Putin is just too smart to kill someone in such a blatant way.
oh really?
A prominent reporter working on Chechnya was given poisoned tea, then when that didn't work gunned down near her home. The only serious enemy she had was the Russian state. The acting president of the Ukraine was poisoned soon after he took power and almost died - the only serious (ie with that kind of access to poisons and to him) enemy he had was the Russian state. There are other examples of Russian politians/journalists but I can't be bothered to look them up.
Seems to me he doesn't much care what the West thinks, as he's decided they'll see sense when he cuts off the gas supplies again. Some sorrowful, restrained words from Mr Blair, and then it's back to business as usual. Even better for Putin, we'll probably never know the truth.
Safari.app is also just a shell, it does not contain the WebKit.framework (used by the help system, and mail, among other things) which does all the actual rendering. So in this sense the two browsers are similar, save that OS X Finder doesn't use the webkit framework for normal browsing. It makes sense to put the rendering in a library as nowadays a lot of apps want to do it. The result is that removing WebKit.framework from OS X would similarly break the system.
I think the real problem here, and the things which got MS into hot water in court, was the predatory behaviour toward partners (everyone was a competitor and to be killed off, even clients like IBM) and despicable OEM licences which prohibited installing another browser or another OS on any machines. That's why they were convicted, not for technical reasons to do with the implementation of the browser.
This functionality is not impossible to create and if MS were in a competitive market where they had to give customers what they want, this would have been in Windows 2000.
Unfortunately it's not in OS X either, though it's long overdue. Any app can use the address book API to access the address book (no authorisation required I don't think), and can send out emails (again, no authorisation required, save running it which many users could be tempted into doing). I was thinking when reading the post above of something built into the OS which blocked ports/folders for all but specific apps - so instead of the current firewall app which gives the user the choice to deny certain ports incoming, you could have a sort of built in Little Snitch, an 'Access Control' for applications (not for users), which did the following - Have a pref pane listing the settings for each app, and on first run of an app give the user a dialog asking :
Would you like this application to be able to :
Send Email Access Internet Access Music Access Images Access Documents Access Address Book Access Other Applications (including prefs) Access Everything
This is of course possible by running as a low privilege user all the time, but no one is going to do that, and they shouldn't have to. Most Mac apps are well behaved and will only look into Application Support and the Preferences folder, however they could easily be forced to behave by the OS. They should pay the author of Little Snitch and just incorporate it, but extend it to file access too (don't think it does that, if it did I'd buy it). Very easy to do, and the payoff would be huge for security against simple trojans and spyware.
I think we should take zuned to mean screwed over, as in
Want to play your MS provided 'Plays for Sure' music on a new MS Zune? Zuned. Want to buy one song instead of 5 at a time, but find you have to buy bundles of MS points instead? Zuned. Want to share your music without DRM and time limits? Zuned.
And a special thank you for partners of MS : Worked with MS for years to build up the 'Plays for Sure' platform only to see it superceded by an MS only effort? Zuned.
FTA, the shutdown menu relied on the shell team and the kernel team, and they only shared root. So how do you know if the menu's broken unless it's synced with everything? Can't test a new menu without the most recent kernel and shell build... Or you can, but once kernel re-syncs, who's to say menu won't up and break?
Whatever happened to 'Design by Contract', or variations on that theme? The shutdown menu team should know precisely nothing about the internals of the shell and kernel, they should be calling an API which is guaranteed to work given the right input. They can test using a harness till the real code is in there, and if the real code doesn't meet the API spec, well then it'll be fixed by the other teams.
The problems with this team seem to be more about meetings with 15 people every week all discussing what's been done and what to do in excruciating detail, rather than just doing it.
Well that's no surprise - have you seen the reviews on Amazon? . I'm not sure I'd buy a product like that given that most of the reviews are so negative.
Even Paul 'WinSuperSite' Thurrott thinks it's a disaster :
What amazes me is that they managed to get so many things wrong on the software side of it, even when the hardware is quite decent. But there's nothing quite like the stupidity of a committee, maybe the software design process was something akin to that used for Vista.
Software like this
http://www.botmaster.net/
claims to decode many popular captchas anyway - do they need humans to do it for them?
With tools like this even an idiot can spam sites protected with captchas, though they'd have to pay through the nose to do it (400 USD!!!). I'd love to see sites like this which profit from stupidity shut down, but as an individual it's hard to see how to do it.
If you're a man diagnosed with prostate cancer, you have a 57 percent chance of it killing you in Britain. In the United States, the chance of dying drops to 19 percent. Again, reports Bartholomew, "Britain is at the bottom of the class and America is at the top."
