I came in grudgingly in favor of Google censoring content for China. It's one thing to trim content to comply with local laws. It's entirely another to cause people to be arrested because they favor democracy.
Thus Google remains un-evil, although tainted and requiring pennance, while Yahoo! is just evil.
If IBM had this new chip NOW, that would be one thing, but what Apple needs is a good CPU NOW, and Intel's going to have that in 2006.
Besides, just because Apple is transitioning to Intel doesn't mean it has to continue to transition away from PowerPC. Let fat binaries become standard. Always ship a two-way Rosetta. Does it suck that binaries now have to be twice as big? Have you looked at how big executables already are? Doubling the size is nothing.
It's not evil to compete with PayPal.
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· Score: 2, Informative
It might be foolish because of their relationship with eBay, but it's not evil. Of all the the things that Google's done lately that some might consider questionable, this isn't one of them.
You can avoid some of the pitfalls of C++'s need for manual memory management and other problems by simply avoiding them. For instance, never do memory management yourself. How? By using STL containers to do it all for you. Next, avoid fixed arrays. Again, let STL do it for you. And, above all else, never do anything where you don't restrict the length. Since you're using STL for arrays, you're good to go there, and you won't end up running off the end of a character array (because you don't use them!). So what you're left with is doing I/O properly. Always limit the the amount of data you read to the buffer size you have allocated.
I'm sure that there's tons I've left out, but this has worked reasonably well for me. The only problem is that STL can be slow. Sure, map may be O(log(n)), but the constants are huge. Unfortulately, for practical reasons, performance and security are often inversely proportional.
If everyone stood by their principles, no freedom-loving company would do business in China.
What happens if they stay out? Then China uses its massive population to develop equivalent services, thereby reinforcing their monoculture. Staying out is NOT going to bully the Chinese government into changing laws. They have no incentive to do so.
As long as there's SOME influence of foreign information services in China, there will be some leakage of outside ideas into China.
Yes, we all wish that China would wake up and embrace democracy and freedom for its people. But we also wish that Pakistani Muslims would stop hating Hindus for being "idol worshipers", but that isn't going to happen any time soon either.
In all seriousness, I'm curious what anyone would do with a keyboard that has only three keys on it. And who would buy it for $100?
It might be useful for embedded applications, like some mall kiosk where you push buttons to get through a menu. But it's still a bit pricy and short on keys.
(1) All racial groups have their own genetic advantages and disadvantages relative to each other.
(2) It has been observed that, given two children with IQ's of 70, one white and one black, the white child will usually be retarded and socially disadvantaged, while the black child will usually be socially normal.
We can all talk about how that suggests that IQ tests don't measure certain kinds of intelligence, nod, pat each other on the backs, etc., blah, blah. But the fact is that I just made a statement about how blacks are "better" than whites. Is that discriminatory?
It's really hard to judge what is and what is not discrimination.
And you've somehow gotten it into your head that I (or someone else?) am judging gay relationships unfairly. Frankly, I don't see straight relationships any differently. But I may see them differently from you. I suppose straight people should be offended by my views just the same then.
It's just that when I think about loving relationships between people, sex isn't necessarily an element of that. There are men that I'm very close to, but I'm not sexually attracted to them. I consider my wife to be my best friend before any other way I characterize our relationship. Things like "gay", "straight", etc. don't enter into it. The fact that my best friend and I are married is only a convenient outward statement of our relationship (and I advocate gay marriage too).
To me, for one man (or woman) to have a loving relationship with another man (or woman) has absolutely nothing to do with sex or being gay or anything. It's just love. But the instant you start using terms like "gay" suggests to me a sexual element. Perhaps I am misreading the dictionary definition of "gay".
My lack of rigour in terminology and description masks my understanding of the topic. I've actually done quite a lot of research on this topic, and I although I may not identify with it personally, I understand a lot about it and respect the people who fit into these categories (insofar as people can be categorizes, which is sometimes quite arbitrary). Also, "sex (as an act)" was a poor choice of terminology. There are separate issues of body gender, brain sex, sexual orientation, sexual identity, and then things that revolve around how that sexual identity interacts with other people. Someone can be gay without actually having sex with a person of the same gender, because of who they're attracted to; so this doesn't necessarily have to do with sex as an ACT, but with sexual behavior at least as an IDEA or interest.
