Congratulations, you just invented Facebook messages.
No. I am proposing basically the same system we already have, not a walled garden controlled by a single company who can unilaterally decide to censor your email traffic.
I cannot see it being feasible for the common user. And anyway, why would they bother?
I see it being totally feasible for everyone. The email client should have certain features, such as auto-adding people to your whitelist when you email them; that way, if two people send each other an email, they have already done all the work needed to make sure they can send each other email anytime. It would even be possible to put whitelist controls in an HTML "wrapper" around the actual email, and thus older email clients (such as Microsoft Outlook) that don't have the new whitelist features would still be usable with this, as long as the email server had the features.
As for why would they bother -- getting all their email, without any spam. I guess that is a benefit of Facebook messages as well, but this solution scales to the entire Internet. I could see the US military rolling out signed email and whitelists, and I can't see them switching to Facebook messages. (The US military has a great setup for whitelists; any email not sent from a US military server is probably not critical for most of their users. Private Jones in the Army motor pool isn't fixing cars for anyone outside the Army.)
there are significant social and technical barriers to what you are suggesting.
I think the technical problems are pretty easily solved. The social ones, we'll see. If we could get the vast majority of users on a system like this, where they never even see any spam, I dare to dream that spam may become unprofitable and the amount of spam in the Internet will drop below 95% of all email.
I am not sure how much signing e-mails would actually help if spam is already sent by botnets via random people's computers
Few of my friends are clueless enough to let their computers get 0wned without their knowledge. If one runs afoul of a worm and doesn't realize it right away, our clue will be when I start getting spam with my friend's identity on it; we will instantly know that his computer is 0wned, and if my friend doesn't instantly fix the problem, I can immediately block his email address from my whitelist (say, for 15 days, so I don't have to remember to turn it back on).
the botnet could easily just collect a bunch of keys and contact lists (so it would know who would accept e-mails signed with that key).
This level of effort is unlikely for the spammers. The reason spam works is economy of scale; they need to send out hundreds of thousands of emails at a time in order to find a few people gullible enough to believe that a product sold by spam might be worth buying.
Even if the spammers write really clever worms that work as you describe, this is still not as good for them as the current situation, where an 0wned computer can spray spam to any address on the Internet, tens of thousands of messages at a time.
The only solution is to make a system that uses a whitelist. But whitelists suck. So we need a whitelist that doesn't suck.
The first step is to have all the email clients start digitally signing emails. It is trivially easy to forge the headers on an email, so it would be stupid to trust them for identity information.
The second step is to have email servers check the identity against the whitelist. If the digital signature is invalid, or the credentials are forged (message was digitally signed, but the announced public key of the sender doesn't match) the message is trashed, with no error message sent. If the signature checks out, but the sender was not on the whitelist, the message bounces back to the sender, with an explanation ("you weren't on the whitelist, sorry").
Okay, but whitelists suck. If my best friend from college wants to track me down and send me an email, I want him to be able to do that; but I don't know his email so he's not on my whitelist. So, we need a solution to this problem.
My proposed solution is that your email server should advertise a list of ways that you will accept to bypass your whitelist for a message. One possible way: attach a micropayment of five cents. Another way: attach a certificate showing that your computer worked for an hour on some worthy problem like protein folding at home or something. Another way: here's a URL of a web page; it contains some riddle... attach the answer to your email. I'm sure you can think of other schemes to make it possible for a friend to bypass your whitelist while not enabling zombie Windows clusters to spray spam into your inbox.
There are other refinements possible. Your whitelist can accept, not just individual signatures, but "badges" from some organization. So, anyone from Mozilla.org can attach a Mozilla.org badge to their emails, and I can allow all Mozilla.org emails through. IEEE member badge, SourceForge.net badge, Apple.com badge, go nuts. Even an organization of "I Swear I Will Never Send Out Spam". The key with the badges is that, if you get kicked out of an organization, you have to lose access to the badge. One simple way would be for the check to be live: if you attach a Mozilla.org badge, the Mozilla.org server had better agree that your identity is one known to it.
The current email system is a "Default Permit" system (the #1 dumbest idea on this list). It has to change.
This system would run on the infrastructure we already have, with a few additions. You could have one account with the whitelist, and another account without... but the one with the whitelist is the only one that pages you, or whatever. The important thing is that this doesn't require everyone in the whole world to adopt it before it starts to become useful. Mailing lists would still work, because when you sign up for a mailing list you would add that mailing list identity to your whitelist (probably a badge, such that members of the mailing list are then cleared to email you directly, through the badge).
Someone may claim that validating public key signatures is computationally expensive. No, not compared to running complicated heuristics over the content of a message, trying to guess whether it's spam or not (SpamAssassin and other systems). With this system, the server doesn't attempt to classify a message. Either it passes the whitelist, it's bounced back to the sender, or it's deleted. Done.
Now, if you have found a hole in this idea, you will score bonus points by explaining how to fix it, not merely pointing out that I am an idiot.
Excuse me, how did we go from sarcasm and suing: directly to understanding: ?
Are you trolling? Good grief, I guess the man should have written his words in lawyer-like boredom-speak. Does he need to mark his jokes with little smileys to help you get them? Did you think his third option was literally a request for a magic spell? If not, why are you so quick to assume he's deadly serious in his second option as well?
Maybe not; you did say "sarcasm". But was there an actual point in there somewhere? His summary was joking and/or sarcastic; he wrote something else that is not. And therefore... what?
I just spent five minutes trying to find your book
Gee, that's weird. I just looked at the summary, copied the Google search string he helpfully provided ("wayner data compression textbook") and Amazon's page for the book popped right out as the top hit. It didn't take me five seconds to find his book. And you are berating him for some reason about this?
They are a convenient size, they come in colors, and all you need to plug one in is a USB cable. I haven't bought the dock yet, but I'm planning to buy a couple.
I love using a 500 GB FreeAgent drive with my netbook... it hardly adds any weight to my carrying bag, and then I have all this storage. And yes, it's just USB bus-powered, and my Acer Aspire One has no trouble powering it. (You don't need one of those two-headed USB cables, to draw power from two USB ports, either. Just one USB cable.)
These aren't too expensive, but they aren't as cheap as just using internal drives with some sort of dock. The ultimate in density/price will always be boring internal drives... but these aren't bad. Around $110 on Newegg for the 500 GB one; compare to $90 for a 3.5" 7200 RPM internal SATA hard drive on Newegg. If you don't need the speed of the internal drive, the convenience of the external may be worth it.
