I don't see any problem with the 802.11 standards. The only thing that is slightly confusing is that there are several kinds of keys and several kinds of modes, but there is no need to expose that to the user. It's slightly bad that Linux and Macintosh expose this, but they expose it in a straightforward way. Vista, on the other hand, behaves completely differently for some of the modes, and that is an unnecessary usability problem.
A secondary problem is that the legal environment doesn't let computers "experiment". The right thing to do from a usability point of view would be for a computer to look at all wireless networks in range and just try each of them until one works, with all the keys the user has submitted. Unfortunately, that would be considered "hacking" right now.
Suggestions that the Viking experiments were positive for life have been around for many years, and the conclusion has been... that the data is inconclusive. We won't know until we send more probes with more experiments.
Note that hydrogen peroxide is interesting not only for its oxygen content, but also because it greatly lowers the freezing point of water, which would be useful on Mars. Furthermore, hydrogen peroxide does occur naturally in cells, sometimes in significant concentrations and volumes (relative to the whole cell), so the suggestion isn't completely far-fetched.
So, you are saying that we should help people who don't have work visas by letting them gamble???
Your attempt at an argument that gambling should be legal because it helps some people is about as stupid as it gets. Gambling should be legal simply because fighting it is costly and because we shouldn't have to live in a nanny state. But stop spreading stupidity like claiming that gambling is a good way of making money.
The US needs international organizations to enforce the copyrights, trademarks, and other rules that US trade and wealth depends on. When the US disregards those rules, it runs the risk that its own rights will not be respected internationally anymore either. Intellectual property (think Microsoft, Hollywood, drug companies, etc.) is particularly vulnerable.
And that's exactly what the WTO action is supposed to get across: the US has a lot to lose here by not playing by international rules.
What do you mean "connects by default" unless you mean is just connects without asking?
It means that it fails with an obscure error message if you try to connect to secured networks, while it works (after a couple of dialog boxes) if you try to connect to unsecured networks.
Are you saying it shouldn't even show unsecured networks in the list without checking some hidden box somewhere?
Quite to the contrary: I think Vista should do the same thing that Macintosh and Linux do. In particular, it should not pop up a dialog box after the user selects an unsecured network, and it should not give the user an error message when connecting to a secured network, it should just request the information it needs to do so. Those error messages and extra steps don't improve security, but they do decrease usability and increase support costs.
Vista gives you a nice fat warning before you connect to any kind of insecure wireless network.
That doesn't contradict what I'm saying: Vista only connects to unsecured networks by default. I actually said that it didn't connect automatically.
Now, unless I'm missing something, OS X (at least "jaguar" or whatever) will be more than happy to connect to any old unsecured network without telling you. [...] If anybody should be raked in the coals over poorly implemented WiFi, it is Apple.
As far as I can tell, OS X connects automatically only to networks that the user has connected to before, in an MRU fashion. That seems entirely reasonable to me.
but in case anybody believes this and thus doesn't try Vista...
Actually, nothing I said in my last posting should discourage people from trying Vista. What you said, however, should: when I explicitly select a network to connect to, it is stupid for Vista to ask me to confirm; explicitly connecting to an unsecured network is not a security problem. It's just one of the many examples of how Vista's feeble attempts at security make the system unusable. That should discourage people from trying Vista. Thanks for the example.
You are trolling, but in case anybody believes this and thus doesn't try Vista...
Heres a little clue, its open source, CHANGE IT TO USE WHATEVER OPEN SOURCE PACKAGE YOU WANT you mindless twits.
Here's a little clue for you: open source isn't an end in itself, it has a purpose. Not all software that is nominally under an open source license achieves that purpose.
In fact, something being open source doesn't even guarantee that you can change it, it only tells you that the author who put the copyright notice on there gives you that permission.
and in Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista you can't connect to an unsecured network by default.
Every Vista machine I have got connects only to unsecured networks by default; you have to go through several obscure dialog boxes even to mark a network as secure and requiring a password.
I have no idea if Linux or OS X behave the same, but I'd be very surprised if they didn't.
All of them can connect to unsecured networks by default simply by selecting the network from the list of available networks. OS X and Linux also connect to secured networks simply by asking you for the password, while Vista requires more work to connect to secured networks.
If the local legislature enacts a statute imposing a fine for unauthorized access to an unsecured network, and you get caught doing it, you can be fined. It doesn't matter in the least what network access is "like".
Well, I don't know what kind of police state the UK may be, but in the US, that's not true. Many laws get struck down in the courts for many reasons. Many other laws end up being unenforceable for other reasons.
This law strikes me as unenforceable because police simply have no way of determining whether you are using an unsecured access point without searching your laptop, but merely seeing you sitting in your car is not sufficient cause for that.