Also, I see your point regarding formation of relationships. I think Blizzard may be taking a stance like this: If two characters get together alone and want to talk about sex, they'll overlook that. But they don't want to actively encourage sex as part of the game, in part because sex is not one of the points behind the game, and because sex may offend the values of some people who would play their game.
I hate it when people try to enforce their values on others. No one should dictate what two concenting adults are allowed to do in private. But when it comes to public places, I don't mind the rules being rather a lot more strict.
I'm sure someone will argue with me, but as I understand it, being gay basically means that you're sexually attracted to people of the same gender. The "GLBT community" is generally made up of people whose sexuality is nontraditional. Where you fit in that community has to do with your own sexual identity and the sort of sexual identity of the people you want to be sexually intimate with. You don't generally find straight people or asexual people being associated with the GLBT community.
That being said... sex (as an act) has no place in the game. Primary sexual traits (ie. male and female) are unavoidable, so it seems natural to have male and female characters. But you can be male or female without considering sexual orientation or sexual acts. You can't be a member of the GLBT without that. Otherwise, what does it mean to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender?
So, as I say, sex (as an act) has no place in the game. Therefore, anything relating to sex (as an act) should be excluded. That's not just GLBT, but ANY kind of sex-act-related topic. It would be just as inappropriate to discuss being straight or any kind of straight-sex related topics. There is no discrimination here.
People like to talk about how Itanic, as it were, is a flop. It is, but not because it's not a good processor. Itanium is a very cool architecture with features long-time in coming. For instance, used properly, branch predication can be a HUGE boost to performance, and it's proven itself to be so when used properly on the Itanium.
The first problem is one of marketing. HP/Compaq is a screwed-up company, the merger of two wholy incompatible companies that could never work together properly. Put this together with the fact that they canceled Alpha, another great processor, and you can see that selling Itanium is more about politics than engineering. The next problem is pricing. For a single-chip solution, Itanium is awesome, if you don't count the fact that you could buy multiple Opterons for that price and achieve more performance with properly threaded code.
There are, of course, technical problems. Itanium is a heat monster. They didn't design it with power consumption and heat dissipation in mind. Did you know that the Itanium's top speed isn't limited by wire delays like it is in most other chips? No. It could actually run a lot faster, were it not for the fact that they can't get the heat off the chip fast enough. Another problem is the compilers. Static scheduling has its limitations, but the real limitation is that Itanium compilers can't manage to do even decent scheduling. It's too complicated. Much of Itanium's performance is theoretical. Given a small piece of C code, you can recode it in assembly and get it to run 10 times faster. If only the compilers were as smart as the assembly coder.
Itanium was a great idea. It's just being executed poorly, and the R&D is being put into the wrong place. The architecture is there. It's great. Now, get the price down, design it for lower heat dissipation, and get some people working on that damn compiler!
Yes, up front, let's recognize that money is a factor. But this is no surprise. Money is ALWAYS a factor. That has nothing to do with whether or not Google is doing the right thing. There are more important factors involved:
(1) If Google did not censor their content for China, Google would not be allowed into China at all. Google is an incredibly valuable resource for anyone looking for information. What's worse? Giving the Chinese as much information as Chinese law allows? Or leaving them with nothing at all?
(2) What is the "right thing"? By whose terms? We're arrogantly acting like American values of free speech are the only possible meaningful set of values. Don't get me wrong; from my perspective, free speech is vital, and China is only hurting itself by being totalitarian. But by the standards of the Chinese government and many Chinese people, Google is most CERTAINLY doing the "right thing" by censoring content.
So, when it comes down to it, all Google is doing is obeying the law, just as they would have to do if the US government passed some horribly boneheaded law. It's either that or go out of business. Are you so foolish as to think that Google could resist the censorship and somehow manage to bully the Chinese government into allowing Google access from within China anyway? Come back when you have your head out of your ass.
As an ASIC designer, I have produced my fair share of silicon bugs. Chips are expensive to produce, making bugs expensive to fix. As a result, chip designers (even ones with deep pockets like Intel) do not look at bugs as something to FIX, but rather as something to MASK. I don't mean to hide it from people (although that does happen), but to make it not a bug by working around it.