Doesn't solve the same problem. lf(1) packs more information into the same size screen, by being terse; all the files with the same extension are printed together, with the extension printed just once (at the beginning of the line) and then omitted to save space. If you have a big project with a whole bunch of files, lf(1) helps you see the forest; ls -X just gives you a listing sorted a different way.
Why is this? Is it because most games don't require printing support?
I'm sure there are some people out there with Print Shop or something who would like to be able to use it... And I tried to help someone run a DOS accounting application under Vista using DOSBox. I couldn't figure out how to get printing to work and ran out of time.:-(
The ArsTechnica article makes an interesting point: could Microsoft have done an XP mode that works on all CPUs?
PC virtualization has been around for years, and predates the special instructions. There is a hack called Binary Translation (BT) where a VM system patches the memory image of the guest program to cause a trap where the guest program uses any difficult-to-virtualize instruction.
The new Windows Virtual PC feature is based on the old Microsoft Virtual PC. Microsoft Virtual PC does not require the virtualization instructions; it can run using BT. So, the point ArsTechnica asked is: why did Microsoft require the virtualization instructions?
I'll try to answer that question. But first, I'm going to rant.
Microsoft has made this much weirder and more confusing than necessary. The new feature is "Windows Virtual PC" and the old, rather different feature, is "Microsoft Virtual PC". In three years, will we have some new third thing that is completely different and is called "Microsoft Windows Virtual PC"? I'll use some abbreviations: I'll call the shiny new Windows 7 virtualization solution, Windows Virtual PC, "W7V" (Windows 7 Virtualization). I'll call the old Microsoft Virtual PC "VPC" (Virtual PC). My first draft of this article was full of "Microsoft Virtual PC" and "Windows Virtual PC" and it was hard to keep track of which was which. Also, Microsoft has broken their web site: links that used to go to VPC are now redirected to W7V. If you are trying to get information on VPC, ha ha! You lose. I was able to find the download page for VPC 2007, but all the links for information now redirect to the W7V page. <end_rant>
So, why did Microsoft require virtualization instructions for W7V? I'm just guessing here, but I think it's pretty obvious.
Take a look at the comparision page for Windows Virtual PC:
W7V adds some new features over the old VPC. Smart cards work, USB devices work, storage drives can be shared. This means that Microsoft did a nontrivial amount of work for W7V. I'll guarantee you that it was easier to just require the virtualization instructions than to try to use BT hacks across the whole Windows XP infrastructure; and this requirement slices away a whole bunch of old computers that now don't need to be tested for compatibility with the new W7V features.
So, the work to create W7V was easier, and testing and support costs reduced, by this decision. Since only the very cheapest new CPUs don't have the virtualization instructions, and this feature was chiefly aimed at corporate customers (who usually don't buy bargain-bin hardware), this decision was likely viewed as a no-brainer.
VPC is still available; customers who have old hardware and don't need the full features of W7V can just use VPC. And VPC remains a free download. (Of course, those customers could also switch to Ubuntu and run their old apps in VirtualBox. I'm just sayin'.)
The summary and TFA are rather light on the details I wanted. Here's what you need to know about Zeus:
It's a Trojan that takes over Windows computers. It is being spread through phishing tricks. It is designed to be easy to use, so script kiddies can just pay US$700 to get the Zeus kit and start building botnets to steal data such as credit card numbers.
One feature of Zeus is the "kos" command, for "kill operating system". This wipes out the Windows Registry and the OS files. Usually, black hat hackers don't want to kill systems they 0wn, but recently Roman Hüssy saw a whole botnet get the kos command. TFA listed three possible reasons for this: 0) rival black hat hackers might have gained enough control of a botnet to issue the kos command, to deny the botnet to its 0wners; 1) the hackers might have issued the kos command by mistake or due to incompetence; or 2) the hackers issued the kos to cover their tracks, and give them more time to use stolen data.
That last theory makes some sense to me. If the system is still intact, the owner of the system may figure out that his system was 0wned. The kos will wipe out the evidence of Zeus as well as the OS, so all the owner really knows is that Windows really crashed hard this time.
Okay, hydrogen is expensive, is 1/3 efficient, needs equipment with a 5-year lifespan and moving parts, depletes ozone, leaks through anything, pools under overhangs, ignites, burns, detonates, has no better range, and takes longer to fill than fast recharging electrics.
But other than that, what's wrong with it?
:-)
I must say, I enjoy reading anything you write about batteries, solar cells, etc. Not only do you seem to know what you are talking about, but you write clear and interesting prose. If you don't mind, would you tell us something about how you know all this stuff? Are you an industrial chemist, a physics professor, or what?
I wish firefox had an option to NOT use any CPU (including scripts, plugins, etc) on tabs except the one visible.
Yes, yes, yes!!! Please.
Here's how it should work:
User middle-clicks on a link, causing the page to load in a tab. Page loads to completion, then sits there, waiting for the tab to become the current tab. (Ideally, the initialization Javascript might be allowed to run... but then everyone will put all their annoying Javascript in the initialization part, and make it run at all times anyway.)
In the UI somewhere, there is a control that lets you set this tab as an always-running tab. I imagine this as a sort of push-pin icon, but let's have a user-interface expert design that part, not me, please. User loads Pandora.com, and pins this to always be allowed to run.
For extra credit: on startup, when restoring tabs, the tabs run serially, N at a time (where N is the number of cores on your system). If a power-user has four dozen tabs to open, instead of running all those threads at once, just run the current tab and load however many hidden tabs the user's system can actually keep up with. Firefox should draw the title bars so the user can tell which tab is which, and click on a particular tab to make it the current tab and make sure it is running right now. As the tabs finish loading, start loading the next tab, and continue until all the tabs are re-loaded; then settle down into the default mode.
P.S. I run Ubuntu on an older computer. I also use NoScript in Firefox. I totally notice the difference between having a bunch of tabs loaded in Firefox, and having tabs loaded in Epiphany; the executing Javascript really does drag down performance. (The new fast Javascript engines will mitigate this but won't eliminate it.)
A few years ago, official Microsoft spokespeople were telling reporters that it was not technically possible to make document converters for reading and writing the OpenDocument format. It made me rather angry.
I just did some Google searching, and didn't find any primary sources, but here's a blog posting that summarizes what they were saying:
Microsoft -- a company with close to $5 billion of cash in the bank and over $70 billion in total assets -- has come up with all sorts of reasons that adding ODF to Microsoft Office is a bad idea. It doesn't have the fidelity of Microsoft's formats (an issue that's really for customers to decide). The company has limited resources and so it's a question of how best to prioritize those resources. Supporting it would be a problem. These are reasons, by the way, that didn't get in the way of supporting Wordperfect's formats, Lotus' formats, HTML, and more recently Adobe's Portable Document Formats.
