Win2K still seems to be huge in the corporate world from what I've seen traveling around. I think the gratuitous random UI changes that simple cause support headaches and lack of compelling reason to upgrade is the cause of that.
Actually, the major reason for this is because if you're doing the whole Active Directory thing, using it to its fullest extent, then having both Win2K and XP systems on your domain is a disaster. There's a whole pile of complicated compatibility and migration issues when you get beyond the basic functionality, many of which don't have good solutions. Microsoft's only answer is "upgrade to XP". The corporate world is unamused by the idea that they should deploy XP across the entire company all at once (which is guaranteed to cause disruption to business for weeks until the IT crew get all the problems worked out), so with that plus no compelling reason to upgrade, a lot of them just didn't bother.
Microsoft don't really care, because most of the large corporates are paying them a huge annual fee regardless of what they run. It's the home users who they need to pressure to upgrade.
So it is nothing more than what they did for every previous release of IE (another OK dialog plus some cargo-cult 'security' logic). That's what I thought.
IE 7+ (Protected Mode IE) - this will virtually eliminate malware via the browser
Now, where have I heard that before? Oh yes, with every previous release of IE. And what they did all those other times was design a complicated system that blames the user for security breaches.
Microsoft thinks that popping up a confirmation dialog makes something secure. The reality is that the idiots who get infested with this crap click 'OK' or 'Continue' on every dialog they see without reading it. Blaming them for it does not accomplish anything; the world remains filled with worm-infested windows boxes sending spam.
The problem is government...wasteful spending brought on by too many years of overfunding. Where a $5 solution would suffice, they ALWAYS spend $500. The solution? I dunno, anarchy maybe.
The problem here is not that you've got the wrong kind of government. The problem is that you've got the wrong kind of people. Changing the system won't solve the problem that you have idiots doing important jobs.
First, when you refer to human-related things - as laws are, they mention e.g. 'assault', 'homicide', and so forth - there is no way to 'clean up' the language. It cannot be made unambiguous, because the underlying concepts are ambiguous.
While this is largely true, there are a number of ways in which the language could be significantly improved upon. Basically, all the nouns and verbs (and noun-/verb-derived adjectives/adverbs) that do not reference mathematically defined concepts are subjective in nature (we can precisely and unambiguously define 'zero', but we cannot give an objective definition for 'pornography'). So as far as those are concerned, you cannot improve on them.
However, those are only part of a language. The other part is all the structural stuff, showing how the subjective words connect together. Human languages are flexible here because they have evolved based on what "sounds good" or "looks good", rather than what is most precise. Unfortunately, they are also ambiguous. There is no good reason why they need to be ambiguous though. It seems to me that you could construct a useful language by using English concept words as predicates, and a syntax based on formal logic. It would probably be easier and more precise to construct laws and contracts in this fashion. It would not solve all the problems of ambiguity that occur, but it could solve some of them.
For example, if you were to write "one person injuring another with a weapon" as "injure(person A, person X where X != A, weapon)", then there is still ambiguity about what "person", "injure" and "weapon" mean, but there is no ambiguity about the fact that we are talking about two distinct "people", and that one of them is "injuring" the other with a "weapon", whatever those three words happen to mean (assuming you set up the syntax that way) - so we've nailed the ambiguity down to a known set of concepts, which a court can then consider. We are certain that this statement does not apply to a person injuring themself, for example.
The random searches and other intrusive treatment of passengers has not resulted in the conviction of many (any?) terrorists
It's had a lot of people arrested and some convicted, but none of them were terrorists. Usually they get convicted of something like "causing a public nuisance", for being drunk or annoyed at being treated like cattle.
As I understand it, Las Vegas doesn't look kindly on that and you can go to jail.
You're more likely to get your legs broken. Vegas gambling institutions often have ties to organised crime. The justice system in that part of the world is not famous for being free of corruption, either. It's not really a good baseline for comparison.
Also, if they authorize a transaction and it turns out to be fraudulent on the part of the buyer where the merchant acts in good faith to verify the card. The credit card companies will still just take the money from the merchant.
The real problem here is that the "good faith verification", which the credit card companies encourage everybody to use, is a load of crap that accomplishes nothing. The courts rightly observe that it doesn't prove a damn thing and therefore, with no actual evidence of a transaction, rule that it didn't take place.