Unless the bug is so fatal that you can't work around it, or the bug could potentially cost lives, the primary solution is to work around it. Either you write driver code to avoid the bug, or you find some other cheap solution. Sometimes, it's a simple matter of removing a feature from your marketing literature.
Intel's typical means to mask processor bugs is microcode. This hurts performance, but they can typically create a workaround that routes everything around the bug. I can't read the article (it's slashdotted), but I'm sure that by saying they won't fix some bugs, they're saying that they won't respin the silicon but rather mask the bug in some other way.
Listing the bugs (and not fixing them in this version) is an appropriate thing for Intel to do.
(I'm no Intel fanboy. I think they're bastards. But this is NOT an example of them being bastards.)
It is theoretically possible to write a secure program in C or C++. With a perfect programmer, all necessary sorts of bounds checking, etc. would be implemented in, and the program would work perfectly. But there is no such thing as a perfect programmer. As long as the language lets you make certain kinds of mistakes, then those mistakes will inevitably be made. Some idealists thing that you should eventually be able to find all such bugs. But there are those who suggest that the process is never-ending because bugs are added faster than they can be found.
Some people love to talk about how Linux is so much more secure than Windows. Part of that is hype. But part of that is due to the fact that much of Linux and surrounding userspace stuff was written more recently. Windows has a longer history and therefore has more legacy code. Although many types of exploits were understood by academics at the time Windows 3.1 and NT 3.1 were written, such concepts were not at the forefront of the minds of most professional programmers. More of Linux was written AFTER people became generally aware of this issue. My point is that, being written mostly in C, GNU/Linux is not any more fundamentally immune to security problems than Windows. Forget counting flaws. The fact that it's even POSSIBLE to implement a security flaw is a horribly shameful defect that both systems share.
Microsoft Research has developed this really neat thing called Singularity. Security is built in at every level. You can't corrupt another program's process space, because every executable and library gets its own isolated process. There's no shared memory. And on top of that, C#, with all of its implicit run-time checking is the language that you're required to use. Even if a security flaw were discovered, many of them could be fixed by modifying the C# runtime, thereby fixing the entire OS in one shot. Ok, so I don't remember everything exactly right, but the point is that this is a MAJOR step in the right direction. Singularity eliminates many security problems simply by making the impossible to implement in the first place.
This is not a jab: As with any reasonable company out to make a profit, Microsoft does not go out of its way to unnecessarily spend money. Reimplementing Windows from the ground up would be incredibly expensive. (Not to mention the emulation necessary for backward compatibility for applications.) But of all companies, Microsoft is the closest to being able to afford such a task. And with so many people, organizations, and countries dependent on the correct functioning of Windows, you have a responsibility to do the right thing. This would require a complete redesign of the OS, but seeing how often your own architects have complained about the dependencies in Windows not being a directed acyclic graph, I can only imagine that a new OS, based on a framework that enforces security, would be a lot easier to develop than trying to fix the monster you have right now.
My question is this: Is Microsoft ever going to work towards making a truly secure system, or are you going to continue the never-ending cycle of patching up your existing code base? Trying to fix bugs one at a time is a fundamentally flawed approach. So, does Microsoft have any intention of ever doing it the RIGHT way?
I'm not a lawyer, but there have got to be laws that apply to this. People here use the word "extortion", and that sounds right to me. It's really not hard to equate what BS is doing to what the Mob does to get "protection money." The moment a big company like, say, Microsoft/MSN, Yahoo!, or Google starts getting threats and degraded performance from BS, what do you think is going to happen? These companies would rather pay this money to their lawyers than throw it away on profiteering from Bellsouth.
I will never build an AJAX application!
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I have this feeling that, unless I lose my present job and have to do whatever it takes to make a living, I will never write an 'AJAX' application. Never. It's not that I don't like it. It's just that, for me, I will always see the web as a medium for distributing information, and information is best distributed in its least-complicated form, both conceptually and visually. Oh, I'll use CSS, XHTML, and I'll even do plenty of back-end stuff. But that's all in service to the main goal which is to inform or distribute.
