience has been the exact opposite. Whenever I patch a Linux box it continues to function properly, similiar maintainence on a W2K server (with a subsequent reboot) invariably leaves me with a new problem. BTW, patches to W2K servers are far more frequent and require longer download times than any Linux patches -- even when a new kernel is required Linux is still faster.
I think Giga has the right perspective here, if you don't know what you're doing of _course_ it's going to require more care & feeding. I'm eager to read this report, there is another MS sponsored study coming out 1Q2003 that should be equally interesting....
Hmm, and how else would you propose establishing a unified authentication mechanism?
It might be more politically correct if my PayPal account gave me the option to create a PayPal account or a Passport account, but the truth is it's a lot easier to maintain if there is a single source for the user database. In this case, it just happens that MS has the proper Internet real estate to ensure that their SSO becomes the most popular.
Unfortunately, I'm not convinced a web-based infrastructure is the right solution (ala: Passport). For that matter a distributed network identity authority (ala: Liberty Alliance) isn't all that much better.
I think the time has come for *real* identity management, biometric authorization by means of a physical connection to a computer. Let's get rid username/password management before it gets the better of us.
While most developers wouldn't know third normal form if it landed in their lap, things are much better than they use to be.
Today even if an attempt wasn't made to build a good data model the developers will usually recognize this failure; whereas, before the advent of widespread commercial software (Oracle, DB2, Informix, Sybase, etc.) it was often acceptable that all your data was in one big ASCII flatfile somewhere.
The software development process has greatly improved in the last 5-10 years. While software hasn't specifically gotten all that much better, the processes for producing good software have been advanced.
Here is my list in ascending order;
1. The Internet and the web. Access to resources like USENET archives and online vendor documentation have greatly improved the development process. For example, a defect in a popular Java Application Server was causing me considerable difficulty, and a quick check of the vendors website indicated SP1 would fix my issues.
2. Acceptance of high-level interpreted languages. While Smalltalk tried to make this happen, it wasn't until Java, Perl and ASP (VBScript) that this trend became popularized as computer hardware started catching up. Developers no longer have to author their own implementations of String(), and many other common functions are readily available.
3. Object oriented development.
4. The relational database server and ANSI-SQL. Developers today are versed in the methods of normalization, and dependencies on home-grown datastores has virtually disappeared.
5. Modular / packaged code. While this isn't a recent development, it has become a best-practice and this has greatly improved the development process.
6. Revision control best-practices. There are still many organizations who version sourcecode using a copy command, but the vast majority of pro shops now use some form of source code control.
7. Open source software. IMHO, this is key to the next wave of development and it has already had an enormous impact.
A variety of software development lifecycle models have helped professional developers learn how to manage projects, but this still needs work particularly from the perspective of management. It's quite possible OSS will obviate the need for many ongoing commercial software development efforts, and while the last decade has been about software teams getting bigger the next decade can really be about the team getting smaller.
Once the teams can leverage existing OSS code, wheel re-invention becomes less necessary and code can be written under-budget (cheap) and on-time (fast).
I couldn't agree more. We are meddling with forces we do not comprehend, and for that matter we are attempting to control mis-understood biological mechanisms in the process.
While there are many potential benefits if we can accomplish this kind of genetic engineering, it's not clear that we are entirely ready for this. One must also ponder the potential for limited success, what will we do if some hideous Frankenstein creature results from this? If this creature goes awry will we be able to "kill" --- Is this moral / ethical?
That's been my experience also; but I tend to follow this rule of thumb for all my boxes --- even (gasp) WinNT systems.
Currently I've got one Windows box at home, who's sole purpose is to play Empire Earth and Siege. After my XP box got struck by lightning (how ironic considering the other problems I was having with it...) I replaced it with a Walmart PC with Gentoo and haven't looked back.
I think W2K will be my last Windows box. At work all my development systems are Linux.
I think this is the link; a good read:
Why Mainframes Rarely Crash
Couldn't say it better myself. Do you _honestly_ think that the average consumer with Win98 at home really knows that WinXP is more recent than WinME?
... whatever.
.NET and XP I'm not entirely clear at all what these product names are for (aside from attempting to generate some buzz in the sales pipeline).
Or for that matter, should they be looking at W2K or XP Pro or Home XP or what? If the operating system were truly intelligent it would simply be "Microsoft Windows" and when you installed you could select "Server Install" or "Workstation Install" or
Hm, that sounds a little like Linux distros I'm familiar with...