Most people don't die of prostate cancer, they die of something else first (something like 70% of men over 80 have it in some form). So if men live longer in the UK, and end up dying of prostate cancer, as opposed to the US, where they die of a heart attack or something else, where does that leave your statistics? It makes a nonsense of them. Frankly an article written for The Spectator (a right wing monthly magazine for businessmen) doesn't inspire much confidence, and the figures you quote sound like he's cherry picked them to make the case he'd already decided on before writing.
Here's some from the Journal of the American Medical Association which completely contradict the source you quoted (The Spectator via The Pittsburg Tribune). I know which I trust to rule out confounding factors and try to give a fair estimate.
PS Being given drugs, an angiogram or intrusive surgery does not necessarily affect the outcome for the better, however much patients demand action, and medical statistics are anyway fraught with difficulties as an indicator of Health Service performance.
Hence, one step forward towards Adobe's vision of unified HTML/Flash/PDF platform. Interesting times.
I find this idea a bit scary. HTML, Flash, and PDF do two completely different things, and attempting to combine them is not going to end with a super-browser but with a monstrous train-wreck something like Acrobat Viewer, which inserts buttons in my excel toolbar without asking, takes forever to load and is generally a waste of space.
This announcement alone doesn't mean that Adobe will take this direction, but it does seem to be their strategy given the lack of emphasis on SVG lately and the purchase of Macromedia. Given Adobe's recent purchase of their main competitor, their sluggish response to market changes like OS X Intel, and the general bloat in their flagship products (which I use every day. but find increasingly frustrating and buggy), this doesn't bode well for the development of the Internet. It's too easy for them to translate control over one of the main browsers into an irresistible push for the internet in the direction that they want it to go.
Apollo's long term goals are to merge Flash, HTML/JS/CSS and PDF in one single "web platform", for internet applications.
A web platform owned by Adobe. It's interesting how closely this strategy mirrors that of Microsoft, which is to pollute the Internet space with de-facto standards (.NET is named that way for a reason) which make using anything but software released by them for creation/viewing difficult. It's the same story with Apple and the iTMS, and I guess it works sometimes, but surely long-term people always see through this attempt to create a walled garden?
MS: That continues to be the premise for devices that are branded in that category, and we think that we've clearly done a lot in that program, where there's a lot of devices out there, there are a lot of services out there, there are a lot of partners, and there are a lot of satisfied customers. We like that program. We've also found that there's a category of customers that say, "Give me a brand experience, advertise it to me on television; I want to be part of the digital music revolution, and that solution [PlaysForSure] doesn't work for me." So they're two complementary solutions -- not everyones gonna want Zune and not everyone's gonna want PlaysForSure. They're different paths there, and we're okay with both of them.
He tries to slime out of actually answering the question, but if you read the whole interview, the answer is quite clear - Zune won't support their so called 'PlaysForSure' at launch. Engadget has been used as a promotion tool for everything Zune for a while, so you can probably trust this is the party line. While it might seem so monumentally stupid that there's no chance Zune won't play 'PlaysForSure', that's exactly what they are planning. Perhaps after a month or so's backlash, they'll change their mind, or perhaps this is just a feint so that they can say to their PlaysForSure partners (now totally screwed either way) that they had to add PlaysForSure to placate outraged customers.
The popularity of the iPod is not due to iTS lock-in, on the contrary, it's in spite of iTS lock-in. As usual MS are copying the wrong thing - 'Give me a brand experience' - pah
Resolution independence doesn't have to be in the OS; it can be in the application layer.
Yes it does. Almost all software uses the standard OS Controls - those are too small to be usable on very high resolution screens. So it's all very well scaling your text up in word, but you won't be able to read the text in tooltips and other controls.
Why, yes it could, they not only require a broken browser and installing software, but they have patents too! Patents for a website - pheh.
http://texasborderwatch.com/patents.php
Patent Information The site is protected by the following patents: 5,798,458 5,912,902 6,009,356 6,130,917 6,181,954 6,246,320 6,253,064 6,366,311 6,392,692 6,518,881 6,545,601 6,636,748 6,853,302 6,970,183 7,023,913 7,049,953
Try a mac mini attached to the TV and use FrontRow to view your videos. I haven't used a Tivo but I imagine the interface is something similar, much better than trying to use iTunes on your TV (even if it does use iTunes behind the scenes to play the content). It's a simple menu system, though it could do with more levels of hierarchy (ie browse by genre) and a search option would be nice too using the computer keyboard. You can easily play shared video from other computers on a simple 'g' wireless network too. Works like a charm.