The credit card companies are providing a crappy service with no proper verification and people are letting them, because they think it's better to do business while being screwed by the credit companies, than to not do business at all. The courts are happy to accept the combination of a till record, a security camera showing the buyer in the store, and the shop attendant on the witness stand, as proving that the transaction took place. They are not amused by the idea that your knowing the buyer's credit card number and expiry date constitutes proof of anything, because it doesn't.
This kind of stupid is going to continue happening until somebody builds a credit card system with actual working authentication for internet transactions. It would not be technically challenging to create; the "chip and pin" system is already most of the way there. The only problems are political/financial in nature. I don't believe that the credit card companies want to do it; the current system works fine from their perspective.
All rules of evidence allow an expert witness of the own parties choosing.
And allow the parties to object to each other's choices in a whole variety of circumstances, including but not limited to compromising bias on the part of the witness (such that allowing that particular choice could prejudice the trial, in which case the judge will tell the party to pick a different witness). This appears to be what the defendant is asking for here.
You can choose your own expert witnesses, but you can't just choose anybody. There are restrictions, and in an adversarial court system (such as the US one) it is the opposing party's job to ensure that the rules are followed correctly.
Doesn't seem particularly newsworthy though, just standard legal bullshit.
If the cable breaks when you fly an airplane into it, it's too damn small. I suggest that a sensible size would be a mesh of cables, in a tube with a radius of a couple of miles. Once the first one is up, the rest will go up pretty easily, and it gives you enough lifting capacity to do something useful up there (like build an asteroid mining complex and some colony ships).
An airplane, even when exploding, would not do a significant amount of damage to an object the size of a mountain. Some of the cables break, some detritus drops into the sea... who cares? The hole can be easily patched. Properly designed, the thing should be able to hold itself up even with a whole bunch of broken cables (in much the same way that your shirt doesn't fall into pieces when you make a small hole in it).
Smart politicians^Wterrorists would use an asteroid. That could do some damage.
The problems with your analogy are that (a) we aren't capable of building a bridge over the atlantic ocean today, let alone in 1900, and (b) if we could do that, it would be a damn good idea. It's much faster, safer, and cheaper to run a jet-propelled train across a bridge than it is to run an airplane, because you don't have to go to all the effort of keeping the damn thing in the air (and transatlantic-capable boats are incredibly slow). Alternatively you could use a maglev design or something, but my point is based on "use the same drive technology".
Likewise, a ground-to-space elevator is always going to be faster and cheaper than any self-propelled reaction thrust method of getting up there at equivalent technology. If you want to beat the elevator design you're going to need a method of transport that isn't based on throwing mass away to accelerate (because the same power technology, in a non-discarding form, can be used to drive the elevator cars at greater efficiency). Gravity control or controlled wormholes would do the trick - but we'll probably have space elevators long before we figure out if those are even possible.
I expect that the real problem with the Debian project is that they haven't yet gotten to the point of fully defining rules that enable decent and useful conversations while discouraging the less productive kinds of conversations.
Partly, but another problem is a small but vocal contingent in Debian who either don't understand its approximately-anarchistic nature, want to be rulers, or want to be ruled - and then create a ruckus when something happens that they don't like. I used to be a Debian developer, and I recognise all of the names in this article as being members of that contingent.
Fortunately, the Debian project has a history of being self-correcting. People like this tend to get frustrated and resign.
It's not the same but you'll quickly find out how you emulate "authority" with your set of rules sooner or later, effectively ending up with leaders.
What you're saying is "if you try to implement your political beliefs then you'll find that actually mine are the only ones which are right". The problem with that assertion should be obvious.
We all want to be leaders, or be equal
I for one do not, which disproves your thesis.
But if there's no concentration or "strategy" in a system, what results is a mess.
That's a value judgement on your part that you don't like 'mess', which here is just another name for anarchy.
Your post appears to just say "I don't like that idea. You have to do it my way". Quite ironic, really.
Neither seem to posess the skill of suspension of disbelief, a prerequisite for watching a movie.