The fact that AJAX is not totally browser-neutral only serves to drive the feeling home even harder. I just got an iPaq. It's pretty neat, and it's the 4705 model with the 480x640 screen. But with the exception of a few web sites, it's mostly pointless to try to pull up a typical web page on it (basically, IE 4.0). Even the web site for a company that specialized in protective cases for PDAs doesn't display properly on the iPaq!
Now, not everything is embedded, so it's unfair to suggest that everyone conform to the lowest common denominator (NCSA Mosaic?). But to me, this just reinforces the feeling that I already had, which was that web sites are most useable when they're simple and comform to the original markup philosophy. To me, caring about the width of the web browser window, and even moreso the height, is something to be avoided.
When I first started learning web programming, I build this really complex page with sidebars and decorative borders and all sorts of stuff. It looked really neat but was really confusing. After consulting with my personal expert on usability (my wife), I redesigned it completely to be simple and to the point. All the navigation stuff you needed was there, but it was just simplified and relatively unadorned. The result was 100 times more intuitive. It's too bad most web site developers don't have usability experts who specialize in making things intuitive to use. And you don't need AJAX to do that.
I'm not saying that iPod users are necessarily less intelligent than others (I have one... which tells you nothing). I'm also not saying that other players are necessarily not well designed.
It's just that with the iPod's well designed interface and iTunes being just so convenient and easy to use, the iPod is more accessible to many more less technical people. It does require some more work to understand P2P software and download MP3s and then load them onto your player. I'm sure most iPod users wouldn't mind getting free music. They just aren't inclined to do so, because Apple's made it just so EASY to do it legit.
It WAS communist, but due to trade with other countries, capitalism has become a dominant part of their economy. It's just not a democracy or republic. Technically, China is a "Capitalist Dictatorship."
As an aside, it seems that people want to blindly attach communism all the time. Yes, communism is bad, but to just blanketly poopoo it is stupid. The truth is that communism is one of the fastest ways to bring a country from total anarchy and poverty to a functioning economy. The problem is that Marxist socialism and communism don't dissolve into democracy like the ideaists said it would. Instead, the people in power don't want to let go of their power, and it becomes a totalitarian, oppressive dictatorship. China's transition to a capitalist dictatorship is probably less disruptive to the people and economy than the sudden switch from communist dictatorship to capitalist democracy in the former USSR. Yes, China's government really sucks and they need a revolution, but this needs to be considered objectively. Sudden revolution could be disasterous locally to China and globally. And things like this usually get worse before they get better.
Either that or the little ISP's will take this as a cue to add restrictions of their own. The smaller ones generally make less profit, so anything they can do to reduce your cost to them, they'll do it.
What's bound to happen is some morons at an ISP will declare that you can't run a computer unless you run their prescribed antivirus and firewall software. Since Linux and Mac users can't run it, they'll be disqualified.
If you can't buy a monitor with analog or DVI, then open-standards hardware projects (like the Open Graphics Project) will be shut out. This isn't just about protecting IP rights. This is a direct attack at Free Software in general.
You're absolutely right, and I agree that what you propose is an interesting topic that DOES have a place in science classrooms, but I feel the need to point out that what you're describing is more engineering than science. How could one design life is an excellent engineering question that would certainly be an excellent tool to teach science to students. However, science classes should focus more on science.
As with any science, Evolution ary theory is incomplete. It's evolving, you might say. But there's also a great deal of fact behind the assertions, and it has withstood a great deal of testing. Of the models we have of the development of life, Evolution is by far the most supported and the most scientific.
Although it's rare, I do sometimes see someone point out a gap in Evolution. And responsible scientists take note and add that to the common knowledge. One mistake people tend to make, however, is to think that every assertion that claims to be part of Evolutionary theory actually is. There is much we don't know, and there is much recent discovery that is still being figured out. And way too much of that stuff is being asserted as fact. But that doesn't change what has come before, those things that have survived the search for counter-evidence. Evolution isn't 100% perfect, but it's the best model we have and, it will contine to be as new discovered are made.
Slashdot Mirror
I came in grudgingly in favor of Google censoring content for China. It's one thing to trim content to comply with local laws. It's entirely another to cause people to be arrested because they favor democracy.
