GNU/HURD has been in development since before even Linux began. Torvalds himself bemoaned the slow development process which was part of the reason he was prompted to write his own kernel.
And what a kernel. Personally I doubt it boils down to monolithic vs micro kernels or other architecture decisions. I reckon simply that Linux was seen as a dynamic development process driven by practical requirements rather than politics. An example of this is Linus' decision to use non-GPL SCM tools for developing the kernel, simply because they were better than the free alternatives.
Frankly nothing about HURD supports any notion that Linux is ultimately doomed. It's a hobbiests OS that feels like Linux ten years ago but without any clear purpose. I can't see any possible benefit for using it, except for someone who wants to play with a GPL'd Mach kernel. All other cited reasons such as the supposed stability benefits have long since been disproven.
I once ran a DikuMUD back in '92 where the city guards would knock unconscious any players they found fighting in the city and drag both of them to jail for a few minutes. PvP was by consent, but if it wasn't, even the above would be a recipe for disaster since newbies could grief resting players simply by attacking them while guards were present. Despite not being advertised outside the faculty I'd say we had 20 or so regular players. That's not much by any standard but it gave me a hell of a lot of experience in running and maintaining an online system.
One particular player, a fellow student who was an Arsehole. He had no friends in real life, had greasy hair, a mousey moustache, wore a dirty raincoat (even in summer) and a satchel around his neck. "Satchelman" started off playing like a normal person and I had no problem with that, but soon he started being a dick, shouting worldwide messages and so forth. So he was booted after warnings. Satchelman didn't like this and would roll a new character start spamming, griefing and being a prick again. Myself or the demi-god admins would ban his character and his IP address and he'd move to the machine over and do the same. We'd mute his character so he couldn't shout or speak and he'd roll a new one. Eventually we created a special room for him called the "Sad bastard room". Any time he acted up, he'd be transported to the sad bastard room where the room description explained in detail that he was a sad bastard and all commands responded with "piss off you sad bastard". Believe it or not he kept coming. Anyway with the room and other controls we developed we kept him check. Looking back I should have put an email validation rule into the new character screen, but it didn't occur to me at the time. He got in trouble later when he was caught taking screendumps of our X displays, for which he was crapped all over by the sysadmin. After that things quietened down.
Anyway, I suppose the moral here, is that some people are arseholes. Their pathology means that they are compulsive dickheads and will do anything to ruin the game no matter how many times they are banned. I have no idea where "satchelman" is today, but it would not surprise me if he was not inflicting his arseholery onto others in the same way he did to us back then. You can't do much to such people unless there are clear consequences for their behaviour. I suppose the easiest punishment is financial - the T&C chould state that the admin can at their discretion remove all their remaining credit, wipe their characters, disable their game code, refuse the credit card and their address. If they want to play again (after getting a new card) - fine, but dish out as much grief to them as they give to you and they perhaps might move elsewhere.
Windows apps are bound by UI guidelines too that say that items in a context menu should appear somewhere else in the main menu. If they don't, well the app is non-compliant and you should consider that as you will.
The claim that right click is hard is specious. Well written apps assume left button only, but for anyone who uses a computer for one week, life without a right mouse button is next to impossible. Of course I'm sure there are Mac users who live their lives with one button, but I'm also sure that in this day and age they are the minority. Computers aren't some new fangled tech any more. Practically anyone under the age of 40 will be familiar with two button mice and it seems bizarre to remove one for no good reason.
In fact even mice without wheels are weird in this day and age. The wheel it has to be said is one of the most useful contributions that MS (or whoever they stole the idea from) have given for productivity.
Either the number of buttons should be a choice when ordering the Mac (just like the memory & HD capacity) or Apple should put their thinking caps on and produce a mouse that can be one or two buttons simply depending on how you configure it from the UI. I'm sure this is entirely within their grasp if they tried.
The alternative is that a Mac is really $50 more expensive than advertised (which is already more than a PC) since people are compelled to buy a new mouse to make their supposedly user friendly Mac, usable.