At any rate, I think MS is clearly using the naming schemes as a marketing ploy. There is nothing whiz-bang about Windows 4.0 but if you call it Win95 instead then you might actually have something. I believe the original argument was if you name products according to the years they were released then the consumer can tell which product is more recent.
This makes sense to me, but with the advent of
IMHO, the truly frustrating part about all this is that there is no need for all these flavors. Software installation can be an intelligent process, you can ask the consumer when they install the os how they intend to use it. This can not only provide server/workstation varients, but can be used to enhance configuration for a wider variety of applications (eg: gaming platform, developers workstation, sysop console, small server, medium server, clustered environment, etc. etc.).
I wasn't even so lucky -- on Mozilla 1.2b I'm getting a "One moment please..." message. Oh well, I guess they won't ever get any of my money.
TBPH, they probably wouldn't anyway. For this kind of thing to really work right, I think it needs to be "TiVo-ized". That way you could sit down at your TV, pick the movie you want to watch and download it. There would be more control over viewing restrictions and -- let's face it -- who wants to sit in front of their PC monitor to watch a movie when there's a 56" widescreen HDTV in the other room?
While our increasing complexity of machinery will be susceptible to magnetic field shifting, I think our species won't have any trouble surviving.
The scenario of wandering magnetic fields could adversely affect the normal operation of devices that have a dependency on eletromagnetic intereference. This potentially includes power infrastructure, elecromechanical devices, computers, etc.
The biggest danger would be the chaos that could follow the inability for our technologies to work. Some groups would more than likely call this the "end" of the world, and the result could be catastrophic --- looting & rioting -- typical TEOTWAWKI paranoia. While biologically we stand a good chance of surviving just about any major global catastrophy as always the real danger is ourselves.
Actually, that was what inspired me to find a new search engine more than anything else. Suddenly -- one day out of the blue -- www.altavista.digital.com stopped working.
Given what happened to Digital, it's not a huge surprise that this kind of difficulty might surface. It appears this URL works again, but I have no intention of going back.
Google is faster, produces more reliable/pertinent results and since they folded in DejaNews it's pretty much the only search engine I need.
Maybe. Does anyone else remember IBM OS/2? Excellent Windows compatibility was included all the way to OS/2 Warp and yet it didn't turn out to be the Windows killer.
IMHO, the inclusion of emulation layers is the first sign that your system is somehow incomplete or incapable. For that matter, take a look at the entire NT architecture -- the foundation of the Microsoft system is emulation. It can be an OS/2 machine, Win16 or even -gasp- NT....
It could be a nice tool for attracting users with applications that currently only run on Win32, but I'm not sure MS Office is the best example of this. The real issues are going to be legacy apps without Linux counterparts (client/server programs that require ODBC/OLEDB, accounting software, POS, etc.), especially those that support an existing database or proprietary firmware devices. If Crossover can successfully support these, then I think it will have done it's job.
Meanwhile, for those considering a move to Linux they should take a good look at OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord and any of the other myriad authoring solutions for UNIX (Emacs, TeX, etc.)
There also appears to be a View Selection Source option now. So I can highlight a section of a document and view just that HTML source -- very handy for development.
No kidding. There is no money saved here, and what's even more ironic is the MS page discussing "Which Edition is Right for You?" proceeds to tell you basically "Why You Should Buy XP Pro"; are there *any* benefits to using XP Home Edition?
Truth be told, XP Home is fairly useless from a Windows network perspective. While it will let you experience the full force of ICMP, lack of Windows network integration make it entirely braindead. This is the one feature MS should not have skimped on, every edition of Windows should be able to join the Windows Active Directory DC. Meanwhile, it reads like XP Home will only perform data backups that endangers your files.
This is all marketing bunk, from the product to the product description to the testimonial about how much better XP is. The ultimate irony here is that the most vaunted products here (Office and IE) are available for Mac OS X anyway, so the whole reason she switched is entirely moot.
I think the curiosity value is the most significant aspect of this finding. We need to get something orbiting Venus to find out what's really going on, and then monitor for the next 20-30 years to see what happens.
We should also try to understand if this is a new phenomina. It sounds like NASA is basically giving up on this discovery already, while activities like the space station are significant I don't honestly see how a few unmanned probes are going to break the bank.
Remember the Philips DVX3000? It was essentially a PC inside a stereo component form-factor with a tweaked version of Win98. This was one of the early promises of convergence and it gave users the ability to run PC applications on their TV.