Thus Google remains un-evil, although tainted and requiring pennance, while Yahoo! is just evil.
If IBM had this new chip NOW, that would be one thing, but what Apple needs is a good CPU NOW, and Intel's going to have that in 2006.
Besides, just because Apple is transitioning to Intel doesn't mean it has to continue to transition away from PowerPC. Let fat binaries become standard. Always ship a two-way Rosetta. Does it suck that binaries now have to be twice as big? Have you looked at how big executables already are? Doubling the size is nothing.
It might be foolish because of their relationship with eBay, but it's not evil. Of all the the things that Google's done lately that some might consider questionable, this isn't one of them.
At least the mouse has a BALL under it so it can sense position. You might say that the mouse has as many buttons as there are pixels on the screen.
You can avoid some of the pitfalls of C++'s need for manual memory management and other problems by simply avoiding them. For instance, never do memory management yourself. How? By using STL containers to do it all for you. Next, avoid fixed arrays. Again, let STL do it for you. And, above all else, never do anything where you don't restrict the length. Since you're using STL for arrays, you're good to go there, and you won't end up running off the end of a character array (because you don't use them!). So what you're left with is doing I/O properly. Always limit the the amount of data you read to the buffer size you have allocated.
I'm sure that there's tons I've left out, but this has worked reasonably well for me. The only problem is that STL can be slow. Sure, map may be O(log(n)), but the constants are huge. Unfortulately, for practical reasons, performance and security are often inversely proportional.
If everyone stood by their principles, no freedom-loving company would do business in China.
What happens if they stay out? Then China uses its massive population to develop equivalent services, thereby reinforcing their monoculture. Staying out is NOT going to bully the Chinese government into changing laws. They have no incentive to do so.
As long as there's SOME influence of foreign information services in China, there will be some leakage of outside ideas into China.
Yes, we all wish that China would wake up and embrace democracy and freedom for its people. But we also wish that Pakistani Muslims would stop hating Hindus for being "idol worshipers", but that isn't going to happen any time soon either.
Hey, guys, April fools is in two months!
In all seriousness, I'm curious what anyone would do with a keyboard that has only three keys on it. And who would buy it for $100?
It might be useful for embedded applications, like some mall kiosk where you push buttons to get through a menu. But it's still a bit pricy and short on keys.
Huh. How about one of each.
(1) All racial groups have their own genetic advantages and disadvantages relative to each other.
(2) It has been observed that, given two children with IQ's of 70, one white and one black, the white child will usually be retarded and socially disadvantaged, while the black child will usually be socially normal.
We can all talk about how that suggests that IQ tests don't measure certain kinds of intelligence, nod, pat each other on the backs, etc., blah, blah. But the fact is that I just made a statement about how blacks are "better" than whites. Is that discriminatory?
It's really hard to judge what is and what is not discrimination.
And you've somehow gotten it into your head that I (or someone else?) am judging gay relationships unfairly. Frankly, I don't see straight relationships any differently. But I may see them differently from you. I suppose straight people should be offended by my views just the same then.
It's just that when I think about loving relationships between people, sex isn't necessarily an element of that. There are men that I'm very close to, but I'm not sexually attracted to them. I consider my wife to be my best friend before any other way I characterize our relationship. Things like "gay", "straight", etc. don't enter into it. The fact that my best friend and I are married is only a convenient outward statement of our relationship (and I advocate gay marriage too).
To me, for one man (or woman) to have a loving relationship with another man (or woman) has absolutely nothing to do with sex or being gay or anything. It's just love. But the instant you start using terms like "gay" suggests to me a sexual element. Perhaps I am misreading the dictionary definition of "gay".
My lack of rigour in terminology and description masks my understanding of the topic. I've actually done quite a lot of research on this topic, and I although I may not identify with it personally, I understand a lot about it and respect the people who fit into these categories (insofar as people can be categorizes, which is sometimes quite arbitrary). Also, "sex (as an act)" was a poor choice of terminology. There are separate issues of body gender, brain sex, sexual orientation, sexual identity, and then things that revolve around how that sexual identity interacts with other people. Someone can be gay without actually having sex with a person of the same gender, because of who they're attracted to; so this doesn't necessarily have to do with sex as an ACT, but with sexual behavior at least as an IDEA or interest.