Right clicks aren't kludges any more than left clicks are kludges. In fact right clicks are considerably more intuitive than holding down the left button, or Apple+Clicking on something to have a context menu appear.
The single button mouse argument might have held water before context menus came along, but not in this day and age.
Is this a literal translation of the title? I just wonder why Japanese titles are so weird. If they need a title instead of Howl's Moving Castle, my suggestions include:
Waddle Quack Duck Mystic Hell Moose Happy Fun Shine Monster Plastic Ball Creamy Tinned Goodness Sparkle Good House Slappy Fork Chrome AC Not To Fuse Insert! Babble Green Mountain
Exactly. I recall seeing Nescafe self heating cups. Think coffee which has been left in a themos overnight and then reheated.
Of course, if the container were to split the coffee from the water until you heated it, it might not be so bad. But even that seems hardly different to me than buying some instant crap from a vending machine. Except of course the vending machine gives you a coffee instantly, rather than fumbling around in the cold trying to activate the device and then then waiting several minutes for it to be even drinkable.
It's more than that. The vast majority of responses to this article seem to diss the question and flame the guy because he's representing Microsoft in some way. Whether he's MS or not is irrelevant.
The simple fact is that his point is valid. And its a glaringly obvious point that has been mentioned by people before. XPI extensions are unsigned. XPI extensions can fuck up your day just as easily as an ActiveX control. So why aren't extensions signed? Why does Firefox make it so easy to install unsigned extensions, even going as far as featuring them on a download extension page?
Even if you happen to know Joe Schmoe who wrote the extension, who's to say someone didn't hack into his popular site, and rejig the extension to deploy a zombie? Who's to say that one of the countless mirrors didn't modify it? Who's to say that someone releases their own malevolant extension and tries it pass it off as Joe's? The answer is nobody can say and nobody can tell either without a line by line comparison of the code (i.e. next to nobody). That's what signing is for. It's no different for extensions than it is for ActiveX.
Firefox has to sort its priorities out. If a cert is not feasible in a bazaar environment then move to another model such as PGP.
The stance on child porn by Freenet and directories such as "The Freedom Index" is one of the reasons it hasn't taken off. It's a fucking stupid stance. Forget free speech - it defies common sense.
By the likes of TFE linking to it, the paedo site gets more hits and it gets smeared around more. By linking to it, it also encourages other sick bastards to submit their sites too. By linking to it, it discourages others who might have less repugnant uses for Freenet. This vicious cycle repeats until Freenet sinks under a tide of this shit, which is where it is today. As the pool of servers decreases, the anonymity does too, legitimate sites bitrot faster and the whole thing collapses.
But isn't refusing to publish paedo links censorship? No it isn't. You're not killing the site itself, you're just choosing not to advertise it. And considering the disgusting content, who the hell would want to? Fuck em - let their nasty sites waste away in the churn.
Despite that the concept of Freenet does have potential. It's just idealistically screwed up and also very, very slow. Part of this slowness is that it was conceived to be "government strength" anonymity. Packets hop around randomly some predetermined number of times to reach you. That's fine, but if you're just downloading an MP3 or a movie, then that is excessive and painful. It is also seriously flawed since sites degrade so you might be downloading something when at 98% it tells you it can retrieve a chunk and you're screwed. Basically if the amount of content exceeds some fraction of the total sum of cache available in Freenet, things will rot.
What is required is some kind of hybrid between bit torrent and Freenet. It would use hops to obscure origins - not enough to be a dog like Freenet, but enough to seriously piss off the RIAA. It would use crypto and random ports to escape packet sniffing. It would automatically mirror seeds and trackers. It would allow the client to nominate a portion of bandwidth to perform "phantom" fetches, where it would go off and download something that it just tosses away (giving you plausible deniability). And it would use actual files as the cache so it didn't degrade over time.
I don't believe it would be the ideal solution from a security perspective since compromising Freenet increases the risks. Freenet was very carefully thought out after all, but I believe a better balance can be made between complete anonymity and covering your tracks well enough for foiling sniffers and copyright / civil rights purposes.