"Suspension of disbelief" is a skill exercised in creating a movie - specifically, it's the art of creating a movie that is unrealistic, but not so unrealistic that it triggers the "wait, this is a load of crap" instinct in the watchers. It's the difference between reasoned speculation and juvenile wish-fulfillment. It's the trick of creating a movie that "makes sense" even though it's fiction. It's okay to be unlikely but you have to avoid unreasonable or impossible or the intelligent parts of the audience are going to (rightly) say that your movie sucks.
It is, in absolutely no sense, the job of the watcher to make the movie not suck. The watcher is the customer. They are paying the maker to make a movie that doesn't suck. If you make a movie and expect the watcher to make it not suck, then you (the maker) need to pay them to watch it, because they're the one doing the work.
A movie that fails to entertain you is not your fault for being a bad watcher, it's a bad movie.
We're all capable of swapping the startup.wav for an empty file, should we so wish.
Unless, of course, they tag it for WFP. That means, whenever you change it, Windows promptly changes it back and then displays a dialog telling you off for being such a naughty boy. In current versions of Windows, it's possible to disable WFP, but there's no particular reason why that should remain true.
They're currently talking about whether or not to do something like this.
To the best of my knowledge (IANAL) there isn't any legal precedent favoring either interpretation.
There are plenty of precedents which say that trivial wiggling, to try and evade the terms of an agreement (such as converting a GPLed program into a library and then linking to it) is invalid. If it was copyright infringement when you linked statically, then the judge will normally rule that changing one little compiler flag (with no user-visible effects) does not suddenly make it legal, because there is no substantial difference in the result. Not a sure win in court, but a solid argument, which means the judge is going to be looking closely at the intentions of both parties and the effect on society, to decide which answer is better.
That doesn't conclusively say that dynamic linking is derivation, but it does mean that you shouldn't screw around with it, which is probably 'good enough' - most people aren't going to risk it.
A more interesting question is whether precedents like http://www.benedict.com/Audio/crew/crew.aspx are applicable to software. That one says that if your derived work is sufficiently different and worthwhile, it's all yours even if it contains literal copying that would, on its own, be unlawful.
Re:This is what I want in a future OS
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 1
I keep hearing about stuff like "all your base are belong to thin clients and remote servers" whenever someone mentions the future of OSes and that deeply disturbs me
I'm not too worried. Why not? Because people have been saying that for about fifty years now; one of the earliest statements was that oft-quoted comment about there being no demand for more than six computers in the world (which was really just saying that a handful of central mainframes could support enough terminals for all the projected users). This was the way that things used to be, until about 20-25 years ago with the advent of the PC. Before that it really did look like that would be the future. We stopped doing that because it had two problems:
Different users have very different needs from their hardware, and centralised processing systems are much harder to customise to individual needs than PC-style architecture
Whenever the central system goes down, or your connection to it goes down, you can't get any work done. Imagine the effect on any business if a single hardware failure means that nobody can get any work done until it has been fixed. Many companies have gone out of business because a critical central system went down for a few days and they didn't have enough liquid assets to manage their cash flow any more - it only takes one slip into the red if you're operating with low profit margins, and the debt spiral takes the company out, regardless of how big or small it is.
We have made a lot of advances in the past twenty years, but we've made no progress at all on these two fundamental issues, so centralised processing still won't work. Everything we've learned has indicated that distributed systems are more flexible and reliable, and often faster (if the problem is embarassingly parallel), and that large centralised systems inevitably become mired in bureaucracy and politics until they are agonisingly nasty to use.
So, I predict that in twenty years people will still be trying to sell expensive centralised solutions and talking about how they're the future, while the market continues to migrate towards more distributed solutions. There are always plenty of people who want to try and sell old ideas that don't work (flying cars!), because it's easier than thinking up new ones. They aren't normally very successful.
How much demand will there really be from corporate users?
In my observation, demand for applications like this is high with executives (who like shiny toys but never do any actual work with them), while the peons who would actually be using the system all go 'meh' and carry on using telephones for all their intra-office communication needs. Shared calendars are managed by secretaries via the simple method of talking to each other.
Sure, there's always a few places where stuff like this gets used, and in any large organisation there's always a few people who use them. That group is roughly equivalent to the group that reads slashdot. But most of the workforce just doesn't give a damn and ignores the thing.
