As has been stated repeatedly before, elsewhere, I wish I had mod points right now.
With that in mind, the first two statements pretty much sum it up. "Because I want to change it" is not a good reason, nor really is a designer saying "I don't like how it looks" if, while ugly, it's intuitive for the user to figure out.
I think I've taken all of half a dozen looks at the beta site, and without fail, my response is "get me the f*** out of here", not because it's unfamiliar (though it is), but because what I see is a jumbled mess that makes following LKML in message-received order when there are multiple heated discussions going on in parallel an easy task.
With that said, I don't consider JS to be the harbinger of death and otherwise all that is evil. Some designers & developers have never heard of progressive enhancement though, causing problems left and right. There are things that can be added to the current UI without completely breaking it that make things more convenient ("Load more comments" is actually one I use regularly, because I'm also aware of how broken the pagination of comments happens to be - but then again, threaded commenting doesn't lend itself to pagination without complete disposal of context. I'd rather read the comment threads and if that means a bit of script, so be it.)
Yup. It's sure the first result on Yahoo. Of course, the last update prior to yesterday that I can find has approximately nothing to do with this "Android Data" thing.
A bit more research, and you'll find: The site was last updated yesterday. The content that was there at it's last indexing on Google and MSN is the same as what is currently up at www.pushpuppets.net. As well, android-data.com (the actual domain for the "product") was registered on 2009/04/20; it's been around for a grand total of 12 days. The site that was there before, according to archive.org: it's a parking page for someone else operating a business by the name of "Android Data Services", though checking androiddata.com on archive.org gets you the same site: defunct since 2006, with it's last update being 2003/01/23. Searching for android-data.com gets you no site whatsoever, on Google, Yahoo, or MSN.
This reads to me as though truth is more idiotic than fiction. Nefarious is more likely the case: everything I've been able to tell suggests that the name and product have been dead for at least 3 years, if not more likely 6 years. Looks more like a case of "I might be able to sue Google for lots of money" than anything. The likelihood of actually winning any lawsuit there, suing over a product that nobody has ever heard of, on a trademark that nobody has ever heard of (until today)... um, right. Maybe if he were actually developing & promoting that product, then he'd have something to say.
Hm. Well, methane will generate CO2 as it's end result, whether it's used for power or not - it undergoes an oxidation reaction over time: CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O. It's also 75 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and as it decomposes to CO2 anyway, net output of CO2 from burning methane from such sources as cow dung is nil.
Wind, solar, and hydrogen all have their issues: wind and solar are unreliable over time, because they both ultimately depend on the weather conditions, and hydrogen isn't an energy source. Free H2 uses a lot of energy to obtain, unless it's obtained from fossil fuels, which, while potentially better for the environment, still leaves us with a non-renewable resource.
Hm. I've got Clear in Portland; I'm in 97239, for what it's worth. They might not advertise it as being available - the primary reason that I've been able to tell is because the signal strength / quality isn't anything great. It's certainly enough to get the job done - once the equipment is placed in a good spot, I still get 5.5Mbit, but in a bad spot (which can be as little as a few inches from the good spot: at least I have ziploc bags and tape, since it's taped to the end of my balcony right now) I'll be lucky to get dialup speeds.
The realm is only half of the identifying element - the URL requesting authentication is the other half. For basic authentication (RFC 2617, section 2), the realm value is only for the server sending it; if another server (identified typically by [ http/https, hostname, port ]) sends me a WWW-Authenticate header with the same realm name specified, for the purposes of authentication it is a different realm. In digest authentication (section 3), it is possible to have credentials go across multiple servers, but such servers have to be specified in the initial WWW-Authenticate header in a "domain" parameter; otherwise, the authentication is again only available to the server sending the WWW-Authenticate header in the first place.
Ultimately, unless your system, DNS server, proxy server (if you're using one), gateway, or the target server, have been broken into, obtaining the credentials for any given realm is going to be difficult; if your system has been broken into, this is pointless because they could just as easily install a keylogger to capture the authentication information as it's being entered; if your gateway has been broken into, then unless you're performing all authenticated transactions over HTTPS and/or not using HTTP Basic authentication, the information is going across there in cleartext anyway, and tcpdump is all that's needed to extract it. Since the proxy server tends to exist at the gateway level anyway, the same issues apply there. As far as the target server goes - you can either capture the authentication info there, or, since you've got permissions to do anything the webserver is capable of, including generally accessing the authentication DB, just grab the authentication information and be done with it.