Re:Hmm, sounds familiar
on
A .Net CPU
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· Score: 1
But it depends what problem space the Java chips were trying to address. With those low specs it seems obvious they're meant to be embedded in simple devices, running simple apps who don't need unicode or other junk eating up the precious constraints or adding to the cost. Another clue was the name - picoJava.
Given that problem domain (and timeframe in which Java Chip was out), the cited restrictions seem perfectly reasonable.
At the moment Minomo is targetted at Linux devices using GTK, so you'll have a while to wait yet. There was apparantely a Windows CE port of Moz at one point but there doesn't appear to be much in the tree.
In theory porting a Win32 app to CE should be fairly straightforward since much of the API is similar. In theory. But in practice anyone faced with porting Moz to CE would probably ground down by hundreds of little issues - porting NSPR, libjpg, libpng etc and other dependent libs first, flags and APIs not defined, compiler problems, linker problems, resource file problems, configuration issues, memory consumption, footprint, bloat etc.
After all that and after putting a simple embedded app front-end on it. You have a big browser running in a small client.
You then have to work on getting it to produce semi acceptable output. Only part of the problem with Pocket IE, or Netfront is that their rendering & layout is very sucky. The other part is that they have a tiny amount of real estate to work with so it sucks even more.
Hopefully Minimo would be a better layout engine, but it would still have to squash pages down to fit the PDA. So it is essential that it has decent stylesheets that did a good job of scaling images and text down to the fit the display. And there would be extra brownie points if the screen could be rotated to work in landscape mode even on older devices.
But then the PSP is a movie and music device in addition to a games console and your speculation on battery life is just supposition. Personally I do expect it to be less, but if it can last a couple of days, that would suit the unit which emphasizes PC connectivity more than the DS. I expect it will have a battery lifetime on par with a phone or a PDA with the same levels of usage. The DS seems more designed for two week stretches with no recharging. The PSP also seems more adult and 'lifestyle' where the DS is aiming for the traditional Nintendo audience - kids.
The specs suggest that the PSP will wipe the floor with the DS. Perhaps the PSP will suck, just as the N-Gage did, in ways that the specs don't reveal. For example regional encoding is a stupid idea in these devices, and stubby memory stick format is even stupider, considering that memory stick is used by barely anyone except Sony. But the only way to know for sure is stand back and wait until the choices are all in front of you, including a decent selection of games.
Though frankly I don't understand why demand for any console are high at the beginning. Why is everyone rushing out to buy a DS, (or XBox, PS2, Gamecube before that), when there are precious few games for it at launch, where it isn't backwards compatible and the main competition is only a few months away itself. It makes no sense except as a "I want it" knee jerk reaction to anything new.
But they shouldn't use an ads path since that is trivally easy to block too. Better to put the ads in paths occupied by important content such as the same place as article text.
Of course another route open to sites is to block Firefox completely or offer preferential treatment to IE users. I wouldn't rule that out either, although that too would be fairly trivial to circumvent.
I know you can get left handed versions of rifles, but I'm suggesting that if you're in a life or death situation, unfamiliarity with the considerably more common right-handed version could be prove to be extremely fatal.
They would be fairly easy to block - just locate the JS that injects the ad and block that. Most sites use boiler plate JS so it's easy enough to do it.
Programmes like Adblock must be the bane of commercial websites all over. However, there is a simple and probably inevitable way to beat this kind of thing - don't serve from URLs called www.doubleclick.net etc. Eventually the way they'll figure out how to beat ad blockers is to use random IP addresses, redirects and more so it is impossible to avoid the ads, short of blocking all images not originating from the same site.
Human inventions are at worst exclusively right-handed in design, agnostic at best and more usually slightly biased to right handed use. Think corkscrews, mice, and even the way that (the West) writes on a piece of paper.
Therefore a left handed person is immediately at a disadvantage. Most of the time this makes no odds (except some fumbling or wrist pain perhaps), but I suggest where is a risk of harm through incorrect operation, that it might lead to slightly higher fatalities for the lefties.