Aside from stability issues (the unit managed to crash numerous times during demos), the limited resolution of NTSC made this impractical. From a purely technical standpoint, the DVX3000 failed miserably.
A better example of the failure of convergence might be the CD-I format. In many ways, CD-I was very much like DVD but it failed because only one company was onboard with this format.
So; the lessons of convergence are quite simple. The NTSC television has insufficient resolution to support anything more than video and technology can only converge when standards are readily available to many vendors.
While HDTV is fixing the problems of low-rez TV, this is still 5-10 years away. Microsoft is too early with this kind of technology, but if they can spur the growth of the HDTV market in the process they might be successful. Obviously, the stability issues have been reconciled and the advent of MP3 makes convergence slightly more compelling. Since they are licensing this software technology, it might be possible for MS to make a dent in the home appliance market.
Meanwhile, TiVo is a niche product that solves a problem (recording TV shows without programming a VCR) that happened exactly at the right time (ie: when DVD was making the VCR obsolete). While it's not truly a convergent device, it does demonstrate how a computer can enable your home entertainment system.
I would tend to agree with the premise that single sign-on credentials remain on my local computer, except that when I need SSO the most I'm on a another machine that is not connected to my LAN.
Somehow we need to support a truly distributed model, where I can authenticate securely to a single account from a browser anywhere and immediately access all resources I have been credentials for.
It's really not that simple though. Just about everything you do now requires another account. You want to download the JDK from Sun? You need an account. You want to checkout the latest demo of product X? You need an account.
I must have 100+ accounts on various web sites, I spend most of my time trying to even remember the login I used much less the password. To make matters worse, sites have varying degrees of password requirement. Some sites restrict you to numbers-only, others expect certain lengths or certain combinations of characters. Sometimes there are two passwords to remember, one to logon and another to access certain features of your account. In other cases your logon is chosen for you, it might be your email address or it could be a fixed combination of your first initial + last name -- or maybe it's that with a number after it because someone else already has that login.
Sillyness. No wonder consumers are frustrated. It's still *me* accessing these sites, there should be a better form of distributed authentication in place that can support *me* accross many sites. How is that insecure?
This is the part I just can't fathom. Why can't the disabling of IE be as simple as Add/Remove?
Of course, MS will tell us that IE is part of the "operating system". Somehow I'm just not convinced, they sold the US Gov on the dependency of IE with Windows and now they can't back down. The simple fact is, IE is just another program, and if consumers want to remove it then that is their problem.
Couldn't they just cross-reference the email address with a registered voter in the representatives area? If the email is registered in your district, then it's something you'll want to pay attention to.
A quick search of deja.com:
deja posting
This patent is clearly baseless, there were other online auctioning systems in place before this patent was made. Furthermore, eBay had no way of knowing this patent was being processed when they first went into business.
A patent claim should be restricted to systems (ie: real physical items) and cannot be used to protect something as mundane as a business process innovation (ie: IP).
Imagine if there was a patent on a particular compression format, and in the process of implementing compression a developer accidentally "invents" the same format without knowing this format has already been covered by a patent. Now what? Are we expected to spend money researching all the algorithm patents out there and do our best to avoid implementing those models?
Where do you draw the line. It seems intuitive to me that instead of storing the color blue 15 times I should store "15xblue", but am I now infringing on the GIF patent? Somebody needs to put an end to this madness. Imagine if there was a patent on the mystery novel genra, this is what is happening with these kinds of software protections.
Not that it matters, but with Linux it's quite trivial for your parents to share the same desktop. Change the ownership of the desired desktop directory to accomidate both users, this is most easily accomplished by placing both users into a common group, and symlink the desktop directory to both home directories.
Unlike Windows, your desktop really is just a directory, there's no reason why multiple users can't share it (although things can get a tad confusing if both use it at the same time).
Also give the Harpsichord a try, the MP3 totally flubs on this sample while OGG recovers nicely.
Take a visit to SQAM:
http://sound.media.mit.edu/mpeg4/audio/sqam
Contrast the sample of the Glockenspiel with a LAME encoding -vs- Oggenc. No comparison! You can barely tell the difference between OGG and the original sample, but with the MP3 sample it's quite clear how the attack of the mallet has been obstructed.
Another interesting contrast is ATRAC, which also fails under some circumstances (http://www.minidisc.org/atrac_breakdown.html).
Yes -- these are lossy algorithms so we should expect them to be less than representative of the original sound. But let's at least aim for something of reasonable quality, and I think OGG clearly has MP3 beat in this regard.