And what do you know, it is technically possible after all.
P.S. At the time, one of the reasons I thought this was so dumb was the blindingly obvious point that if MS Office supported ODF, then when governments or businesses standardize on ODF, they can still buy MS Office. Now, instead of spending resources on trying to fight ODF, they can just focus on selling Office as an ODF solution.
So, points to Microsoft for finally doing the right thing for the right reasons. (IMHO they are still in karmic debt over this issue.)
Everyone thinks they want a la carte programming, but the reality is that if it ever came to pass, most folks would pay pretty much what they pay now, except they'd get fewer channels in exchange
Nope, not buying it. You can't convince me that having a choice is worse than having no choice.
I have some friends who used to live in Japan. When they moved to the USA, I checked to find out how much it would cost to get them one channel of Japanese TV programming on Comcast cable; it was heinous. They would have to buy a complete package of stuff they didn't want, plus pay something like $30 for the Japanese channel. It would have been $60 or $90 per month (I don't remember exactly how much, but I just remember my feeling of shock over how much Comcast wanted for this).
I have to assume that some company in Japan could stream TV shows over the Internet for way less cost to the user.
As another example, I'm interested in bicycle races. The "Versus" cable TV channel will have the Tour de France, but no cable channel will carry the Giro d'Italia or several other bike races I could name. There just isn't enough interest in most of the customers in America. If I could get TV shows a la carte, I could get the Giro.
I think you are partly correct: it may be that buying a bundle of channels will allow customers to save money compared to buying every single channel one-off. And people will probably still buy bundles for the convenience. But the current situation lets the cable companies dictate terms to their customers; when the customers gain the power to end-run the cable companies, that will put downward pressure on the cable company prices. Which can only help bring costs down for the consumers.
Does this work for you? I've never tried this and I think I like the approach, how do people react?
People are quite prepared to believe that there will be problems with any computer they might use. If they have used computers, they are used to the problems; if they haven't used computers much, they have probably heard stories. Consider all the hoopla about Conficker. I just had to spend hours working on my sister's laptop; she was hit by a fake antivirus infection.
Do they stay with the Linux install?
My wife is perfectly happy with her Linux install, because it does everything she cares about. My mother hated Vista so much that she asked me to install Linux, and she is still using it. I have a few friends for whom I set up a dual boot, and I think they mostly use Windows.
I am constantly asked by people to help them with their computers but I just don't want to fix windows problems anymore, even re-installing presents hours of time if the windows box is to be built and patched properly. Even then there is no guarantee that the user won't end up in the same situation they were in before.
I tell people that they should absolutely get a hardware firewall to protect their home computers; I personally recommend a Netgear Internet router with Stateful Packet Inspection. This will greatly help cut down problems. People with laptops using WiFi are a separate problem.
I tell people to consider a Mac, and I also tell them that if I weren't using Linux I'd use a Mac. I hate viruses, spyware, and the other malware that strikes Windows; and I hate how time-consuming it is to do anything with Windows.
If you set up an Ubuntu system, make sure to install with two partitions, a "/" partition and a "/home". The Ubuntu installer is fast, but it works by wiping the "/" partition and unpacking default directories. If you have the separate "/" and "/home" partitions, you can let the installer wipe "/" and have it not touch "/home"; the user's settings are preserved. Just last week, I helped someone who had a messed-up, un-bootable system; his computer took a power hit (no UPS) and the disk got messed up. We re-installed Ubuntu and preserved his "/home" and got him up and running faster than I could possibly have done with Windows.
When trying to play a DVD on my girlfriend's brand new Ubuntu build it was necessary to download 3 different media applications (settled on VLC, but even that had a fatal bug sometimes) and sift for a while through google just to install the correct libs.
Or, you could have done it the Windows way: buy proprietary DVD-playing software, install that, done.
She doesn't use the computer for too much but shouldn't the bare basics work immediately?
I don't think Windows XP comes with a DVD player pre-installed by default. If you buy a new Compaq or Dell or something it probably does have a DVD player, but nobody seems to be selling Ubuntu pre-installed with PowerDVD. Yet.
If Linux is trying to get new users, shouldn't the focus be on effectively presenting the OS to new users?
Who do you mean by "Linux" here? The Ubuntu guys are doing one thing, the Fedora guys are doing something else, etc.
But here's what a new Ubuntu user should be reading:
I found Ubuntu Guide through Google. There are resources out there.
Yes, the world of Linux, even Ubuntu Linux, is not yet a shiny gleaming perfect place. But I know several people who are far less geeky than me, and they are perfectly happy using Ubuntu. The best thing is for a geek to set everything up, and then the user can just use the system.
I always tell people: "There will be problems. There are always problems. But, with Linux, they are different problems than you get in Windows... and I like Linux's problems better. The problems in Windows tend to be things like 'My machine has spyware now and it stopped working!' The problems in Linux tend to be 'I don't know how to get it to do what I want', but once you solve the Linux problems they tend to stay solved."
That's not a tidy message you could have Jerry Seinfeld deliver in a few seconds; I guess that's why I'm not in marketing.
Scan in a document (group multiple pages into a single PDF)
Easily scan a page and insert it into a pre-existing PDF (if you missed a page yesterday, today go back and put it in)
OCR the documents and provide an index to allow searching
Provide a really convenient photocopier feature (scan+print)
Fast and easy. Scan in color, but detect black-and-white and auto-convert to greyscale. Do not pop up any dialogs; when the user clicks on the "Scan!" button, start scanning.
Also allow dropping in saved HTML pages, OpenOffice.org documents, etc. Manage the user's saved documents, no matter what kind of documents they are.
In a perfect world, the GNOME guys and the KDE guys would both start competing over who can make the slickest product and we all would win.
Yes, you can simply say "grep bar foo" and it will have the same effect with less typing. But it's really not that big a deal, and there are times when I would do this. Usually it is because I'm doing something like this:
shell_script foo | grep bar
And I'm not getting the results I expect; then I might swap out the shell script part for cat, to help me debug. It's easier to type
cat !*
or even
^shell_script^cat
than to retype the whole command.
As long as you know what you are doing, build the command line any way you like. The computer exists to serve you, not the other way around...
Now someone will mod me (-1, No Sense of Humor) or (-1, Beating the Joke Into the Ground). But I regret nothing! Nothing, I tell you.
"Old doctors and old lawyers are like old wines. Old engineers are like old fish fillets."