You *will* need a bigger hard disk though, so make sure you upgrade the one inside the mini when you buy it, or get an external one.
Slashdot Mirror
If everyone turned off images, html and anything else, we'd get text only spam instead.
The real problem is authentication in email. While mail servers accept email with any arbitrary 'from' address, this problem will persist.
Putin is just too smart to kill someone in such a blatant way.
oh really?
A prominent reporter working on Chechnya was given poisoned tea, then when that didn't work gunned down near her home. The only serious enemy she had was the Russian state.
The acting president of the Ukraine was poisoned soon after he took power and almost died - the only serious (ie with that kind of access to poisons and to him) enemy he had was the Russian state.
There are other examples of Russian politians/journalists but I can't be bothered to look them up.
Seems to me he doesn't much care what the West thinks, as he's decided they'll see sense when he cuts off the gas supplies again. Some sorrowful, restrained words from Mr Blair, and then it's back to business as usual. Even better for Putin, we'll probably never know the truth.
Safari.app is also just a shell, it does not contain the WebKit.framework (used by the help system, and mail, among other things) which does all the actual rendering. So in this sense the two browsers are similar, save that OS X Finder doesn't use the webkit framework for normal browsing. It makes sense to put the rendering in a library as nowadays a lot of apps want to do it. The result is that removing WebKit.framework from OS X would similarly break the system.
I think the real problem here, and the things which got MS into hot water in court, was the predatory behaviour toward partners (everyone was a competitor and to be killed off, even clients like IBM) and despicable OEM licences which prohibited installing another browser or another OS on any machines. That's why they were convicted, not for technical reasons to do with the implementation of the browser.
This functionality is not impossible to create and if MS were in a competitive market where they had to give customers what they want, this would have been in Windows 2000.
Unfortunately it's not in OS X either, though it's long overdue. Any app can use the address book API to access the address book (no authorisation required I don't think), and can send out emails (again, no authorisation required, save running it which many users could be tempted into doing). I was thinking when reading the post above of something built into the OS which blocked ports/folders for all but specific apps - so instead of the current firewall app which gives the user the choice to deny certain ports incoming, you could have a sort of built in Little Snitch, an 'Access Control' for applications (not for users), which did the following - Have a pref pane listing the settings for each app, and on first run of an app give the user a dialog asking :
Would you like this application to be able to :
Send Email
Access Internet
Access Music
Access Images
Access Documents
Access Address Book
Access Other Applications (including prefs)
Access Everything
This is of course possible by running as a low privilege user all the time, but no one is going to do that, and they shouldn't have to. Most Mac apps are well behaved and will only look into Application Support and the Preferences folder, however they could easily be forced to behave by the OS. They should pay the author of Little Snitch and just incorporate it, but extend it to file access too (don't think it does that, if it did I'd buy it). Very easy to do, and the payoff would be huge for security against simple trojans and spyware.
I think we should take zuned to mean screwed over, as in
Want to play your MS provided 'Plays for Sure' music on a new MS Zune? Zuned.
Want to buy one song instead of 5 at a time, but find you have to buy bundles of MS points instead? Zuned.
Want to share your music without DRM and time limits? Zuned.
And a special thank you for partners of MS :
Worked with MS for years to build up the 'Plays for Sure' platform only to see it superceded by an MS only effort? Zuned.
FTA, the shutdown menu relied on the shell team and the kernel team, and they only shared root. So how do you know if the menu's broken unless it's synced with everything? Can't test a new menu without the most recent kernel and shell build... Or you can, but once kernel re-syncs, who's to say menu won't up and break?
Whatever happened to 'Design by Contract', or variations on that theme? The shutdown menu team should know precisely nothing about the internals of the shell and kernel, they should be calling an API which is guaranteed to work given the right input. They can test using a harness till the real code is in there, and if the real code doesn't meet the API spec, well then it'll be fixed by the other teams.
The problems with this team seem to be more about meetings with 15 people every week all discussing what's been done and what to do in excruciating detail, rather than just doing it.
Well that's no surprise - have you seen the reviews on Amazon? . I'm not sure I'd buy a product like that given that most of the reviews are so negative.
Even Paul 'WinSuperSite' Thurrott thinks it's a disaster :
http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/zune.asp
What amazes me is that they managed to get so many things wrong on the software side of it, even when the hardware is quite decent. But there's nothing quite like the stupidity of a committee, maybe the software design process was something akin to that used for Vista.
Software like this http://www.botmaster.net/ claims to decode many popular captchas anyway - do they need humans to do it for them? With tools like this even an idiot can spam sites protected with captchas, though they'd have to pay through the nose to do it (400 USD!!!). I'd love to see sites like this which profit from stupidity shut down, but as an individual it's hard to see how to do it.