So... good luck at attempting to reuse the exact realm of another server - since, for the purposes of comparing authentication realms, the realm name is little more than a token which identifies a given protection space on a single server (or multiple explicitly specified servers in HTTP Digest, but that's still explicit).
Eep. That's painful. I would have already spent $120 on data charges if I had to put up with those data rates in the past 2 days... I've only had my current phone for that long, too. Ouch.
Actually used Verizon FIOS for a few months here not too long ago - service was pretty decent, all things considered. My mother (who is the person with the connection; I lived with her until about a month ago) called me complaining that she was unable to get online for whatever reason. Brought over my laptop, plugged it in, called up Verizon, and was back online in about 10 minutes (most of that time spent on the phone waiting for the computer to finish asking me questions), the only issue being that their DHCP server got a wee bit messed up. Also was getting the advertised 5M/2M service (which was the base package) regardless of what was being run over the connection. I'm on Comcast now, and by comparison, it sucks horribly. Annoying part is that the apartment complex that I'm in now doesn't even have Verizon as an option - my alternative to Comcast is Qwest, and having put up with them at work, I wasn't terribly pleased there, either, though now that the service is set up, I might have actually found them to be a better choice.
As far as Comcast and connectivity - well, yeah, you're connected. They didn't finally get a connection up here until 2 weeks after move-in. I also see latency regularly jump to 1.5s to ping out to the gateway; seems kind of absurd to me, personally.
The short-term result is millions of people who pirated your software, the long term result is millions of people who will ultimately purchase your software. See also, Microsoft loses a little money from someone not purchasing the upgrade copy of Vista, but it comes right back to them when that person goes out and purchases a new machine with (guess what) Vista installed on it. So, at least in the case of Microsoft, pirating their software is a marketing tool - rather like a drug. The first hit is always free, you know.
As far as OS X goes - there is a "Control Panel", it's known as "System Preferences". Icons line up on the right by default, which can be a wee bit of a pain when your primary display is the one on the left, but the same is true if you're in KDE or such and your primary display is the one on the right. As far as "desktop properties" go, if you're talking about the primary thing people care to change about their desktop (the background), then yes, you can right-click to get the desktop properties, but desktop resolution is configured elsewhere (System Preferences -> Display). And, of course, the whole thing with using an Apple mouse - it's not specifically a "right click" so much as it is ctrl+click, mostly because the mouse only has one button unless you've replaced it.
Even of the items that I know about - which is most of them - that doesn't mean that I follow them. As far as them being common "geek" sense, they might be, but:
"Don't click on links in email messages. Type the URL in your browser manually." - bit overkill. Check to see where they're going first. And your mail client shouldn't have any active content enabled for viewing mail in the first place, so a JavaScript onmouseover/onmouseout/onclick handler attached to a link would have no effect anyway. If you're following the other suggestions on the list, this doesn't matter anyway, since your email is plain text and any links that appear in the body of the mail message are a result of the mail client automatically highlighting what looks like a link.
"Disable the preview pane in all your inboxes." - That's what you disable any sort of active content for in the first place - it should be the default in any reasonable mail client to not have any sort of active content running in your mail client.
"Read all email in plain text." - and this one as well.
"Don't open email attachments." - this falls into the category of something most people probably don't know about, but that's because they tend to trust their email. As far as it goes, though, don't open unexpected attachments seems more correct than not opening any attachments.
"Don't use Java, JavaScript, and ActiveX." - It's not Java and JavaScript that you need to worry about so much, it's ActiveX. And since the only browser that will run ActiveX is MSIE, that's already been taken care of by one of the other suggestions farther down this list.
"Don't check your email with Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express." - which is perfectly acceptable in a personal context. Too many businesses, however, mandate Outlook and Exchange. Get businesses off of Exchange once a viable competitor becomes available and then getting them off of Outlook becomes easier.
"Don't display your email address on your web site." - or on any website, if you can get away with it.
"Don't follow links in web pages, email messages, or newsgroup without knowing what they link to." - That's the first point on this list, really.
"Don't let the computer save your passwords." - I'll agree with this one, but for places that I don't care about the password that I use, it still gets saved here on the computer, simply because I'll never remember the account name / password the next time I need to use it if I don't.