There probably is some outright age-ism out there, although I haven't had it smack me in the face yet.
But I suspect that what is much more common is a desire for the latest shiny technologies. When I went to school, Java hadn't been invented yet, and most of my classes were taught in Pascal. The colleges now are presumably teaching the new cool stuff. So, while you will be 35, you will be 35 with a fresh degree.
As I would advise any college student considering a computer career, I recommend you do projects on the side as much as you can. Find an open-source project, learn your way around it, contribute a few lines of code. Figure out what your college isn't teaching you, and study it on your own. For example, if your school teaches only Java and you don't get any assembly language or C programming, study that on your own. Joel (who writes Joel on Software) says he won't hire anyone who doesn't know how to work with pointers; he may be an extreme case, but knowing pointers can only help you.
Study the want ads now, and try to figure out what the employers are looking for; make sure you are learning it. But you can't learn everything... I don't have any Visual Basic experience, and I was never interested in the jobs that require it. So I guess what I'm saying is, try to figure out an area you would like to be qualified for, and get the skills for it.
I highly recommend you study Python; a good book that walks you through the whole language will expose you to some cool stuff. Other people would urge you to study LISP; that will stretch your mind a bit. (When I was playing with LISP, I used the book The Little Schemer, and the DrScheme environment to run my code.)
The point of the last few paragraphs is to make you stand out a bit when you have your degree. You won't just be a 35-year-old with a fresh degree, you'll also be able to write cool Python scripts, juggle C pointers, maybe write mind-stretching LISP functions. I believe those sort of extras will help someone decide to hire you.
If you have to work full time and support a family while going to school nights, this is going to be hard. I have a friend doing this right now, and sometimes he does his homework from midnight to 4am, then gets up and goes to work. He's doing it and he's probably ten years older than you, so I'm sure you can do it too.
The good news is that if you are really right for a computer software career, and it is right for you, you will actually enjoy a lot of your work. Building software projects and watching them actually start to work is a special pleasure.
Lasse Gjertsen's "Hyperactive" was a huge viral hit in 2005, and a number of people have imitated it. The ones I have seen pretty much just copied it exactly, not even inventing a new rhythm. Here's a cute one. It says "parody" but it's really more of a straight copy.
The thing he found hardest, the thing he singled out for special mention as the worst problem, was: installing new software.
Eeek.
That's what Linux distros, particularly Debian-based ones, do best! The package management is the best single feature of Debian and Ubuntu, light-years ahead of the situation in Windows.
Now, he's not a troll and he's not an idiot. Which means that he has just helpfully identified something we should work on.
His basic problem is that he is used to Windows, where things are done differently. Either Microsoft Office is installed or it isn't; and the only pieces of Office that you can see are large chunks like Word, Excel, etc. It was surprising and alarming to him when there were hundreds and hundreds of little packages with odd names. For example, the updater told him it would update "anachron -- cron-like program that doesn't go by time" and he didn't know what to make of that.
In his Part 2 article, he recommends that you never update any package you don't understand. Eeek, again! What if there is a critical security update to DNS or something? He is unlikely to know what it is, so he will decline it. And he will be working very hard to go through the list and uncheck the update box for the vast majority of his packages.
The correct policy is to have the updater pull from a trusted source, and just let it update. Trust the system.
In all fairness, Windows has its share of similarly weird stuff. But they have done a much better job of wrapping it up to present to the user.
When you run Windows Update, it won't give you anything called "anachron", but it will give you things like "hotfix 967363: A Windows Server 2008-based DHCP server does not register DNS records for earlier version DHCP clients that do not send option 81 to the DHCP server". But this will be labeled as a "critical" patch that you really need to take.
Perhaps Ubuntu should have a popup on the update manager that gives newbies a quick overview of package management on Linux? Things are much better than the mess in Windows, so we need to make sure that newbies understand what's going on. When new users are confused, that should be treated as a bug, and fixed.
steveha
The Watchmen the studio wanted
on
Watchmen Watched
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Great jumping cats! Someone made an animated "Saturday Morning Watchmen" cartoon and it is seriously funny. It's at the end of this article, but here's a direct link:
Looking forward to it
on
Watchmen Watched
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I haven't seen it yet, but I'm going to see it as soon as I can. I was hoping this wouldn't get screwed up, and signs indicate that it hasn't.
The surest way to screw it up would have been to get Tim Burton or Paul Verhoeven to direct it; they don't seem to be able to make a movie based on a book without wanting to change things and put their own fingerprints on it. (I'd love to watch a Starship Troopers movie. Too bad we didn't actually get one.)
Everyone agrees that a perfect, 100% faithful adaptation is impossible, unless you do it as a miniseries that is around 12 hours long. The best we can hope for is that the screenwriter and director do a good job of streamlining the story and keeping the important parts intact. Kevin Smith says that this has been done.
I've read several reviews, and they illustrate how impossible it is to walk the tightrope. The movie keeps large chunks of the original dialog intact, and reviews have complained about dialog-heavy, boring long scenes. As a fan of Alan Moore's writing, I'm expecting that I will like or love these "boring" scenes. You can't please everyone.
I read an interview with the director, Zack Snyder. He said the movie studios pushed on him to cut some of the more shocking scenes, such as a rape, and a scene where a pregnant woman gets shot; but the scenes were important to the story, and he got them kept in. In the book, the alienation of Dr. Manhatten is shown visually in the way he stops bothering to wear clothes; this is kept as well. The pirate-themed side story would have made the movie too long... but they filmed it anyway and it will be available as its own feature on DVD.
I read that Zack Snyder gave each actor a copy of the graphic novel, and authorized them to edit their characters' dialog to more closely match the graphic novel. I have real hope that this movie will make me happy as a Watchmen fan.
P.S. Alan Moore is not happy with it, but as far as I can tell, he is automatically not happy with any attempt to turn his work into a movie. You could get Peter Jackson with an unlimited budget, and he still would not be happy. I read that they offered to have him help with the adaptation, but he declined. (Which makes perfect sense... that way he can complain about everything, and no one can say "well, you had the power to change that, why didn't you?")
A few years ago someone figured out that Intel's compiler was engaged in dirty tricks: it inserted code to cause poor performance on hardware that did not have an Intel CPUID.
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations, you just invented Facebook messages.
No. I am proposing basically the same system we already have, not a walled garden controlled by a single company who can unilaterally decide to censor your email traffic.
I cannot see it being feasible for the common user. And anyway, why would they bother?