Also, I see your point regarding formation of relationships. I think Blizzard may be taking a stance like this: If two characters get together alone and want to talk about sex, they'll overlook that. But they don't want to actively encourage sex as part of the game, in part because sex is not one of the points behind the game, and because sex may offend the values of some people who would play their game.
I hate it when people try to enforce their values on others. No one should dictate what two concenting adults are allowed to do in private. But when it comes to public places, I don't mind the rules being rather a lot more strict.
I'm sure someone will argue with me, but as I understand it, being gay basically means that you're sexually attracted to people of the same gender. The "GLBT community" is generally made up of people whose sexuality is nontraditional. Where you fit in that community has to do with your own sexual identity and the sort of sexual identity of the people you want to be sexually intimate with. You don't generally find straight people or asexual people being associated with the GLBT community.
That being said... sex (as an act) has no place in the game. Primary sexual traits (ie. male and female) are unavoidable, so it seems natural to have male and female characters. But you can be male or female without considering sexual orientation or sexual acts. You can't be a member of the GLBT without that. Otherwise, what does it mean to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender?
So, as I say, sex (as an act) has no place in the game. Therefore, anything relating to sex (as an act) should be excluded. That's not just GLBT, but ANY kind of sex-act-related topic. It would be just as inappropriate to discuss being straight or any kind of straight-sex related topics. There is no discrimination here.
People like to talk about how Itanic, as it were, is a flop. It is, but not because it's not a good processor. Itanium is a very cool architecture with features long-time in coming. For instance, used properly, branch predication can be a HUGE boost to performance, and it's proven itself to be so when used properly on the Itanium.
The first problem is one of marketing. HP/Compaq is a screwed-up company, the merger of two wholy incompatible companies that could never work together properly. Put this together with the fact that they canceled Alpha, another great processor, and you can see that selling Itanium is more about politics than engineering. The next problem is pricing. For a single-chip solution, Itanium is awesome, if you don't count the fact that you could buy multiple Opterons for that price and achieve more performance with properly threaded code.
There are, of course, technical problems. Itanium is a heat monster. They didn't design it with power consumption and heat dissipation in mind. Did you know that the Itanium's top speed isn't limited by wire delays like it is in most other chips? No. It could actually run a lot faster, were it not for the fact that they can't get the heat off the chip fast enough. Another problem is the compilers. Static scheduling has its limitations, but the real limitation is that Itanium compilers can't manage to do even decent scheduling. It's too complicated. Much of Itanium's performance is theoretical. Given a small piece of C code, you can recode it in assembly and get it to run 10 times faster. If only the compilers were as smart as the assembly coder.
Itanium was a great idea. It's just being executed poorly, and the R&D is being put into the wrong place. The architecture is there. It's great. Now, get the price down, design it for lower heat dissipation, and get some people working on that damn compiler!
Yes, up front, let's recognize that money is a factor. But this is no surprise. Money is ALWAYS a factor. That has nothing to do with whether or not Google is doing the right thing. There are more important factors involved:
(1) If Google did not censor their content for China, Google would not be allowed into China at all. Google is an incredibly valuable resource for anyone looking for information. What's worse? Giving the Chinese as much information as Chinese law allows? Or leaving them with nothing at all?
(2) What is the "right thing"? By whose terms? We're arrogantly acting like American values of free speech are the only possible meaningful set of values. Don't get me wrong; from my perspective, free speech is vital, and China is only hurting itself by being totalitarian. But by the standards of the Chinese government and many Chinese people, Google is most CERTAINLY doing the "right thing" by censoring content.
So, when it comes down to it, all Google is doing is obeying the law, just as they would have to do if the US government passed some horribly boneheaded law. It's either that or go out of business. Are you so foolish as to think that Google could resist the censorship and somehow manage to bully the Chinese government into allowing Google access from within China anyway? Come back when you have your head out of your ass.
As an ASIC designer, I have produced my fair share of silicon bugs. Chips are expensive to produce, making bugs expensive to fix. As a result, chip designers (even ones with deep pockets like Intel) do not look at bugs as something to FIX, but rather as something to MASK. I don't mean to hide it from people (although that does happen), but to make it not a bug by working around it.