An extreme example would be a gun where the entire design practically demands you fire it with your right hand. A left handed person must either learn to use their right hand (and have a poorer aim), or attempt to shoot it with their left hand (and get all fouled up on the moulded grip, safety catch & ejection mechanism). Neither is optimal.
I've often wanted to punch the screen while watching this. Anyone who thinks that shit, or anything comparable (Waltons, Little House On The Prairie, Touched By An Angel etc.) should be all that fills the TV channels needs a hard slap to the face. Repeatedly.
Of course, I'd be all in favour of replacing some trashy violent show (or any of the above), and put something educational in its place, for example teaching evolution, science, skepticism, rational thinking etc.
If it's a beta, then run it in parallel with the older (working) system until it offers the same functionality. People will still give it a go. Don't force it upon people when Google Groups represents the only source for searching news archives.
Besides, the old system works just fine. The new beta seems to be heading off in a very poor direction from a user perspective. It seems more about ingratiating Google specific groups into the usenet system and stuffing more ads into the UI than anything else.
Young Indiana Jones was okay in some ways, but a bunch of toss in others. What did it in for me, was the number of "coincidences" that happened in every episode. Not a single one went by without Indiana Jones rubbing shoulders with someone famous, be it Charles De Gaulle, Ho Chi Minh, Franz Kafka etc.
It was pathetic. Interestingly enough, that is part of the reasons the Star Wars prequels were so shit too. Too many fucking cameos from characters from the original movies.
Because then it will be the advertisers committing fraud. Personally, if Google's model is broken, it's up to Google to figure out a way to fix it.
I suggest a simple way is to work from the premise that clickthrus represent some tiny fraction of visitors, e.g. 1%. If a site consistently claims > 1% clickthrus start investigating. If a site consistently starts getting clickthrus from the same IP block over and over start investigating. If a site consistently gets clickthrus in a short space of time start investigating. If the user visits the same site over and over (detected via a cookie), start investigating. If any of these things happen, raise a red flag on an account.
Even without human intervention, the red flag could modify the behaviour of the Ad Words / Ad Sense. For example it could switch to charity links, or start dumping 'honey pot' links - links whose wording are proven to be unattractive to normal users yet indistinguishable to bots. And so forth.
It shouldn't be rocket science for a search engine company like Google to lay enough traps that the deterrent effect (of losing evertthing) will put off the vast majority of abusers.
The recent version of VMWare I tried was certainly not executing at anywhere near native speeds. It might have played some tricks to speed things up (e.g. native code to emulate devices using the VMWare tools drivers), and be able to run certain code with minimal intervention but it's still damned slow.
On a 1.8ghz box, I'd estimate that VMWare performance is comparable to 300Mhz PC. It takes something like 10 minutes to boot Linspire on it. Fast enough to be usable for testing or evaluation, but nowhere near native performance or suggestive that VMWare is doing anything particularly clever.
I don't think QEMU / Bochs are actually that much slower. They just seem that way because VMWare ships with a bunch of drivers (VMWare tools) that move a lot of the display and disk activity out into the host architecture.
By comparison Bochs uses a crappy SVGA emulator that really drags down the graphical performance, QEMU has only recently gained support for a 10 year old Cirrus Logic SVGA driver. Not exactly cutting edge stuff. But still, this is probably the way to go - even some old as the hills graphics card that offers some hardware acceleration offers the chance to move some operations to the host. That's also the tack taken by Virtual PC which emulates an S3 graphics card.
Hi, yes please. I have the latest client via bittorrent now. If you're able to arrange a trial, can you email a trial key to drxym AT yahoo.com. Cheers! I'd like to give it a go although I can't make any guarantees as to whether I'll stick with it.
Slashdot Mirror
And what a kernel. Personally I doubt it boils down to monolithic vs micro kernels or other architecture decisions. I reckon simply that Linux was seen as a dynamic development process driven by practical requirements rather than politics. An example of this is Linus' decision to use non-GPL SCM tools for developing the kernel, simply because they were better than the free alternatives.