Schwartz is in the middle of trying to pull Sun out of a very deep hole.
So it's business as usual at Sun.
Sun *is* an established titan of industry, one that has been hurting for years.
The really strange, curious, and amusing thing about Sun is that this has always been true, at any given point in its history. It is quite difficult to explain why this company is still in business.
Throughout Sun's history, its management has made endless strange and often rather stupid decisions, with the apparent goal of making Sun go out of business as quickly as possible. It rather reminds me of a line from the Hitchhiker's Guide: "The art of flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss". That could be Sun's unofficial motto. Despite all their efforts, they have not yet managed to hit the ground.
There's something very weird about the reality distortion field near that company.
And you don't see any difference in process or potential impact between getting to these end products through slightly differing iterations over thousands of years of evolution and a significant, practically instantaneous, once-off modification ?
Aside from the fact that we're talking about hundreds of years of deliberate human selection, not thousands of years of evolution, no.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the major reason for this is because if you're doing the whole Active Directory thing, using it to its fullest extent, then having both Win2K and XP systems on your domain is a disaster. There's a whole pile of complicated compatibility and migration issues when you get beyond the basic functionality, many of which don't have good solutions. Microsoft's only answer is "upgrade to XP". The corporate world is unamused by the idea that they should deploy XP across the entire company all at once (which is guaranteed to cause disruption to business for weeks until the IT crew get all the problems worked out), so with that plus no compelling reason to upgrade, a lot of them just didn't bother.
Microsoft don't really care, because most of the large corporates are paying them a huge annual fee regardless of what they run. It's the home users who they need to pressure to upgrade.
So it is nothing more than what they did for every previous release of IE (another OK dialog plus some cargo-cult 'security' logic). That's what I thought.
"PlaysForSure" has always been a classic exercise in doubletalk. The thing is entirely about preventing you from playing media.
Now, where have I heard that before? Oh yes, with every previous release of IE. And what they did all those other times was design a complicated system that blames the user for security breaches.
Microsoft thinks that popping up a confirmation dialog makes something secure. The reality is that the idiots who get infested with this crap click 'OK' or 'Continue' on every dialog they see without reading it. Blaming them for it does not accomplish anything; the world remains filled with worm-infested windows boxes sending spam.
The problem here is not that you've got the wrong kind of government. The problem is that you've got the wrong kind of people. Changing the system won't solve the problem that you have idiots doing important jobs.
While this is largely true, there are a number of ways in which the language could be significantly improved upon. Basically, all the nouns and verbs (and noun-/verb-derived adjectives/adverbs) that do not reference mathematically defined concepts are subjective in nature (we can precisely and unambiguously define 'zero', but we cannot give an objective definition for 'pornography'). So as far as those are concerned, you cannot improve on them.
However, those are only part of a language. The other part is all the structural stuff, showing how the subjective words connect together. Human languages are flexible here because they have evolved based on what "sounds good" or "looks good", rather than what is most precise. Unfortunately, they are also ambiguous. There is no good reason why they need to be ambiguous though. It seems to me that you could construct a useful language by using English concept words as predicates, and a syntax based on formal logic. It would probably be easier and more precise to construct laws and contracts in this fashion. It would not solve all the problems of ambiguity that occur, but it could solve some of them.
For example, if you were to write "one person injuring another with a weapon" as "injure(person A, person X where X != A, weapon)", then there is still ambiguity about what "person", "injure" and "weapon" mean, but there is no ambiguity about the fact that we are talking about two distinct "people", and that one of them is "injuring" the other with a "weapon", whatever those three words happen to mean (assuming you set up the syntax that way) - so we've nailed the ambiguity down to a known set of concepts, which a court can then consider. We are certain that this statement does not apply to a person injuring themself, for example.
It's had a lot of people arrested and some convicted, but none of them were terrorists. Usually they get convicted of something like "causing a public nuisance", for being drunk or annoyed at being treated like cattle.
Don't be silly. When you crash the party, they all scream and run to find clothes.
Sneak in the night before and set up concealed cameras. That's where the real money lies.