"Don't trust the "From" line in email messages." - perfectly reasonable.
"Never Use Internet Explorer and instead Switch to Firefox." - Don't I wish life were that easy? Reasonable idea, but talk 80% of the users of the internet into it... until then, it's not going away.
"Never run a program unless you know it to be authored by a person or company that you trust." - perfectly reasonable.
"Read the User Agreement thoroughly on all software you download to ensure it is not spyware." - this gets you approximately nowhere, since pretty much every EULA includes clauses that basically allow the distributor / author of the software to do whatever they want to your computer without any liability on their part.
"Don't count on your email system to block all worms and viruses." - this is one of those things that should be obvious to anyone who has been online for more than an hour.
"Get a Mac" - as much as I like this idea, that sounds like an idea that would just change the targets of viruses and worms from Windows-based platforms to Mac-based platforms. They might be more secure - but how frequently is a Mac targeted in preference to a Windows system?
So really, most, if not all, of that list isn't a "never do that", but a "use common sense before you do that", and that's most of what it amounts to in the first place. Security would be better if it wasn't for the hideous defaults that we put up with - which in an ideal environment without worms and viruses and such would make for better usability, but since most people don't use their computers in a hermetically sealed room with no connection to the outside world whatsoever...
Yes, there are already comments along the lines of "why use OS X if you're not going to use Aqua?"; that's basically what it amounts to. You get few, if any, benefits from ditching Aqua if you're still running OS X - the only thing that you get from it is the drivers that came with the system in the first place, and if that's all you want, you can always run Darwin instead and copy in the necessary kexts for the hardware that doesn't already have drivers with it, especially since, under the hood, Darwin and OS X are the same, except that Darwin comes configured to run primarily as a *nix-type command-line based system instead of as a desktop with a nice GUI.
Could it be done? Yes, but it would probably take a larger investment of time to figure out how to remove or disable the stuff you don't want than it would be to start from a system that comes ready to run the way you want it anyway.
So.... they've got a statistics page for their defect scanning tool. Which says that Subversion has 15 lines of code... umm, have they run their bug scanner against their own code?:)
Actually, it's possible on Windows as well. Not that I particularly *like* Windows by any stretch of the imagination, but XP and 2003, at least, will write a memory dump to the system swap file to be copied into %systemroot%\memory.dmp on the following startup, provided that it's configured to do so. The memory dump can then be loaded into a debugger to do post-mortem debugging. It does have a talent for not being the most useful on some configurations - I've run into issues on systems with >2G of memory, generally with the end of the dump file being truncated, but it certainly does save those details for later analysis.
Perhaps it's a DSL modem with a built-in switch? I don't know... I know the DSL modem / firewall that I've got sitting here has a built-in switch and such on it, but it still only runs 100baseTX-FD, though the way I've figured it's not like it makes much difference unless I'm communicating with the machine on the floor next to me. The rest of the house is behind an ancient 10baseT hub, not that, for internet access, anyone would ever notice. The hub never gets saturated in the first place... 3Mbit in from the DSL line isn't enough to do that.
Well, that or you plan your route such that you can purchase more bananas every so often along your trip, and then you pick them up as you need them.:)
As far as covering 3,145 miles on a bicycle goes... well, I know that a bicycle will go that far without falling apart, though you're likely to require new inner tubes, tires, and brake pads by that point.
(And anyone who doesn't have a computer hooked up to a television is just living in a sad, last-millenium hardware setup.)
Meh. I never bother hooking the computer to the television; I prefer the TV tuner in the computer. (Of course, my most current working system right now is a dual Celeron 500, so...)
Well, I don't know about you, but I'm less worried about the acts most people consider "terrorism", which usually involves such actions as bombings, hostage taking, and such; and more worried about the actions being taken by King George and his cronies, using "terrorism" as a magic word to get anything to go through Congress. So - do I give up my right to say what I want without having to worry about going to a Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison because the government doesn't like it (no, that doesn't mean that my speech doesn't necessarily have consequences - but those consequences are from other people); or my right to not be searched (my person, my belongings, or my communications) without either good cause or my consent, or my right to not incriminate myself - simply because the government thinks it needs to know what I happen to be doing and saying at any point in time?