I see it being totally feasible for everyone. The email client should have certain features, such as auto-adding people to your whitelist when you email them; that way, if two people send each other an email, they have already done all the work needed to make sure they can send each other email anytime. It would even be possible to put whitelist controls in an HTML "wrapper" around the actual email, and thus older email clients (such as Microsoft Outlook) that don't have the new whitelist features would still be usable with this, as long as the email server had the features.
As for why would they bother -- getting all their email, without any spam. I guess that is a benefit of Facebook messages as well, but this solution scales to the entire Internet. I could see the US military rolling out signed email and whitelists, and I can't see them switching to Facebook messages. (The US military has a great setup for whitelists; any email not sent from a US military server is probably not critical for most of their users. Private Jones in the Army motor pool isn't fixing cars for anyone outside the Army.)
there are significant social and technical barriers to what you are suggesting.
I think the technical problems are pretty easily solved. The social ones, we'll see. If we could get the vast majority of users on a system like this, where they never even see any spam, I dare to dream that spam may become unprofitable and the amount of spam in the Internet will drop below 95% of all email.
I am not sure how much signing e-mails would actually help if spam is already sent by botnets via random people's computers
Few of my friends are clueless enough to let their computers get 0wned without their knowledge. If one runs afoul of a worm and doesn't realize it right away, our clue will be when I start getting spam with my friend's identity on it; we will instantly know that his computer is 0wned, and if my friend doesn't instantly fix the problem, I can immediately block his email address from my whitelist (say, for 15 days, so I don't have to remember to turn it back on).
the botnet could easily just collect a bunch of keys and contact lists (so it would know who would accept e-mails signed with that key).
This level of effort is unlikely for the spammers. The reason spam works is economy of scale; they need to send out hundreds of thousands of emails at a time in order to find a few people gullible enough to believe that a product sold by spam might be worth buying.
Even if the spammers write really clever worms that work as you describe, this is still not as good for them as the current situation, where an 0wned computer can spray spam to any address on the Internet, tens of thousands of messages at a time.
steveha
The only solution is to make a system that uses a whitelist. But whitelists suck. So we need a whitelist that doesn't suck.
The first step is to have all the email clients start digitally signing emails. It is trivially easy to forge the headers on an email, so it would be stupid to trust them for identity information.
The second step is to have email servers check the identity against the whitelist. If the digital signature is invalid, or the credentials are forged (message was digitally signed, but the announced public key of the sender doesn't match) the message is trashed, with no error message sent. If the signature checks out, but the sender was not on the whitelist, the message bounces back to the sender, with an explanation ("you weren't on the whitelist, sorry").
Okay, but whitelists suck. If my best friend from college wants to track me down and send me an email, I want him to be able to do that; but I don't know his email so he's not on my whitelist. So, we need a solution to this problem.
My proposed solution is that your email server should advertise a list of ways that you will accept to bypass your whitelist for a message. One possible way: attach a micropayment of five cents. Another way: attach a certificate showing that your computer worked for an hour on some worthy problem like protein folding at home or something. Another way: here's a URL of a web page; it contains some riddle... attach the answer to your email. I'm sure you can think of other schemes to make it possible for a friend to bypass your whitelist while not enabling zombie Windows clusters to spray spam into your inbox.
There are other refinements possible. Your whitelist can accept, not just individual signatures, but "badges" from some organization. So, anyone from Mozilla.org can attach a Mozilla.org badge to their emails, and I can allow all Mozilla.org emails through. IEEE member badge, SourceForge.net badge, Apple.com badge, go nuts. Even an organization of "I Swear I Will Never Send Out Spam". The key with the badges is that, if you get kicked out of an organization, you have to lose access to the badge. One simple way would be for the check to be live: if you attach a Mozilla.org badge, the Mozilla.org server had better agree that your identity is one known to it.
The current email system is a "Default Permit" system (the #1 dumbest idea on this list). It has to change.
This system would run on the infrastructure we already have, with a few additions. You could have one account with the whitelist, and another account without... but the one with the whitelist is the only one that pages you, or whatever. The important thing is that this doesn't require everyone in the whole world to adopt it before it starts to become useful. Mailing lists would still work, because when you sign up for a mailing list you would add that mailing list identity to your whitelist (probably a badge, such that members of the mailing list are then cleared to email you directly, through the badge).
Someone may claim that validating public key signatures is computationally expensive. No, not compared to running complicated heuristics over the content of a message, trying to guess whether it's spam or not (SpamAssassin and other systems). With this system, the server doesn't attempt to classify a message. Either it passes the whitelist, it's bounced back to the sender, or it's deleted. Done.
Now, if you have found a hole in this idea, you will score bonus points by explaining how to fix it, not merely pointing out that I am an idiot.
steveha
Excuse me, how did we go from sarcasm and suing:
directly to understanding:
?
Are you trolling? Good grief, I guess the man should have written his words in lawyer-like boredom-speak. Does he need to mark his jokes with little smileys to help you get them? Did you think his third option was literally a request for a magic spell? If not, why are you so quick to assume he's deadly serious in his second option as well?
Maybe not; you did say "sarcasm". But was there an actual point in there somewhere? His summary was joking and/or sarcastic; he wrote something else that is not. And therefore... what?
I just spent five minutes trying to find your book
Gee, that's weird. I just looked at the summary, copied the Google search string he helpfully provided ("wayner data compression textbook") and Amazon's page for the book popped right out as the top hit. It didn't take me five seconds to find his book. And you are berating him for some reason about this?
steveha
No doubt they will treat a Zune Phone like the original XBox...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRLRjKCGHek
steveha
This is what I decided to use for backup and offline storage:
http://freeagent.seagate.com/en-us/hard-drive/portable-hard-drive/Free-Agent.html
They are a convenient size, they come in colors, and all you need to plug one in is a USB cable. I haven't bought the dock yet, but I'm planning to buy a couple.
I love using a 500 GB FreeAgent drive with my netbook... it hardly adds any weight to my carrying bag, and then I have all this storage. And yes, it's just USB bus-powered, and my Acer Aspire One has no trouble powering it. (You don't need one of those two-headed USB cables, to draw power from two USB ports, either. Just one USB cable.)
These aren't too expensive, but they aren't as cheap as just using internal drives with some sort of dock. The ultimate in density/price will always be boring internal drives... but these aren't bad. Around $110 on Newegg for the 500 GB one; compare to $90 for a 3.5" 7200 RPM internal SATA hard drive on Newegg. If you don't need the speed of the internal drive, the convenience of the external may be worth it.
steveha
What's wrong with 'ls -X'?