If you're a man diagnosed with prostate cancer, you have a 57 percent chance of it killing you in Britain. In the United States, the chance of dying drops to 19 percent. Again, reports Bartholomew, "Britain is at the bottom of the class and America is at the top."
w sid=42717
Most people don't die of prostate cancer, they die of something else first (something like 70% of men over 80 have it in some form). So if men live longer in the UK, and end up dying of prostate cancer, as opposed to the US, where they die of a heart attack or something else, where does that leave your statistics? It makes a nonsense of them. Frankly an article written for The Spectator (a right wing monthly magazine for businessmen) doesn't inspire much confidence, and the figures you quote sound like he's cherry picked them to make the case he'd already decided on before writing.
Here's some from the Journal of the American Medical Association which completely contradict the source you quoted (The Spectator via The Pittsburg Tribune). I know which I trust to rule out confounding factors and try to give a fair estimate.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/healthnews.php?ne
PS Being given drugs, an angiogram or intrusive surgery does not necessarily affect the outcome for the better, however much patients demand action, and medical statistics are anyway fraught with difficulties as an indicator of Health Service performance.
Hence, one step forward towards Adobe's vision of unified HTML/Flash/PDF platform. Interesting times.
I find this idea a bit scary. HTML, Flash, and PDF do two completely different things, and attempting to combine them is not going to end with a super-browser but with a monstrous train-wreck something like Acrobat Viewer, which inserts buttons in my excel toolbar without asking, takes forever to load and is generally a waste of space.
This announcement alone doesn't mean that Adobe will take this direction, but it does seem to be their strategy given the lack of emphasis on SVG lately and the purchase of Macromedia. Given Adobe's recent purchase of their main competitor, their sluggish response to market changes like OS X Intel, and the general bloat in their flagship products (which I use every day. but find increasingly frustrating and buggy), this doesn't bode well for the development of the Internet. It's too easy for them to translate control over one of the main browsers into an irresistible push for the internet in the direction that they want it to go.
Apollo's long term goals are to merge Flash, HTML/JS/CSS and PDF in one single "web platform", for internet applications.
A web platform owned by Adobe. It's interesting how closely this strategy mirrors that of Microsoft, which is to pollute the Internet space with de-facto standards (.NET is named that way for a reason) which make using anything but software released by them for creation/viewing difficult. It's the same story with Apple and the iTMS, and I guess it works sometimes, but surely long-term people always see through this attempt to create a walled garden?
From an engadget interview 2006/09/14 with an MS Corporate vice-president (whatever that is) :
He tries to slime out of actually answering the question, but if you read the whole interview, the answer is quite clear - Zune won't support their so called 'PlaysForSure' at launch. Engadget has been used as a promotion tool for everything Zune for a while, so you can probably trust this is the party line. While it might seem so monumentally stupid that there's no chance Zune won't play 'PlaysForSure', that's exactly what they are planning. Perhaps after a month or so's backlash, they'll change their mind, or perhaps this is just a feint so that they can say to their PlaysForSure partners (now totally screwed either way) that they had to add PlaysForSure to placate outraged customers.The popularity of the iPod is not due to iTS lock-in, on the contrary, it's in spite of iTS lock-in. As usual MS are copying the wrong thing - 'Give me a brand experience' - pah
Resolution independence doesn't have to be in the OS; it can be in the application layer.
Yes it does. Almost all software uses the standard OS Controls - those are too small to be usable on very high resolution screens. So it's all very well scaling your text up in word, but you won't be able to read the text in tooltips and other controls.
Why, yes it could, they not only require a broken browser and installing software, but they have patents too! Patents for a website - pheh.
http://texasborderwatch.com/patents.php
Patent Information
The site is protected by the following patents:
5,798,458
5,912,902
6,009,356
6,130,917
6,181,954
6,246,320
6,253,064
6,366,311
6,392,692
6,518,881
6,545,601
6,636,748
6,853,302
6,970,183
7,023,913
7,049,953
Try a mac mini attached to the TV and use FrontRow to view your videos. I haven't used a Tivo but I imagine the interface is something similar, much better than trying to use iTunes on your TV (even if it does use iTunes behind the scenes to play the content). It's a simple menu system, though it could do with more levels of hierarchy (ie browse by genre) and a search option would be nice too using the computer keyboard. You can easily play shared video from other computers on a simple 'g' wireless network too. Works like a charm.
You *will* need a bigger hard disk though, so make sure you upgrade the one inside the mini when you buy it, or get an external one.