My opinion is that you might as well be dead if you have no freedoms. On another note, such things as what happened on 9/11 weren't commonplace prior to 9/11; the bombings in Iraq are caused by our intervention there; the terrorist attacks in Israel are caused by our intervention there. Afghanistan is still a mess, because of our intervention there; it will be a mess for a long time as a result, and when it finally stabilizes, I highly doubt they'll be on anything resembling friendly terms with us. Is there a pattern there? Yes - we went in; with cause in the case of Afghanistan in 2001-2002, and with cause in the case of Iraq - in 1992, but not in 2004... in the case of Israel, we forcibly moved people who were there at the time and relocated people of Jewish descent there at the end of WWII; ultimately destroyed the nations in question for various reasons - terrorism, for example - and what proceeded to happen was that they became unstable territories and breeding grounds for exactly what's happening. The population originally in those places didn't want us there, but we shoved our noses in anyway. We pissed off a *lot* of people - now, we've got hundreds of millions of pissed off people, some with the desire to do something about it, in places where there isn't much of anything that they can do about it to make their issues known or otherwise correct the causes of their problems.
So - without the "safeguards that people are worried infringe on their freedom", 9/11-style events weren't happening here regularly. They weren't happening here because our system works, for the most part - the events of 9/11 were (directly or indirectly) caused by the actions of our government. Certainly, we need to pay more attention, but the systems that were in place worked before 9/11, so what changed after 9/11 to cause the existing systems to break? My guess - not a damned thing. Lots of things did change as a result, sure - but the events of that day didn't show us that our system was broken, they showed us that the people running the system needed to open their eyes. The only thing that was broken before was that we were too complacent - assuming that nothing was going to happen to us, because that's just the way things were.
Bit of a cliche here - but: those who would give up essential liberty for a little temporary security will soon have neither. Basically - if you think it's a good idea to give up your freedoms, just remember that it's a lot easier to give up freedom than it is to get it back later; and that the complacency that took place before 9/11 will come back soon enough, but the powers that were given to the government as a result of that day - taking away our freedom - won't go away.
Every PC that I own has a hardware power switch on them, except for this laptop. Of course, it's got no main battery and no PRAM battery, so when I want it physically off, I pull the power cord, which I have to do more often than not anyway. Everything else certainly has a softswitch on it, but they do have the physical switch on the back of the power supply as well.
As to WOL, that also means that the NIC is active regardless of whether the power is "on" or "off" as far as the sofware-controlled power is concerned - no power because the actual hardware power switch is in the off position means that WOL won't work, regardless of how many magic packets you send. So that turns into "can't be turned on by software" - exactly how I'd want a DRM switch to be, otherwise my configuration settings mean absolutely nothing. Especially when it's stuff that other people want on, and will try doing anything to get it turned on.
Dunno about BIOS-disabled myself... if I'm going to be able to turn off DRM on any machine that I end up with, it's got to be in the hardware itself - a jumper or something; if it's software disabled, it's possible for software to re-enable it at a later point, and if I'm turning it off, it's because I specifically want it off. Same thing as a physical power switch - when the switch is in the "off" position, there's not a damned thing that can be done by software to turn on whatever devices are connected to it; about the only thing that can be done is overload the switch itself with a big power surge, which most likely ends up destroying whatever is connected to it anyway.
So yeah, while it might be more difficult to actually flip a switch or pull a jumper, the truly paranoid among us are going to be justifyably fearful of a soft-off for things like DRM.
You know, I've got a PowerBook G3 sitting here on my lap... runs plenty snappy enough for my purposes, in either OS X 10.3 or Linux (Gentoo PPC, stage 3). The closest I've really had to issues with this machine has nothing to do with the OS it's running and more to do with this hardware being picky about the memory you put into it. But such is the case with the Lombard-series laptops. In either case, it runs nicely for whatever I feel like throwing at it, keeping in mind that it's a bit memory-limited and that it's not the absolute fastest machine out there.
They're going to pay the legal fees and fines for one person and they've "joined the fight"?
They could very well be testing the water, you know. Not many of the families being sued (sorry, extorted) by the RIAA have the resources backing them to even make it possible to stand up to them without going bankrupt in the process, even if they win. Make the RIAA start losing, you start setting precedent. Start setting precedent, the cases start getting thrown out before there is a trial because there's not anything left to back them up. If you can make them start losing, then it doesn't take a lot to end the whole thing; but it takes someone willing and able to stand up and fight back. Publicity stunt? Certainly. Exactly what's needed? Definately.