Doesn't solve the same problem. lf(1) packs more information into the same size screen, by being terse; all the files with the same extension are printed together, with the extension printed just once (at the beginning of the line) and then omitted to save space. If you have a big project with a whole bunch of files, lf(1) helps you see the forest; ls -X just gives you a listing sorted a different way.
See the screenshot on the Sourceforge page.
steveha
DOSBox does not officially have printing support. People have added it, but it's not part of the main product.
http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=19764
Why is this? Is it because most games don't require printing support?
I'm sure there are some people out there with Print Shop or something who would like to be able to use it... And I tried to help someone run a DOS accounting application under Vista using DOSBox. I couldn't figure out how to get printing to work and ran out of time. :-(
steveha
The ArsTechnica article makes an interesting point: could Microsoft have done an XP mode that works on all CPUs?
PC virtualization has been around for years, and predates the special instructions. There is a hack called Binary Translation (BT) where a VM system patches the memory image of the guest program to cause a trap where the guest program uses any difficult-to-virtualize instruction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_virtualization
The new Windows Virtual PC feature is based on the old Microsoft Virtual PC. Microsoft Virtual PC does not require the virtualization instructions; it can run using BT. So, the point ArsTechnica asked is: why did Microsoft require the virtualization instructions?
I'll try to answer that question. But first, I'm going to rant.
Microsoft has made this much weirder and more confusing than necessary. The new feature is "Windows Virtual PC" and the old, rather different feature, is "Microsoft Virtual PC". In three years, will we have some new third thing that is completely different and is called "Microsoft Windows Virtual PC"? I'll use some abbreviations: I'll call the shiny new Windows 7 virtualization solution, Windows Virtual PC, "W7V" (Windows 7 Virtualization). I'll call the old Microsoft Virtual PC "VPC" (Virtual PC). My first draft of this article was full of "Microsoft Virtual PC" and "Windows Virtual PC" and it was hard to keep track of which was which. Also, Microsoft has broken their web site: links that used to go to VPC are now redirected to W7V. If you are trying to get information on VPC, ha ha! You lose. I was able to find the download page for VPC 2007, but all the links for information now redirect to the W7V page. <end_rant>
So, why did Microsoft require virtualization instructions for W7V? I'm just guessing here, but I think it's pretty obvious.
Take a look at the comparision page for Windows Virtual PC:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/features/compare.aspx
W7V adds some new features over the old VPC. Smart cards work, USB devices work, storage drives can be shared. This means that Microsoft did a nontrivial amount of work for W7V. I'll guarantee you that it was easier to just require the virtualization instructions than to try to use BT hacks across the whole Windows XP infrastructure; and this requirement slices away a whole bunch of old computers that now don't need to be tested for compatibility with the new W7V features.
So, the work to create W7V was easier, and testing and support costs reduced, by this decision. Since only the very cheapest new CPUs don't have the virtualization instructions, and this feature was chiefly aimed at corporate customers (who usually don't buy bargain-bin hardware), this decision was likely viewed as a no-brainer.
VPC is still available; customers who have old hardware and don't need the full features of W7V can just use VPC. And VPC remains a free download. (Of course, those customers could also switch to Ubuntu and run their old apps in VirtualBox. I'm just sayin'.)
steveha
The summary and TFA are rather light on the details I wanted. Here's what you need to know about Zeus:
It's a Trojan that takes over Windows computers. It is being spread through phishing tricks. It is designed to be easy to use, so script kiddies can just pay US$700 to get the Zeus kit and start building botnets to steal data such as credit card numbers.
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid14_gci1310679,00.html
One feature of Zeus is the "kos" command, for "kill operating system". This wipes out the Windows Registry and the OS files. Usually, black hat hackers don't want to kill systems they 0wn, but recently Roman Hüssy saw a whole botnet get the kos command. TFA listed three possible reasons for this: 0) rival black hat hackers might have gained enough control of a botnet to issue the kos command, to deny the botnet to its 0wners; 1) the hackers might have issued the kos command by mistake or due to incompetence; or 2) the hackers issued the kos to cover their tracks, and give them more time to use stolen data.
That last theory makes some sense to me. If the system is still intact, the owner of the system may figure out that his system was 0wned. The kos will wipe out the evidence of Zeus as well as the OS, so all the owner really knows is that Windows really crashed hard this time.
steveha
Okay, hydrogen is expensive, is 1/3 efficient, needs equipment with a 5-year lifespan and moving parts, depletes ozone, leaks through anything, pools under overhangs, ignites, burns, detonates, has no better range, and takes longer to fill than fast recharging electrics.
But other than that, what's wrong with it?
I must say, I enjoy reading anything you write about batteries, solar cells, etc. Not only do you seem to know what you are talking about, but you write clear and interesting prose. If you don't mind, would you tell us something about how you know all this stuff? Are you an industrial chemist, a physics professor, or what?
steveha
I wish firefox had an option to NOT use any CPU (including scripts, plugins, etc) on tabs except the one visible.
Yes, yes, yes!!! Please.
Here's how it should work:
User middle-clicks on a link, causing the page to load in a tab. Page loads to completion, then sits there, waiting for the tab to become the current tab. (Ideally, the initialization Javascript might be allowed to run... but then everyone will put all their annoying Javascript in the initialization part, and make it run at all times anyway.)
In the UI somewhere, there is a control that lets you set this tab as an always-running tab. I imagine this as a sort of push-pin icon, but let's have a user-interface expert design that part, not me, please. User loads Pandora.com, and pins this to always be allowed to run.
For extra credit: on startup, when restoring tabs, the tabs run serially, N at a time (where N is the number of cores on your system). If a power-user has four dozen tabs to open, instead of running all those threads at once, just run the current tab and load however many hidden tabs the user's system can actually keep up with. Firefox should draw the title bars so the user can tell which tab is which, and click on a particular tab to make it the current tab and make sure it is running right now. As the tabs finish loading, start loading the next tab, and continue until all the tabs are re-loaded; then settle down into the default mode.
P.S. I run Ubuntu on an older computer. I also use NoScript in Firefox. I totally notice the difference between having a bunch of tabs loaded in Firefox, and having tabs loaded in Epiphany; the executing Javascript really does drag down performance. (The new fast Javascript engines will mitigate this but won't eliminate it.)
steveha
A few years ago, official Microsoft spokespeople were telling reporters that it was not technically possible to make document converters for reading and writing the OpenDocument format. It made me rather angry.
I just did some Google searching, and didn't find any primary sources, but here's a blog posting that summarizes what they were saying:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2075
And what do you know, it is technically possible after all.