Frankly nothing about HURD supports any notion that Linux is ultimately doomed. It's a hobbiests OS that feels like Linux ten years ago but without any clear purpose. I can't see any possible benefit for using it, except for someone who wants to play with a GPL'd Mach kernel. All other cited reasons such as the supposed stability benefits have long since been disproven.
One particular player, a fellow student who was an Arsehole. He had no friends in real life, had greasy hair, a mousey moustache, wore a dirty raincoat (even in summer) and a satchel around his neck. "Satchelman" started off playing like a normal person and I had no problem with that, but soon he started being a dick, shouting worldwide messages and so forth. So he was booted after warnings. Satchelman didn't like this and would roll a new character start spamming, griefing and being a prick again. Myself or the demi-god admins would ban his character and his IP address and he'd move to the machine over and do the same. We'd mute his character so he couldn't shout or speak and he'd roll a new one. Eventually we created a special room for him called the "Sad bastard room". Any time he acted up, he'd be transported to the sad bastard room where the room description explained in detail that he was a sad bastard and all commands responded with "piss off you sad bastard". Believe it or not he kept coming. Anyway with the room and other controls we developed we kept him check. Looking back I should have put an email validation rule into the new character screen, but it didn't occur to me at the time. He got in trouble later when he was caught taking screendumps of our X displays, for which he was crapped all over by the sysadmin. After that things quietened down.
Anyway, I suppose the moral here, is that some people are arseholes. Their pathology means that they are compulsive dickheads and will do anything to ruin the game no matter how many times they are banned. I have no idea where "satchelman" is today, but it would not surprise me if he was not inflicting his arseholery onto others in the same way he did to us back then. You can't do much to such people unless there are clear consequences for their behaviour. I suppose the easiest punishment is financial - the T&C chould state that the admin can at their discretion remove all their remaining credit, wipe their characters, disable their game code, refuse the credit card and their address. If they want to play again (after getting a new card) - fine, but dish out as much grief to them as they give to you and they perhaps might move elsewhere.
With one of the heads being made of papier mache...
The claim that right click is hard is specious. Well written apps assume left button only, but for anyone who uses a computer for one week, life without a right mouse button is next to impossible. Of course I'm sure there are Mac users who live their lives with one button, but I'm also sure that in this day and age they are the minority. Computers aren't some new fangled tech any more. Practically anyone under the age of 40 will be familiar with two button mice and it seems bizarre to remove one for no good reason.
In fact even mice without wheels are weird in this day and age. The wheel it has to be said is one of the most useful contributions that MS (or whoever they stole the idea from) have given for productivity.
Either the number of buttons should be a choice when ordering the Mac (just like the memory & HD capacity) or Apple should put their thinking caps on and produce a mouse that can be one or two buttons simply depending on how you configure it from the UI. I'm sure this is entirely within their grasp if they tried.
The alternative is that a Mac is really $50 more expensive than advertised (which is already more than a PC) since people are compelled to buy a new mouse to make their supposedly user friendly Mac, usable.
The single button mouse argument might have held water before context menus came along, but not in this day and age.
Is this a literal translation of the title? I just wonder why Japanese titles are so weird. If they need a title instead of Howl's Moving Castle, my suggestions include:
Waddle Quack Duck
Mystic Hell Moose
Happy Fun Shine
Monster Plastic Ball
Creamy Tinned Goodness
Sparkle Good House
Slappy Fork Chrome
AC Not To Fuse Insert!
Babble Green Mountain
Of course, if the container were to split the coffee from the water until you heated it, it might not be so bad. But even that seems hardly different to me than buying some instant crap from a vending machine. Except of course the vending machine gives you a coffee instantly, rather than fumbling around in the cold trying to activate the device and then then waiting several minutes for it to be even drinkable.
The simple fact is that his point is valid. And its a glaringly obvious point that has been mentioned by people before. XPI extensions are unsigned. XPI extensions can fuck up your day just as easily as an ActiveX control. So why aren't extensions signed? Why does Firefox make it so easy to install unsigned extensions, even going as far as featuring them on a download extension page?