It's a profit decision, sure. Assuming those values, though - of the 2 groups of people who use alternative browsers, most of them are the geeks, the rest are Mac users, a generally more affluent and powerful group anyway. Not supporting alternative browsers also makes you more vulnerable to looking bad in the eyes of both of these groups - and while they're a small proportion of the marketplace, combined there's a disproportionally large share of power between them.
If you've got a website where you potentially promote your business or whatnot, and it doesn't work in whatever browser the end user happens to use, you make yourself look bad - make yourself look bad to the decision maker, and you've lost almost any chance of selling your product to them in the first place; make yourself look bad to the geek, and they're going to tell their friends and family to not support your business. Either case is bad - potentially worse for you to not support the alternative browsers, even if their users don't directly make you any money, as people connected to them very well might.
So in the end, is it worth writing off the 1,000 users you presented above because they won't buy your software, simply because it costs $10,000 to redesign what you're working with so that it does? Sure, that's where your point of good will comes in - not just in supporting legacy systems, but in supporting alternative systems as well, which is especially true when it comes to designing web-based software. Make it difficult or impossible for a group of users to get to or use your software and they're not going to recommend it to anyone, and are even more likely to attempt to dissuade anyone they know from using it.
Slashdot Mirror
From the original submission: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/malwa...
As has been stated repeatedly before, elsewhere, I wish I had mod points right now.
With that in mind, the first two statements pretty much sum it up. "Because I want to change it" is not a good reason, nor really is a designer saying "I don't like how it looks" if, while ugly, it's intuitive for the user to figure out.
I think I've taken all of half a dozen looks at the beta site, and without fail, my response is "get me the f*** out of here", not because it's unfamiliar (though it is), but because what I see is a jumbled mess that makes following LKML in message-received order when there are multiple heated discussions going on in parallel an easy task.
With that said, I don't consider JS to be the harbinger of death and otherwise all that is evil. Some designers & developers have never heard of progressive enhancement though, causing problems left and right. There are things that can be added to the current UI without completely breaking it that make things more convenient ("Load more comments" is actually one I use regularly, because I'm also aware of how broken the pagination of comments happens to be - but then again, threaded commenting doesn't lend itself to pagination without complete disposal of context. I'd rather read the comment threads and if that means a bit of script, so be it.)
Yup. It's sure the first result on Yahoo. Of course, the last update prior to yesterday that I can find has approximately nothing to do with this "Android Data" thing.
A bit more research, and you'll find: The site was last updated yesterday. The content that was there at it's last indexing on Google and MSN is the same as what is currently up at www.pushpuppets.net. As well, android-data.com (the actual domain for the "product") was registered on 2009/04/20; it's been around for a grand total of 12 days. The site that was there before, according to archive.org: it's a parking page for someone else operating a business by the name of "Android Data Services", though checking androiddata.com on archive.org gets you the same site: defunct since 2006, with it's last update being 2003/01/23. Searching for android-data.com gets you no site whatsoever, on Google, Yahoo, or MSN.
This reads to me as though truth is more idiotic than fiction. Nefarious is more likely the case: everything I've been able to tell suggests that the name and product have been dead for at least 3 years, if not more likely 6 years. Looks more like a case of "I might be able to sue Google for lots of money" than anything. The likelihood of actually winning any lawsuit there, suing over a product that nobody has ever heard of, on a trademark that nobody has ever heard of (until today)... um, right. Maybe if he were actually developing & promoting that product, then he'd have something to say.
Hm. Well, methane will generate CO2 as it's end result, whether it's used for power or not - it undergoes an oxidation reaction over time: CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O. It's also 75 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and as it decomposes to CO2 anyway, net output of CO2 from burning methane from such sources as cow dung is nil.
Wind, solar, and hydrogen all have their issues: wind and solar are unreliable over time, because they both ultimately depend on the weather conditions, and hydrogen isn't an energy source. Free H2 uses a lot of energy to obtain, unless it's obtained from fossil fuels, which, while potentially better for the environment, still leaves us with a non-renewable resource.
Hm. I've got Clear in Portland; I'm in 97239, for what it's worth. They might not advertise it as being available - the primary reason that I've been able to tell is because the signal strength / quality isn't anything great. It's certainly enough to get the job done - once the equipment is placed in a good spot, I still get 5.5Mbit, but in a bad spot (which can be as little as a few inches from the good spot: at least I have ziploc bags and tape, since it's taped to the end of my balcony right now) I'll be lucky to get dialup speeds.