Since the police can't tell from the outside what you're doing, this basically means that whenever you're using your laptop in your car, UK police may stop and question you, and may insist that you show them what you're doing on your computer.
Even if using open wireless access points should be a crime, that strikes me as completely unreasonable.
It is a police responsibility to prosecute whoever goes into my unlocked house without permission -- even if he only uses a toilet (thus using some water and electricity) without breaking anything.
No, it's not; the police can only intervene if they have reasonable cause, and someone going into an unlocked house isn't reasonable cause by itself--and I certainly wouldn't want it to be either.
Actually, they will first be concentrated, and then become more and more dilute, which ensures that somewhere along the line, they will have the ideal concentration for creating resistant bacteria.
This is only against stupid opponents or crowds. A smart opponent will, if anything is at stake, run the same simulation, predict your action based on your prediction, and alter his behavior accordingly.
What makes this book crackpot is that it's reasoning based on superficial similarity and analogies rather than a carefully constructed chain of reasoning.
Unfortunately, this is quite commonplace, and you don't have to look to biology to find it: in computer science, people do the same thing. Things like "your data is safe because the database uses transactions", or "the programming language is fast because it compiles into native code", or "the code is fast because it uses pointers", etc.
Most science these days is crackpot; some people just hide it better than others.
It isn't really open source if you need to buy proprietary software in order to run it.
Maybe Mono can be used to free some of that software, but this is basically just a self-serving effort by Microsoft to get free labor out of people. Some other companies are abusing open source in a similarly sleazy way. You know who you are.
Actually, I disagree. If we keep them, they take a job from an American.
In fact, historically, immigrants in the high-tech industry have created far more jobs than they have taken; a big part of the US computer industry, as well as a big part of US science and technology in general was built by foreigners.
If we send them home, they compete with us from abroad, and make money for India/China instead of for the US.
You're quite right about that. Where you're wrong is that you think you can stop it by denying them education. If the US doesn't train these people, other nations will.
Even if denying them education would work, it would be short-sighted: these countries need to develop in order to buy US products. Furthermore, the greater the disparity between the US and those other countries, the more likely the US will be attacked.
instead of giving it to an American, who will also perform the same work, for what is likely a longer period of time?
Those Americans that are capable of doing this work generally aren't interested in it.
Furthermore, you make it sound like the US government can control this; it cannot. University decides who they admit, and companies decide where and who they hire. If the US government tries to interfere with this, the research, students, and jobs will simply leave the country.
What are you some disciple of Tanenbaum come to diss me over the lack of microness in the Linux kernel.
Microkernels are only one of the many things that have happened in kernels. There has been a lot of work on static type safety, verification, adaptivity, componentization, message passing, object-orientation, new security techniques, and many others.
You are a troll pokey.
No, the "troll" is Linus, I merely used his words, which happen to fit the Linux kernel just as well as they fit Subversion.
I got all night.
Well, yes, evidently you have nothing better to do.
In fact, all of those diseases, including cancer, involve some degree of inflammation. And hydrogen peroxide is a key compound in inflammation, basically used as a general purpose "local disinfectant" by the body.
What kind of stupid metaphor is that? Red shift means that they are moving away from the observer fast, blue shift means that they are moving towards the observer fast.
As for the "theory", mainly what you're seeing is that fast growing companies buy a lot more hardware; they do that for two reasons: (1) they are adding customers and (2) they don't have time to tune their software, so they are using disproportionate amounts of resources. But the cause is fast growth, and buying lots of hardware is the effect.
Oh, one thing that's pretty clear: many of those companies are not buying Sun products. Why would they?
It is probably the most advanced and stable kernel out there.
What kernels do you actually know?
Why do you think it owns a lot of high end film production? ILM, Pixar and more. It is used for many super computers and kinda owns clustering.
Well, the Linux kernel is used in all those areas because they don't need a lot of advanced features; in some of them, complexity is downright harmful. In fact, there are few applications that do. That's why a simple, open source kernel with lots of drivers does the trick.
That's why Linux is so successful: it's simple, it's limited, and it's good enough. Furthermore, the kernel and its maintenance are so byzantine that it simply can't be changed quickly, which is something the market likes (kind of like the market also usually likes it when the US government is deadlocked).
The Linux kernel is, I think, a classic case of 'good enough'. It's what people are used to, and it's 'good enough' to be used fairly widely, but it's good enough in exactly the sense DOS and Windows were 'good enough'. Not great technology, just very widely available, and it works well enough for people and looks familiar enough that people use it.
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I don't see any problem with the 802.11 standards. The only thing that is slightly confusing is that there are several kinds of keys and several kinds of modes, but there is no need to expose that to the user. It's slightly bad that Linux and Macintosh expose this, but they expose it in a straightforward way. Vista, on the other hand, behaves completely differently for some of the modes, and that is an unnecessary usability problem.