Even if you happen to know Joe Schmoe who wrote the extension, who's to say someone didn't hack into his popular site, and rejig the extension to deploy a zombie? Who's to say that one of the countless mirrors didn't modify it? Who's to say that someone releases their own malevolant extension and tries it pass it off as Joe's? The answer is nobody can say and nobody can tell either without a line by line comparison of the code (i.e. next to nobody). That's what signing is for. It's no different for extensions than it is for ActiveX.
Firefox has to sort its priorities out. If a cert is not feasible in a bazaar environment then move to another model such as PGP.
By the likes of TFE linking to it, the paedo site gets more hits and it gets smeared around more. By linking to it, it also encourages other sick bastards to submit their sites too. By linking to it, it discourages others who might have less repugnant uses for Freenet. This vicious cycle repeats until Freenet sinks under a tide of this shit, which is where it is today. As the pool of servers decreases, the anonymity does too, legitimate sites bitrot faster and the whole thing collapses.
But isn't refusing to publish paedo links censorship? No it isn't. You're not killing the site itself, you're just choosing not to advertise it. And considering the disgusting content, who the hell would want to? Fuck em - let their nasty sites waste away in the churn.
Despite that the concept of Freenet does have potential. It's just idealistically screwed up and also very, very slow. Part of this slowness is that it was conceived to be "government strength" anonymity. Packets hop around randomly some predetermined number of times to reach you. That's fine, but if you're just downloading an MP3 or a movie, then that is excessive and painful. It is also seriously flawed since sites degrade so you might be downloading something when at 98% it tells you it can retrieve a chunk and you're screwed. Basically if the amount of content exceeds some fraction of the total sum of cache available in Freenet, things will rot.
What is required is some kind of hybrid between bit torrent and Freenet. It would use hops to obscure origins - not enough to be a dog like Freenet, but enough to seriously piss off the RIAA. It would use crypto and random ports to escape packet sniffing. It would automatically mirror seeds and trackers. It would allow the client to nominate a portion of bandwidth to perform "phantom" fetches, where it would go off and download something that it just tosses away (giving you plausible deniability). And it would use actual files as the cache so it didn't degrade over time.
I don't believe it would be the ideal solution from a security perspective since compromising Freenet increases the risks. Freenet was very carefully thought out after all, but I believe a better balance can be made between complete anonymity and covering your tracks well enough for foiling sniffers and copyright / civil rights purposes.
Given that problem domain (and timeframe in which Java Chip was out), the cited restrictions seem perfectly reasonable.
In theory porting a Win32 app to CE should be fairly straightforward since much of the API is similar. In theory. But in practice anyone faced with porting Moz to CE would probably ground down by hundreds of little issues - porting NSPR, libjpg, libpng etc and other dependent libs first, flags and APIs not defined, compiler problems, linker problems, resource file problems, configuration issues, memory consumption, footprint, bloat etc.
After all that and after putting a simple embedded app front-end on it. You have a big browser running in a small client.
You then have to work on getting it to produce semi acceptable output. Only part of the problem with Pocket IE, or Netfront is that their rendering & layout is very sucky. The other part is that they have a tiny amount of real estate to work with so it sucks even more.
Hopefully Minimo would be a better layout engine, but it would still have to squash pages down to fit the PDA. So it is essential that it has decent stylesheets that did a good job of scaling images and text down to the fit the display. And there would be extra brownie points if the screen could be rotated to work in landscape mode even on older devices.
I suspect most rich people have more taste. A Segway is the preserve of the gauche and the lardass.
The specs suggest that the PSP will wipe the floor with the DS. Perhaps the PSP will suck, just as the N-Gage did, in ways that the specs don't reveal. For example regional encoding is a stupid idea in these devices, and stubby memory stick format is even stupider, considering that memory stick is used by barely anyone except Sony. But the only way to know for sure is stand back and wait until the choices are all in front of you, including a decent selection of games.
Though frankly I don't understand why demand for any console are high at the beginning. Why is everyone rushing out to buy a DS, (or XBox, PS2, Gamecube before that), when there are precious few games for it at launch, where it isn't backwards compatible and the main competition is only a few months away itself. It makes no sense except as a "I want it" knee jerk reaction to anything new.