Unless the bug is so fatal that you can't work around it, or the bug could potentially cost lives, the primary solution is to work around it. Either you write driver code to avoid the bug, or you find some other cheap solution. Sometimes, it's a simple matter of removing a feature from your marketing literature.
Intel's typical means to mask processor bugs is microcode. This hurts performance, but they can typically create a workaround that routes everything around the bug. I can't read the article (it's slashdotted), but I'm sure that by saying they won't fix some bugs, they're saying that they won't respin the silicon but rather mask the bug in some other way.
Listing the bugs (and not fixing them in this version) is an appropriate thing for Intel to do.
(I'm no Intel fanboy. I think they're bastards. But this is NOT an example of them being bastards.)
I have Windows Mobile 2003 on my iPaq, and I just bought it. It reports that it's IE4. You may want to consider supporting that.
It is theoretically possible to write a secure program in C or C++. With a perfect programmer, all necessary sorts of bounds checking, etc. would be implemented in, and the program would work perfectly. But there is no such thing as a perfect programmer. As long as the language lets you make certain kinds of mistakes, then those mistakes will inevitably be made. Some idealists thing that you should eventually be able to find all such bugs. But there are those who suggest that the process is never-ending because bugs are added faster than they can be found.
Some people love to talk about how Linux is so much more secure than Windows. Part of that is hype. But part of that is due to the fact that much of Linux and surrounding userspace stuff was written more recently. Windows has a longer history and therefore has more legacy code. Although many types of exploits were understood by academics at the time Windows 3.1 and NT 3.1 were written, such concepts were not at the forefront of the minds of most professional programmers. More of Linux was written AFTER people became generally aware of this issue. My point is that, being written mostly in C, GNU/Linux is not any more fundamentally immune to security problems than Windows. Forget counting flaws. The fact that it's even POSSIBLE to implement a security flaw is a horribly shameful defect that both systems share.
Microsoft Research has developed this really neat thing called Singularity. Security is built in at every level. You can't corrupt another program's process space, because every executable and library gets its own isolated process. There's no shared memory. And on top of that, C#, with all of its implicit run-time checking is the language that you're required to use. Even if a security flaw were discovered, many of them could be fixed by modifying the C# runtime, thereby fixing the entire OS in one shot. Ok, so I don't remember everything exactly right, but the point is that this is a MAJOR step in the right direction. Singularity eliminates many security problems simply by making the impossible to implement in the first place.
This is not a jab: As with any reasonable company out to make a profit, Microsoft does not go out of its way to unnecessarily spend money. Reimplementing Windows from the ground up would be incredibly expensive. (Not to mention the emulation necessary for backward compatibility for applications.) But of all companies, Microsoft is the closest to being able to afford such a task. And with so many people, organizations, and countries dependent on the correct functioning of Windows, you have a responsibility to do the right thing. This would require a complete redesign of the OS, but seeing how often your own architects have complained about the dependencies in Windows not being a directed acyclic graph, I can only imagine that a new OS, based on a framework that enforces security, would be a lot easier to develop than trying to fix the monster you have right now.
My question is this: Is Microsoft ever going to work towards making a truly secure system, or are you going to continue the never-ending cycle of patching up your existing code base? Trying to fix bugs one at a time is a fundamentally flawed approach. So, does Microsoft have any intention of ever doing it the RIGHT way?
I'm not a lawyer, but there have got to be laws that apply to this. People here use the word "extortion", and that sounds right to me. It's really not hard to equate what BS is doing to what the Mob does to get "protection money." The moment a big company like, say, Microsoft/MSN, Yahoo!, or Google starts getting threats and degraded performance from BS, what do you think is going to happen? These companies would rather pay this money to their lawyers than throw it away on profiteering from Bellsouth.
I have this feeling that, unless I lose my present job and have to do whatever it takes to make a living, I will never write an 'AJAX' application. Never. It's not that I don't like it. It's just that, for me, I will always see the web as a medium for distributing information, and information is best distributed in its least-complicated form, both conceptually and visually. Oh, I'll use CSS, XHTML, and I'll even do plenty of back-end stuff. But that's all in service to the main goal which is to inform or distribute.