A secondary problem is that the legal environment doesn't let computers "experiment". The right thing to do from a usability point of view would be for a computer to look at all wireless networks in range and just try each of them until one works, with all the keys the user has submitted. Unfortunately, that would be considered "hacking" right now.
Suggestions that the Viking experiments were positive for life have been around for many years, and the conclusion has been... that the data is inconclusive. We won't know until we send more probes with more experiments.
Note that hydrogen peroxide is interesting not only for its oxygen content, but also because it greatly lowers the freezing point of water, which would be useful on Mars. Furthermore, hydrogen peroxide does occur naturally in cells, sometimes in significant concentrations and volumes (relative to the whole cell), so the suggestion isn't completely far-fetched.
Yeah; it's called China. Too bad about the government, though.
So, you are saying that we should help people who don't have work visas by letting them gamble???
Your attempt at an argument that gambling should be legal because it helps some people is about as stupid as it gets. Gambling should be legal simply because fighting it is costly and because we shouldn't have to live in a nanny state. But stop spreading stupidity like claiming that gambling is a good way of making money.
The US needs international organizations to enforce the copyrights, trademarks, and other rules that US trade and wealth depends on. When the US disregards those rules, it runs the risk that its own rights will not be respected internationally anymore either. Intellectual property (think Microsoft, Hollywood, drug companies, etc.) is particularly vulnerable.
And that's exactly what the WTO action is supposed to get across: the US has a lot to lose here by not playing by international rules.
What do you mean "connects by default" unless you mean is just connects without asking?
It means that it fails with an obscure error message if you try to connect to secured networks, while it works (after a couple of dialog boxes) if you try to connect to unsecured networks.
Are you saying it shouldn't even show unsecured networks in the list without checking some hidden box somewhere?
Quite to the contrary: I think Vista should do the same thing that Macintosh and Linux do. In particular, it should not pop up a dialog box after the user selects an unsecured network, and it should not give the user an error message when connecting to a secured network, it should just request the information it needs to do so. Those error messages and extra steps don't improve security, but they do decrease usability and increase support costs.
Vista gives you a nice fat warning before you connect to any kind of insecure wireless network.
That doesn't contradict what I'm saying: Vista only connects to unsecured networks by default. I actually said that it didn't connect automatically.
Now, unless I'm missing something, OS X (at least "jaguar" or whatever) will be more than happy to connect to any old unsecured network without telling you. [...] If anybody should be raked in the coals over poorly implemented WiFi, it is Apple.
As far as I can tell, OS X connects automatically only to networks that the user has connected to before, in an MRU fashion. That seems entirely reasonable to me.
but in case anybody believes this and thus doesn't try Vista...
Actually, nothing I said in my last posting should discourage people from trying Vista. What you said, however, should: when I explicitly select a network to connect to, it is stupid for Vista to ask me to confirm; explicitly connecting to an unsecured network is not a security problem. It's just one of the many examples of how Vista's feeble attempts at security make the system unusable. That should discourage people from trying Vista. Thanks for the example.
You are trolling, but in case anybody believes this and thus doesn't try Vista...
No, you are trolling.
Heres a little clue, its open source, CHANGE IT TO USE WHATEVER OPEN SOURCE PACKAGE YOU WANT you mindless twits.
Here's a little clue for you: open source isn't an end in itself, it has a purpose. Not all software that is nominally under an open source license achieves that purpose.
In fact, something being open source doesn't even guarantee that you can change it, it only tells you that the author who put the copyright notice on there gives you that permission.
and in Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista you can't connect to an unsecured network by default.
Every Vista machine I have got connects only to unsecured networks by default; you have to go through several obscure dialog boxes even to mark a network as secure and requiring a password.
I have no idea if Linux or OS X behave the same, but I'd be very surprised if they didn't.
All of them can connect to unsecured networks by default simply by selecting the network from the list of available networks. OS X and Linux also connect to secured networks simply by asking you for the password, while Vista requires more work to connect to secured networks.
If the local legislature enacts a statute imposing a fine for unauthorized access to an unsecured network, and you get caught doing it, you can be fined. It doesn't matter in the least what network access is "like".
Well, I don't know what kind of police state the UK may be, but in the US, that's not true. Many laws get struck down in the courts for many reasons. Many other laws end up being unenforceable for other reasons.
This law strikes me as unenforceable because police simply have no way of determining whether you are using an unsecured access point without searching your laptop, but merely seeing you sitting in your car is not sufficient cause for that.
Since the police can't tell from the outside what you're doing, this basically means that whenever you're using your laptop in your car, UK police may stop and question you, and may insist that you show them what you're doing on your computer.