You're more likely to get your legs broken. Vegas gambling institutions often have ties to organised crime. The justice system in that part of the world is not famous for being free of corruption, either. It's not really a good baseline for comparison.
The real problem here is that the "good faith verification", which the credit card companies encourage everybody to use, is a load of crap that accomplishes nothing. The courts rightly observe that it doesn't prove a damn thing and therefore, with no actual evidence of a transaction, rule that it didn't take place.
The credit card companies are providing a crappy service with no proper verification and people are letting them, because they think it's better to do business while being screwed by the credit companies, than to not do business at all. The courts are happy to accept the combination of a till record, a security camera showing the buyer in the store, and the shop attendant on the witness stand, as proving that the transaction took place. They are not amused by the idea that your knowing the buyer's credit card number and expiry date constitutes proof of anything, because it doesn't.
This kind of stupid is going to continue happening until somebody builds a credit card system with actual working authentication for internet transactions. It would not be technically challenging to create; the "chip and pin" system is already most of the way there. The only problems are political/financial in nature. I don't believe that the credit card companies want to do it; the current system works fine from their perspective.
And allow the parties to object to each other's choices in a whole variety of circumstances, including but not limited to compromising bias on the part of the witness (such that allowing that particular choice could prejudice the trial, in which case the judge will tell the party to pick a different witness). This appears to be what the defendant is asking for here.
You can choose your own expert witnesses, but you can't just choose anybody. There are restrictions, and in an adversarial court system (such as the US one) it is the opposing party's job to ensure that the rules are followed correctly.
Doesn't seem particularly newsworthy though, just standard legal bullshit.
If the cable breaks when you fly an airplane into it, it's too damn small. I suggest that a sensible size would be a mesh of cables, in a tube with a radius of a couple of miles. Once the first one is up, the rest will go up pretty easily, and it gives you enough lifting capacity to do something useful up there (like build an asteroid mining complex and some colony ships).
An airplane, even when exploding, would not do a significant amount of damage to an object the size of a mountain. Some of the cables break, some detritus drops into the sea... who cares? The hole can be easily patched. Properly designed, the thing should be able to hold itself up even with a whole bunch of broken cables (in much the same way that your shirt doesn't fall into pieces when you make a small hole in it).
Smart politicians^Wterrorists would use an asteroid. That could do some damage.
The problems with your analogy are that (a) we aren't capable of building a bridge over the atlantic ocean today, let alone in 1900, and (b) if we could do that, it would be a damn good idea. It's much faster, safer, and cheaper to run a jet-propelled train across a bridge than it is to run an airplane, because you don't have to go to all the effort of keeping the damn thing in the air (and transatlantic-capable boats are incredibly slow). Alternatively you could use a maglev design or something, but my point is based on "use the same drive technology".
Likewise, a ground-to-space elevator is always going to be faster and cheaper than any self-propelled reaction thrust method of getting up there at equivalent technology. If you want to beat the elevator design you're going to need a method of transport that isn't based on throwing mass away to accelerate (because the same power technology, in a non-discarding form, can be used to drive the elevator cars at greater efficiency). Gravity control or controlled wormholes would do the trick - but we'll probably have space elevators long before we figure out if those are even possible.
Okay, so I didn't correct the OP's poor terminology. The point is that it's an effect for the viewer and an action for the autor.
Partly, but another problem is a small but vocal contingent in Debian who either don't understand its approximately-anarchistic nature, want to be rulers, or want to be ruled - and then create a ruckus when something happens that they don't like. I used to be a Debian developer, and I recognise all of the names in this article as being members of that contingent.
Fortunately, the Debian project has a history of being self-correcting. People like this tend to get frustrated and resign.
Hey, it's still working.
For the record, I quit for entirely different reasons, and some of my thoughts at the time on Debian's problems can be found here: http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/01/ms
What you're saying is "if you try to implement your political beliefs then you'll find that actually mine are the only ones which are right". The problem with that assertion should be obvious.
I for one do not, which disproves your thesis.
That's a value judgement on your part that you don't like 'mess', which here is just another name for anarchy.
Your post appears to just say "I don't like that idea. You have to do it my way". Quite ironic, really.