The realm is only half of the identifying element - the URL requesting authentication is the other half. For basic authentication (RFC 2617, section 2), the realm value is only for the server sending it; if another server (identified typically by [ http/https, hostname, port ]) sends me a WWW-Authenticate header with the same realm name specified, for the purposes of authentication it is a different realm. In digest authentication (section 3), it is possible to have credentials go across multiple servers, but such servers have to be specified in the initial WWW-Authenticate header in a "domain" parameter; otherwise, the authentication is again only available to the server sending the WWW-Authenticate header in the first place.
Ultimately, unless your system, DNS server, proxy server (if you're using one), gateway, or the target server, have been broken into, obtaining the credentials for any given realm is going to be difficult; if your system has been broken into, this is pointless because they could just as easily install a keylogger to capture the authentication information as it's being entered; if your gateway has been broken into, then unless you're performing all authenticated transactions over HTTPS and/or not using HTTP Basic authentication, the information is going across there in cleartext anyway, and tcpdump is all that's needed to extract it. Since the proxy server tends to exist at the gateway level anyway, the same issues apply there. As far as the target server goes - you can either capture the authentication info there, or, since you've got permissions to do anything the webserver is capable of, including generally accessing the authentication DB, just grab the authentication information and be done with it.
So... good luck at attempting to reuse the exact realm of another server - since, for the purposes of comparing authentication realms, the realm name is little more than a token which identifies a given protection space on a single server (or multiple explicitly specified servers in HTTP Digest, but that's still explicit).
Eep. That's painful. I would have already spent $120 on data charges if I had to put up with those data rates in the past 2 days... I've only had my current phone for that long, too. Ouch.
Actually used Verizon FIOS for a few months here not too long ago - service was pretty decent, all things considered. My mother (who is the person with the connection; I lived with her until about a month ago) called me complaining that she was unable to get online for whatever reason. Brought over my laptop, plugged it in, called up Verizon, and was back online in about 10 minutes (most of that time spent on the phone waiting for the computer to finish asking me questions), the only issue being that their DHCP server got a wee bit messed up. Also was getting the advertised 5M/2M service (which was the base package) regardless of what was being run over the connection. I'm on Comcast now, and by comparison, it sucks horribly. Annoying part is that the apartment complex that I'm in now doesn't even have Verizon as an option - my alternative to Comcast is Qwest, and having put up with them at work, I wasn't terribly pleased there, either, though now that the service is set up, I might have actually found them to be a better choice.
As far as Comcast and connectivity - well, yeah, you're connected. They didn't finally get a connection up here until 2 weeks after move-in. I also see latency regularly jump to 1.5s to ping out to the gateway; seems kind of absurd to me, personally.
Heh. By the Doom9 forum, they had this 5 days before WinDVD and such were patched - so make that -120 hours ;)
The short-term result is millions of people who pirated your software, the long term result is millions of people who will ultimately purchase your software. See also, Microsoft loses a little money from someone not purchasing the upgrade copy of Vista, but it comes right back to them when that person goes out and purchases a new machine with (guess what) Vista installed on it. So, at least in the case of Microsoft, pirating their software is a marketing tool - rather like a drug. The first hit is always free, you know.
As far as OS X goes - there is a "Control Panel", it's known as "System Preferences". Icons line up on the right by default, which can be a wee bit of a pain when your primary display is the one on the left, but the same is true if you're in KDE or such and your primary display is the one on the right. As far as "desktop properties" go, if you're talking about the primary thing people care to change about their desktop (the background), then yes, you can right-click to get the desktop properties, but desktop resolution is configured elsewhere (System Preferences -> Display). And, of course, the whole thing with using an Apple mouse - it's not specifically a "right click" so much as it is ctrl+click, mostly because the mouse only has one button unless you've replaced it.
Even of the items that I know about - which is most of them - that doesn't mean that I follow them. As far as them being common "geek" sense, they might be, but:
So really, most, if not all, of that list isn't a "never do that", but a "use common sense before you do that", and that's most of what it amounts to in the first place. Security would be better if it wasn't for the hideous defaults that we put up with - which in an ideal environment without worms and viruses and such would make for better usability, but since most people don't use their computers in a hermetically sealed room with no connection to the outside world whatsoever...