Before some geek wires their nutsack with a liquid cooling system!
Of course another route open to sites is to block Firefox completely or offer preferential treatment to IE users. I wouldn't rule that out either, although that too would be fairly trivial to circumvent.
I know you can get left handed versions of rifles, but I'm suggesting that if you're in a life or death situation, unfamiliarity with the considerably more common right-handed version could be prove to be extremely fatal.
They would be fairly easy to block - just locate the JS that injects the ad and block that. Most sites use boiler plate JS so it's easy enough to do it.
Programmes like Adblock must be the bane of commercial websites all over. However, there is a simple and probably inevitable way to beat this kind of thing - don't serve from URLs called www.doubleclick.net etc. Eventually the way they'll figure out how to beat ad blockers is to use random IP addresses, redirects and more so it is impossible to avoid the ads, short of blocking all images not originating from the same site.
Human inventions are at worst exclusively right-handed in design, agnostic at best and more usually slightly biased to right handed use. Think corkscrews, mice, and even the way that (the West) writes on a piece of paper.
Therefore a left handed person is immediately at a disadvantage. Most of the time this makes no odds (except some fumbling or wrist pain perhaps), but I suggest where is a risk of harm through incorrect operation, that it might lead to slightly higher fatalities for the lefties.
An extreme example would be a gun where the entire design practically demands you fire it with your right hand. A left handed person must either learn to use their right hand (and have a poorer aim), or attempt to shoot it with their left hand (and get all fouled up on the moulded grip, safety catch & ejection mechanism). Neither is optimal.
Of course, I'd be all in favour of replacing some trashy violent show (or any of the above), and put something educational in its place, for example teaching evolution, science, skepticism, rational thinking etc.
Besides, the old system works just fine. The new beta seems to be heading off in a very poor direction from a user perspective. It seems more about ingratiating Google specific groups into the usenet system and stuffing more ads into the UI than anything else.
It was pathetic. Interestingly enough, that is part of the reasons the Star Wars prequels were so shit too. Too many fucking cameos from characters from the original movies.
I suggest a simple way is to work from the premise that clickthrus represent some tiny fraction of visitors, e.g. 1%. If a site consistently claims > 1% clickthrus start investigating. If a site consistently starts getting clickthrus from the same IP block over and over start investigating. If a site consistently gets clickthrus in a short space of time start investigating. If the user visits the same site over and over (detected via a cookie), start investigating. If any of these things happen, raise a red flag on an account.
Even without human intervention, the red flag could modify the behaviour of the Ad Words / Ad Sense. For example it could switch to charity links, or start dumping 'honey pot' links - links whose wording are proven to be unattractive to normal users yet indistinguishable to bots. And so forth.
It shouldn't be rocket science for a search engine company like Google to lay enough traps that the deterrent effect (of losing evertthing) will put off the vast majority of abusers.
On a 1.8ghz box, I'd estimate that VMWare performance is comparable to 300Mhz PC. It takes something like 10 minutes to boot Linspire on it. Fast enough to be usable for testing or evaluation, but nowhere near native performance or suggestive that VMWare is doing anything particularly clever.
I don't think QEMU / Bochs are actually that much slower. They just seem that way because VMWare ships with a bunch of drivers (VMWare tools) that move a lot of the display and disk activity out into the host architecture.
By comparison Bochs uses a crappy SVGA emulator that really drags down the graphical performance, QEMU has only recently gained support for a 10 year old Cirrus Logic SVGA driver. Not exactly cutting edge stuff. But still, this is probably the way to go - even some old as the hills graphics card that offers some hardware acceleration offers the chance to move some operations to the host. That's also the tack taken by Virtual PC which emulates an S3 graphics card.
Hi, yes please. I have the latest client via bittorrent now. If you're able to arrange a trial, can you email a trial key to drxym AT yahoo.com. Cheers! I'd like to give it a go although I can't make any guarantees as to whether I'll stick with it.