The fact that AJAX is not totally browser-neutral only serves to drive the feeling home even harder. I just got an iPaq. It's pretty neat, and it's the 4705 model with the 480x640 screen. But with the exception of a few web sites, it's mostly pointless to try to pull up a typical web page on it (basically, IE 4.0). Even the web site for a company that specialized in protective cases for PDAs doesn't display properly on the iPaq!
Now, not everything is embedded, so it's unfair to suggest that everyone conform to the lowest common denominator (NCSA Mosaic?). But to me, this just reinforces the feeling that I already had, which was that web sites are most useable when they're simple and comform to the original markup philosophy. To me, caring about the width of the web browser window, and even moreso the height, is something to be avoided.
When I first started learning web programming, I build this really complex page with sidebars and decorative borders and all sorts of stuff. It looked really neat but was really confusing. After consulting with my personal expert on usability (my wife), I redesigned it completely to be simple and to the point. All the navigation stuff you needed was there, but it was just simplified and relatively unadorned. The result was 100 times more intuitive. It's too bad most web site developers don't have usability experts who specialize in making things intuitive to use. And you don't need AJAX to do that.
I'm not saying that iPod users are necessarily less intelligent than others (I have one... which tells you nothing). I'm also not saying that other players are necessarily not well designed.
It's just that with the iPod's well designed interface and iTunes being just so convenient and easy to use, the iPod is more accessible to many more less technical people. It does require some more work to understand P2P software and download MP3s and then load them onto your player. I'm sure most iPod users wouldn't mind getting free music. They just aren't inclined to do so, because Apple's made it just so EASY to do it legit.
It WAS communist, but due to trade with other countries, capitalism has become a dominant part of their economy. It's just not a democracy or republic. Technically, China is a "Capitalist Dictatorship."
As an aside, it seems that people want to blindly attach communism all the time. Yes, communism is bad, but to just blanketly poopoo it is stupid. The truth is that communism is one of the fastest ways to bring a country from total anarchy and poverty to a functioning economy. The problem is that Marxist socialism and communism don't dissolve into democracy like the ideaists said it would. Instead, the people in power don't want to let go of their power, and it becomes a totalitarian, oppressive dictatorship. China's transition to a capitalist dictatorship is probably less disruptive to the people and economy than the sudden switch from communist dictatorship to capitalist democracy in the former USSR. Yes, China's government really sucks and they need a revolution, but this needs to be considered objectively. Sudden revolution could be disasterous locally to China and globally. And things like this usually get worse before they get better.
Either that or the little ISP's will take this as a cue to add restrictions of their own. The smaller ones generally make less profit, so anything they can do to reduce your cost to them, they'll do it.
What's bound to happen is some morons at an ISP will declare that you can't run a computer unless you run their prescribed antivirus and firewall software. Since Linux and Mac users can't run it, they'll be disqualified.
If you can't buy a monitor with analog or DVI, then open-standards hardware projects (like the Open Graphics Project) will be shut out. This isn't just about protecting IP rights. This is a direct attack at Free Software in general.
You're absolutely right, and I agree that what you propose is an interesting topic that DOES have a place in science classrooms, but I feel the need to point out that what you're describing is more engineering than science. How could one design life is an excellent engineering question that would certainly be an excellent tool to teach science to students. However, science classes should focus more on science.
As with any science, Evolution ary theory is incomplete. It's evolving, you might say. But there's also a great deal of fact behind the assertions, and it has withstood a great deal of testing. Of the models we have of the development of life, Evolution is by far the most supported and the most scientific.
Although it's rare, I do sometimes see someone point out a gap in Evolution. And responsible scientists take note and add that to the common knowledge. One mistake people tend to make, however, is to think that every assertion that claims to be part of Evolutionary theory actually is. There is much we don't know, and there is much recent discovery that is still being figured out. And way too much of that stuff is being asserted as fact. But that doesn't change what has come before, those things that have survived the search for counter-evidence. Evolution isn't 100% perfect, but it's the best model we have and, it will contine to be as new discovered are made.
Didn't Lex Luthor get all sorts of humanitarian awards too?
Let's see... rich guy, gives money to charities, does humanitarian things, does some evil on the side...