Yes, there are already comments along the lines of "why use OS X if you're not going to use Aqua?"; that's basically what it amounts to. You get few, if any, benefits from ditching Aqua if you're still running OS X - the only thing that you get from it is the drivers that came with the system in the first place, and if that's all you want, you can always run Darwin instead and copy in the necessary kexts for the hardware that doesn't already have drivers with it, especially since, under the hood, Darwin and OS X are the same, except that Darwin comes configured to run primarily as a *nix-type command-line based system instead of as a desktop with a nice GUI.
Could it be done? Yes, but it would probably take a larger investment of time to figure out how to remove or disable the stuff you don't want than it would be to start from a system that comes ready to run the way you want it anyway.
So.... they've got a statistics page for their defect scanning tool. Which says that Subversion has 15 lines of code... umm, have they run their bug scanner against their own code? :)
Actually, it's possible on Windows as well. Not that I particularly *like* Windows by any stretch of the imagination, but XP and 2003, at least, will write a memory dump to the system swap file to be copied into %systemroot%\memory.dmp on the following startup, provided that it's configured to do so. The memory dump can then be loaded into a debugger to do post-mortem debugging. It does have a talent for not being the most useful on some configurations - I've run into issues on systems with >2G of memory, generally with the end of the dump file being truncated, but it certainly does save those details for later analysis.
Perhaps it's a DSL modem with a built-in switch? I don't know... I know the DSL modem / firewall that I've got sitting here has a built-in switch and such on it, but it still only runs 100baseTX-FD, though the way I've figured it's not like it makes much difference unless I'm communicating with the machine on the floor next to me. The rest of the house is behind an ancient 10baseT hub, not that, for internet access, anyone would ever notice. The hub never gets saturated in the first place... 3Mbit in from the DSL line isn't enough to do that.
Well, that or you plan your route such that you can purchase more bananas every so often along your trip, and then you pick them up as you need them. :)
As far as covering 3,145 miles on a bicycle goes... well, I know that a bicycle will go that far without falling apart, though you're likely to require new inner tubes, tires, and brake pads by that point.
Meh. I never bother hooking the computer to the television; I prefer the TV tuner in the computer. (Of course, my most current working system right now is a dual Celeron 500, so...)
Well, I don't know about you, but I'm less worried about the acts most people consider "terrorism", which usually involves such actions as bombings, hostage taking, and such; and more worried about the actions being taken by King George and his cronies, using "terrorism" as a magic word to get anything to go through Congress. So - do I give up my right to say what I want without having to worry about going to a Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison because the government doesn't like it (no, that doesn't mean that my speech doesn't necessarily have consequences - but those consequences are from other people); or my right to not be searched (my person, my belongings, or my communications) without either good cause or my consent, or my right to not incriminate myself - simply because the government thinks it needs to know what I happen to be doing and saying at any point in time?
My opinion is that you might as well be dead if you have no freedoms. On another note, such things as what happened on 9/11 weren't commonplace prior to 9/11; the bombings in Iraq are caused by our intervention there; the terrorist attacks in Israel are caused by our intervention there. Afghanistan is still a mess, because of our intervention there; it will be a mess for a long time as a result, and when it finally stabilizes, I highly doubt they'll be on anything resembling friendly terms with us. Is there a pattern there? Yes - we went in; with cause in the case of Afghanistan in 2001-2002, and with cause in the case of Iraq - in 1992, but not in 2004... in the case of Israel, we forcibly moved people who were there at the time and relocated people of Jewish descent there at the end of WWII; ultimately destroyed the nations in question for various reasons - terrorism, for example - and what proceeded to happen was that they became unstable territories and breeding grounds for exactly what's happening. The population originally in those places didn't want us there, but we shoved our noses in anyway. We pissed off a *lot* of people - now, we've got hundreds of millions of pissed off people, some with the desire to do something about it, in places where there isn't much of anything that they can do about it to make their issues known or otherwise correct the causes of their problems.