Even if using open wireless access points should be a crime, that strikes me as completely unreasonable.
It is a police responsibility to prosecute whoever goes into my unlocked house without permission -- even if he only uses a toilet (thus using some water and electricity) without breaking anything.
No, it's not; the police can only intervene if they have reasonable cause, and someone going into an unlocked house isn't reasonable cause by itself--and I certainly wouldn't want it to be either.
Actually, they will first be concentrated, and then become more and more dilute, which ensures that somewhere along the line, they will have the ideal concentration for creating resistant bacteria.
This is only against stupid opponents or crowds. A smart opponent will, if anything is at stake, run the same simulation, predict your action based on your prediction, and alter his behavior accordingly.
What makes this book crackpot is that it's reasoning based on superficial similarity and analogies rather than a carefully constructed chain of reasoning.
Unfortunately, this is quite commonplace, and you don't have to look to biology to find it: in computer science, people do the same thing. Things like "your data is safe because the database uses transactions", or "the programming language is fast because it compiles into native code", or "the code is fast because it uses pointers", etc.
Most science these days is crackpot; some people just hide it better than others.
It isn't really open source if you need to buy proprietary software in order to run it.
Maybe Mono can be used to free some of that software, but this is basically just a self-serving effort by Microsoft to get free labor out of people. Some other companies are abusing open source in a similarly sleazy way. You know who you are.
Actually, I disagree. If we keep them, they take a job from an American.
In fact, historically, immigrants in the high-tech industry have created far more jobs than they have taken; a big part of the US computer industry, as well as a big part of US science and technology in general was built by foreigners.
If we send them home, they compete with us from abroad, and make money for India/China instead of for the US.
You're quite right about that. Where you're wrong is that you think you can stop it by denying them education. If the US doesn't train these people, other nations will.
Even if denying them education would work, it would be short-sighted: these countries need to develop in order to buy US products. Furthermore, the greater the disparity between the US and those other countries, the more likely the US will be attacked.
instead of giving it to an American, who will also perform the same work, for what is likely a longer period of time?
Those Americans that are capable of doing this work generally aren't interested in it.
Furthermore, you make it sound like the US government can control this; it cannot. University decides who they admit, and companies decide where and who they hire. If the US government tries to interfere with this, the research, students, and jobs will simply leave the country.
Age alone can't be it; supernova remnants as old as 10 billion years have been observed. But it may have become ejected from wherever it originated.
What are you some disciple of Tanenbaum come to diss me over the lack of microness in the Linux kernel.
Microkernels are only one of the many things that have happened in kernels. There has been a lot of work on static type safety, verification, adaptivity, componentization, message passing, object-orientation, new security techniques, and many others.
You are a troll pokey.
No, the "troll" is Linus, I merely used his words, which happen to fit the Linux kernel just as well as they fit Subversion.
I got all night.
Well, yes, evidently you have nothing better to do.
In fact, all of those diseases, including cancer, involve some degree of inflammation. And hydrogen peroxide is a key compound in inflammation, basically used as a general purpose "local disinfectant" by the body.
I'm pretty certain this was done deliberately. Imagine you are the observer and you are chasing after the star.
Why would I want to chase after Sun? If they want my money, they should damned well blue-shift towards me.
What kind of stupid metaphor is that? Red shift means that they are moving away from the observer fast, blue shift means that they are moving towards the observer fast.
As for the "theory", mainly what you're seeing is that fast growing companies buy a lot more hardware; they do that for two reasons: (1) they are adding customers and (2) they don't have time to tune their software, so they are using disproportionate amounts of resources. But the cause is fast growth, and buying lots of hardware is the effect.
Oh, one thing that's pretty clear: many of those companies are not buying Sun products. Why would they?
All of the kernels you list are commercial and technologically.
If you want to see what's been happening in OS kernels since the 1970's, go read the CS literature.
It is probably the most advanced and stable kernel out there.
What kernels do you actually know?
Why do you think it owns a lot of high end film production? ILM, Pixar and more. It is used for many super computers and kinda owns clustering.
Well, the Linux kernel is used in all those areas because they don't need a lot of advanced features; in some of them, complexity is downright harmful. In fact, there are few applications that do. That's why a simple, open source kernel with lots of drivers does the trick.
That's why Linux is so successful: it's simple, it's limited, and it's good enough. Furthermore, the kernel and its maintenance are so byzantine that it simply can't be changed quickly, which is something the market likes (kind of like the market also usually likes it when the US government is deadlocked).
The Linux kernel is, I think, a classic case of 'good enough'. It's what people are used to, and it's 'good enough' to be used fairly widely, but it's good enough in exactly the sense DOS and Windows were 'good enough'. Not great technology, just very widely available, and it works well enough for people and looks familiar enough that people use it.