P.S. At the time, one of the reasons I thought this was so dumb was the blindingly obvious point that if MS Office supported ODF, then when governments or businesses standardize on ODF, they can still buy MS Office. Now, instead of spending resources on trying to fight ODF, they can just focus on selling Office as an ODF solution.
So, points to Microsoft for finally doing the right thing for the right reasons. (IMHO they are still in karmic debt over this issue.)
steveha
Everyone thinks they want a la carte programming, but the reality is that if it ever came to pass, most folks would pay pretty much what they pay now, except they'd get fewer channels in exchange
Nope, not buying it. You can't convince me that having a choice is worse than having no choice.
I have some friends who used to live in Japan. When they moved to the USA, I checked to find out how much it would cost to get them one channel of Japanese TV programming on Comcast cable; it was heinous. They would have to buy a complete package of stuff they didn't want, plus pay something like $30 for the Japanese channel. It would have been $60 or $90 per month (I don't remember exactly how much, but I just remember my feeling of shock over how much Comcast wanted for this).
I have to assume that some company in Japan could stream TV shows over the Internet for way less cost to the user.
As another example, I'm interested in bicycle races. The "Versus" cable TV channel will have the Tour de France, but no cable channel will carry the Giro d'Italia or several other bike races I could name. There just isn't enough interest in most of the customers in America. If I could get TV shows a la carte, I could get the Giro.
I think you are partly correct: it may be that buying a bundle of channels will allow customers to save money compared to buying every single channel one-off. And people will probably still buy bundles for the convenience. But the current situation lets the cable companies dictate terms to their customers; when the customers gain the power to end-run the cable companies, that will put downward pressure on the cable company prices. Which can only help bring costs down for the consumers.
My wife's computer does run Ubuntu. My standard is Ubuntu on the desktop, Debian Stable on my servers.
steveha
Does this work for you? I've never tried this and I think I like the approach, how do people react?
People are quite prepared to believe that there will be problems with any computer they might use. If they have used computers, they are used to the problems; if they haven't used computers much, they have probably heard stories. Consider all the hoopla about Conficker. I just had to spend hours working on my sister's laptop; she was hit by a fake antivirus infection.
Do they stay with the Linux install?
My wife is perfectly happy with her Linux install, because it does everything she cares about. My mother hated Vista so much that she asked me to install Linux, and she is still using it. I have a few friends for whom I set up a dual boot, and I think they mostly use Windows.
I am constantly asked by people to help them with their computers but I just don't want to fix windows problems anymore, even re-installing presents hours of time if the windows box is to be built and patched properly. Even then there is no guarantee that the user won't end up in the same situation they were in before.
I tell people that they should absolutely get a hardware firewall to protect their home computers; I personally recommend a Netgear Internet router with Stateful Packet Inspection. This will greatly help cut down problems. People with laptops using WiFi are a separate problem.
I tell people to consider a Mac, and I also tell them that if I weren't using Linux I'd use a Mac. I hate viruses, spyware, and the other malware that strikes Windows; and I hate how time-consuming it is to do anything with Windows.
If you set up an Ubuntu system, make sure to install with two partitions, a "/" partition and a "/home". The Ubuntu installer is fast, but it works by wiping the "/" partition and unpacking default directories. If you have the separate "/" and "/home" partitions, you can let the installer wipe "/" and have it not touch "/home"; the user's settings are preserved. Just last week, I helped someone who had a messed-up, un-bootable system; his computer took a power hit (no UPS) and the disk got messed up. We re-installed Ubuntu and preserved his "/home" and got him up and running faster than I could possibly have done with Windows.
steveha
When trying to play a DVD on my girlfriend's brand new Ubuntu build it was necessary to download 3 different media applications (settled on VLC, but even that had a fatal bug sometimes) and sift for a while through google just to install the correct libs.
Or, you could have done it the Windows way: buy proprietary DVD-playing software, install that, done.
http://shop.canonical.com/
Click on "Software" and there it is: PowerDVD.
She doesn't use the computer for too much but shouldn't the bare basics work immediately?
I don't think Windows XP comes with a DVD player pre-installed by default. If you buy a new Compaq or Dell or something it probably does have a DVD player, but nobody seems to be selling Ubuntu pre-installed with PowerDVD. Yet.
If Linux is trying to get new users, shouldn't the focus be on effectively presenting the OS to new users?
Who do you mean by "Linux" here? The Ubuntu guys are doing one thing, the Fedora guys are doing something else, etc.
But here's what a new Ubuntu user should be reading:
http://www.ubuntuguide.org/
I found Ubuntu Guide through Google. There are resources out there.
Yes, the world of Linux, even Ubuntu Linux, is not yet a shiny gleaming perfect place. But I know several people who are far less geeky than me, and they are perfectly happy using Ubuntu. The best thing is for a geek to set everything up, and then the user can just use the system.
I always tell people: "There will be problems. There are always problems. But, with Linux, they are different problems than you get in Windows... and I like Linux's problems better. The problems in Windows tend to be things like 'My machine has spyware now and it stopped working!' The problems in Linux tend to be 'I don't know how to get it to do what I want', but once you solve the Linux problems they tend to stay solved."
That's not a tidy message you could have Jerry Seinfeld deliver in a few seconds; I guess that's why I'm not in marketing.
steveha
The "Prodigy" ad is interesting, but my favorite IBM Linux ad is "The Heist":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmxPfZtV6w0
"I sent out an email..."
steveha
I am hoping that someone will make a nice personal document management package as free software.
If you use Windows, you can buy this:
http://www.nuance.com/paperport/
The basic features would be:
In a perfect world, the GNOME guys and the KDE guys would both start competing over who can make the slickest product and we all would win.
steveha
As an aside, remember kids, don't do this:
cat foo | grep bar
It is bad Unix!
Eh, it's not that big a deal.
Yes, you can simply say "grep bar foo" and it will have the same effect with less typing. But it's really not that big a deal, and there are times when I would do this. Usually it is because I'm doing something like this:
shell_script foo | grep bar
And I'm not getting the results I expect; then I might swap out the shell script part for cat, to help me debug. It's easier to type
cat !*
or even
^shell_script^cat
than to retype the whole command.
As long as you know what you are doing, build the command line any way you like. The computer exists to serve you, not the other way around...
Now someone will mod me (-1, No Sense of Humor) or (-1, Beating the Joke Into the Ground). But I regret nothing! Nothing, I tell you.
steveha
My father made this observation:
"Old doctors and old lawyers are like old wines. Old engineers are like old fish fillets."
There probably is some outright age-ism out there, although I haven't had it smack me in the face yet.