"Suspension of disbelief" is a skill exercised in creating a movie - specifically, it's the art of creating a movie that is unrealistic, but not so unrealistic that it triggers the "wait, this is a load of crap" instinct in the watchers. It's the difference between reasoned speculation and juvenile wish-fulfillment. It's the trick of creating a movie that "makes sense" even though it's fiction. It's okay to be unlikely but you have to avoid unreasonable or impossible or the intelligent parts of the audience are going to (rightly) say that your movie sucks.
It is, in absolutely no sense, the job of the watcher to make the movie not suck. The watcher is the customer. They are paying the maker to make a movie that doesn't suck. If you make a movie and expect the watcher to make it not suck, then you (the maker) need to pay them to watch it, because they're the one doing the work.
A movie that fails to entertain you is not your fault for being a bad watcher, it's a bad movie.
You'd be more convincing if you knew the difference between a PC and a Mac. Totally different hardware and attitude.
Unless, of course, they tag it for WFP. That means, whenever you change it, Windows promptly changes it back and then displays a dialog telling you off for being such a naughty boy. In current versions of Windows, it's possible to disable WFP, but there's no particular reason why that should remain true.
They're currently talking about whether or not to do something like this.
There are plenty of precedents which say that trivial wiggling, to try and evade the terms of an agreement (such as converting a GPLed program into a library and then linking to it) is invalid. If it was copyright infringement when you linked statically, then the judge will normally rule that changing one little compiler flag (with no user-visible effects) does not suddenly make it legal, because there is no substantial difference in the result. Not a sure win in court, but a solid argument, which means the judge is going to be looking closely at the intentions of both parties and the effect on society, to decide which answer is better.
That doesn't conclusively say that dynamic linking is derivation, but it does mean that you shouldn't screw around with it, which is probably 'good enough' - most people aren't going to risk it.
A more interesting question is whether precedents like http://www.benedict.com/Audio/crew/crew.aspx are applicable to software. That one says that if your derived work is sufficiently different and worthwhile, it's all yours even if it contains literal copying that would, on its own, be unlawful.
I'm not too worried. Why not? Because people have been saying that for about fifty years now; one of the earliest statements was that oft-quoted comment about there being no demand for more than six computers in the world (which was really just saying that a handful of central mainframes could support enough terminals for all the projected users). This was the way that things used to be, until about 20-25 years ago with the advent of the PC. Before that it really did look like that would be the future. We stopped doing that because it had two problems:
We have made a lot of advances in the past twenty years, but we've made no progress at all on these two fundamental issues, so centralised processing still won't work. Everything we've learned has indicated that distributed systems are more flexible and reliable, and often faster (if the problem is embarassingly parallel), and that large centralised systems inevitably become mired in bureaucracy and politics until they are agonisingly nasty to use.
So, I predict that in twenty years people will still be trying to sell expensive centralised solutions and talking about how they're the future, while the market continues to migrate towards more distributed solutions. There are always plenty of people who want to try and sell old ideas that don't work (flying cars!), because it's easier than thinking up new ones. They aren't normally very successful.
In my observation, demand for applications like this is high with executives (who like shiny toys but never do any actual work with them), while the peons who would actually be using the system all go 'meh' and carry on using telephones for all their intra-office communication needs. Shared calendars are managed by secretaries via the simple method of talking to each other.
Sure, there's always a few places where stuff like this gets used, and in any large organisation there's always a few people who use them. That group is roughly equivalent to the group that reads slashdot. But most of the workforce just doesn't give a damn and ignores the thing.
So it's business as usual at Sun.
The really strange, curious, and amusing thing about Sun is that this has always been true, at any given point in its history. It is quite difficult to explain why this company is still in business.
Throughout Sun's history, its management has made endless strange and often rather stupid decisions, with the apparent goal of making Sun go out of business as quickly as possible. It rather reminds me of a line from the Hitchhiker's Guide: "The art of flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss". That could be Sun's unofficial motto. Despite all their efforts, they have not yet managed to hit the ground.
There's something very weird about the reality distortion field near that company.
Aside from the fact that we're talking about hundreds of years of deliberate human selection, not thousands of years of evolution, no.
1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 == 3 + 3.
This quote sums it up quite nicely:
It's so very right on so many levels.