So - without the "safeguards that people are worried infringe on their freedom", 9/11-style events weren't happening here regularly. They weren't happening here because our system works, for the most part - the events of 9/11 were (directly or indirectly) caused by the actions of our government. Certainly, we need to pay more attention, but the systems that were in place worked before 9/11, so what changed after 9/11 to cause the existing systems to break? My guess - not a damned thing. Lots of things did change as a result, sure - but the events of that day didn't show us that our system was broken, they showed us that the people running the system needed to open their eyes. The only thing that was broken before was that we were too complacent - assuming that nothing was going to happen to us, because that's just the way things were.
Bit of a cliche here - but: those who would give up essential liberty for a little temporary security will soon have neither. Basically - if you think it's a good idea to give up your freedoms, just remember that it's a lot easier to give up freedom than it is to get it back later; and that the complacency that took place before 9/11 will come back soon enough, but the powers that were given to the government as a result of that day - taking away our freedom - won't go away.
Every PC that I own has a hardware power switch on them, except for this laptop. Of course, it's got no main battery and no PRAM battery, so when I want it physically off, I pull the power cord, which I have to do more often than not anyway. Everything else certainly has a softswitch on it, but they do have the physical switch on the back of the power supply as well.
As to WOL, that also means that the NIC is active regardless of whether the power is "on" or "off" as far as the sofware-controlled power is concerned - no power because the actual hardware power switch is in the off position means that WOL won't work, regardless of how many magic packets you send. So that turns into "can't be turned on by software" - exactly how I'd want a DRM switch to be, otherwise my configuration settings mean absolutely nothing. Especially when it's stuff that other people want on, and will try doing anything to get it turned on.
Dunno about BIOS-disabled myself... if I'm going to be able to turn off DRM on any machine that I end up with, it's got to be in the hardware itself - a jumper or something; if it's software disabled, it's possible for software to re-enable it at a later point, and if I'm turning it off, it's because I specifically want it off. Same thing as a physical power switch - when the switch is in the "off" position, there's not a damned thing that can be done by software to turn on whatever devices are connected to it; about the only thing that can be done is overload the switch itself with a big power surge, which most likely ends up destroying whatever is connected to it anyway.
So yeah, while it might be more difficult to actually flip a switch or pull a jumper, the truly paranoid among us are going to be justifyably fearful of a soft-off for things like DRM.
You know, I've got a PowerBook G3 sitting here on my lap... runs plenty snappy enough for my purposes, in either OS X 10.3 or Linux (Gentoo PPC, stage 3). The closest I've really had to issues with this machine has nothing to do with the OS it's running and more to do with this hardware being picky about the memory you put into it. But such is the case with the Lombard-series laptops. In either case, it runs nicely for whatever I feel like throwing at it, keeping in mind that it's a bit memory-limited and that it's not the absolute fastest machine out there.
They could very well be testing the water, you know. Not many of the families being sued (sorry, extorted) by the RIAA have the resources backing them to even make it possible to stand up to them without going bankrupt in the process, even if they win. Make the RIAA start losing, you start setting precedent. Start setting precedent, the cases start getting thrown out before there is a trial because there's not anything left to back them up. If you can make them start losing, then it doesn't take a lot to end the whole thing; but it takes someone willing and able to stand up and fight back. Publicity stunt? Certainly. Exactly what's needed? Definately.
It's a profit decision, sure. Assuming those values, though - of the 2 groups of people who use alternative browsers, most of them are the geeks, the rest are Mac users, a generally more affluent and powerful group anyway. Not supporting alternative browsers also makes you more vulnerable to looking bad in the eyes of both of these groups - and while they're a small proportion of the marketplace, combined there's a disproportionally large share of power between them.
If you've got a website where you potentially promote your business or whatnot, and it doesn't work in whatever browser the end user happens to use, you make yourself look bad - make yourself look bad to the decision maker, and you've lost almost any chance of selling your product to them in the first place; make yourself look bad to the geek, and they're going to tell their friends and family to not support your business. Either case is bad - potentially worse for you to not support the alternative browsers, even if their users don't directly make you any money, as people connected to them very well might.
So in the end, is it worth writing off the 1,000 users you presented above because they won't buy your software, simply because it costs $10,000 to redesign what you're working with so that it does? Sure, that's where your point of good will comes in - not just in supporting legacy systems, but in supporting alternative systems as well, which is especially true when it comes to designing web-based software. Make it difficult or impossible for a group of users to get to or use your software and they're not going to recommend it to anyone, and are even more likely to attempt to dissuade anyone they know from using it.
Don't you mean unscrew the design flaw? ;)