But I suspect that what is much more common is a desire for the latest shiny technologies. When I went to school, Java hadn't been invented yet, and most of my classes were taught in Pascal. The colleges now are presumably teaching the new cool stuff. So, while you will be 35, you will be 35 with a fresh degree.
As I would advise any college student considering a computer career, I recommend you do projects on the side as much as you can. Find an open-source project, learn your way around it, contribute a few lines of code. Figure out what your college isn't teaching you, and study it on your own. For example, if your school teaches only Java and you don't get any assembly language or C programming, study that on your own. Joel (who writes Joel on Software) says he won't hire anyone who doesn't know how to work with pointers; he may be an extreme case, but knowing pointers can only help you.
Study the want ads now, and try to figure out what the employers are looking for; make sure you are learning it. But you can't learn everything... I don't have any Visual Basic experience, and I was never interested in the jobs that require it. So I guess what I'm saying is, try to figure out an area you would like to be qualified for, and get the skills for it.
I highly recommend you study Python; a good book that walks you through the whole language will expose you to some cool stuff. Other people would urge you to study LISP; that will stretch your mind a bit. (When I was playing with LISP, I used the book The Little Schemer, and the DrScheme environment to run my code.)
The point of the last few paragraphs is to make you stand out a bit when you have your degree. You won't just be a 35-year-old with a fresh degree, you'll also be able to write cool Python scripts, juggle C pointers, maybe write mind-stretching LISP functions. I believe those sort of extras will help someone decide to hire you.
If you have to work full time and support a family while going to school nights, this is going to be hard. I have a friend doing this right now, and sometimes he does his homework from midnight to 4am, then gets up and goes to work. He's doing it and he's probably ten years older than you, so I'm sure you can do it too.
The good news is that if you are really right for a computer software career, and it is right for you, you will actually enjoy a lot of your work. Building software projects and watching them actually start to work is a special pleasure.
steveha
Lasse Gjertsen has done this sort of thing, only he put together all his clips with a camcorder so he has no IP issues.
Hyperactive -- a sort of human drum solo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9698TqtY4A
Amateur -- actual instruments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzqumbhfxRo
Jeg går en Tur -- "self-portrait"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ncOAJpr3n0
Lasse Gjertsen's "Hyperactive" was a huge viral hit in 2005, and a number of people have imitated it. The ones I have seen pretty much just copied it exactly, not even inventing a new rhythm. Here's a cute one. It says "parody" but it's really more of a straight copy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xhqnt0EvY8
steveha
The thing he found hardest, the thing he singled out for special mention as the worst problem, was: installing new software.
Eeek.
That's what Linux distros, particularly Debian-based ones, do best! The package management is the best single feature of Debian and Ubuntu, light-years ahead of the situation in Windows.
Now, he's not a troll and he's not an idiot. Which means that he has just helpfully identified something we should work on.
His basic problem is that he is used to Windows, where things are done differently. Either Microsoft Office is installed or it isn't; and the only pieces of Office that you can see are large chunks like Word, Excel, etc. It was surprising and alarming to him when there were hundreds and hundreds of little packages with odd names. For example, the updater told him it would update "anachron -- cron-like program that doesn't go by time" and he didn't know what to make of that.
In his Part 2 article, he recommends that you never update any package you don't understand. Eeek, again! What if there is a critical security update to DNS or something? He is unlikely to know what it is, so he will decline it. And he will be working very hard to go through the list and uncheck the update box for the vast majority of his packages.
The correct policy is to have the updater pull from a trusted source, and just let it update. Trust the system.
In all fairness, Windows has its share of similarly weird stuff. But they have done a much better job of wrapping it up to present to the user.
When you run Windows Update, it won't give you anything called "anachron", but it will give you things like "hotfix 967363: A Windows Server 2008-based DHCP server does not register DNS records for earlier version DHCP clients that do not send option 81 to the DHCP server". But this will be labeled as a "critical" patch that you really need to take.
Perhaps Ubuntu should have a popup on the update manager that gives newbies a quick overview of package management on Linux? Things are much better than the mess in Windows, so we need to make sure that newbies understand what's going on. When new users are confused, that should be treated as a bug, and fixed.
steveha
http://io9.com/5165227/the-version-of-watchmen-the-studio-wanted
Great jumping cats! Someone made an animated "Saturday Morning Watchmen" cartoon and it is seriously funny. It's at the end of this article, but here's a direct link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDDHHrt6l4w
steveha
I haven't seen it yet, but I'm going to see it as soon as I can. I was hoping this wouldn't get screwed up, and signs indicate that it hasn't.
The surest way to screw it up would have been to get Tim Burton or Paul Verhoeven to direct it; they don't seem to be able to make a movie based on a book without wanting to change things and put their own fingerprints on it. (I'd love to watch a Starship Troopers movie. Too bad we didn't actually get one.)
Everyone agrees that a perfect, 100% faithful adaptation is impossible, unless you do it as a miniseries that is around 12 hours long. The best we can hope for is that the screenwriter and director do a good job of streamlining the story and keeping the important parts intact. Kevin Smith says that this has been done.
I've read several reviews, and they illustrate how impossible it is to walk the tightrope. The movie keeps large chunks of the original dialog intact, and reviews have complained about dialog-heavy, boring long scenes. As a fan of Alan Moore's writing, I'm expecting that I will like or love these "boring" scenes. You can't please everyone.
I read an interview with the director, Zack Snyder. He said the movie studios pushed on him to cut some of the more shocking scenes, such as a rape, and a scene where a pregnant woman gets shot; but the scenes were important to the story, and he got them kept in. In the book, the alienation of Dr. Manhatten is shown visually in the way he stops bothering to wear clothes; this is kept as well. The pirate-themed side story would have made the movie too long... but they filmed it anyway and it will be available as its own feature on DVD.
I read that Zack Snyder gave each actor a copy of the graphic novel, and authorized them to edit their characters' dialog to more closely match the graphic novel. I have real hope that this movie will make me happy as a Watchmen fan.
P.S. Alan Moore is not happy with it, but as far as I can tell, he is automatically not happy with any attempt to turn his work into a movie. You could get Peter Jackson with an unlimited budget, and he still would not be happy. I read that they offered to have him help with the adaptation, but he declined. (Which makes perfect sense... that way he can complain about everything, and no one can say "well, you had the power to change that, why didn't you?")
steveha
A few years ago someone figured out that Intel's compiler was engaged in dirty tricks: it inserted code to cause poor performance on hardware that did not have an Intel CPUID.
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/8547
But perhaps they have cleaned this up before the 10.0 release:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=518
steveha