Your word-choice errors aside (uniformed? uninformed?), you really need to buy a clue. So you can configure X to your liking. So what? How many people browse under X, compared with other platforms? Or compared with the dominant platform (Windows, remember)?
Your sad little bigotry (The interviewee is obviously stuck on some lesser platform) says much more about you than about Zeldman's platform of choice. Anyone can design a web page that renders perfectly on one platform - this isn't even hard. The point of the web is that all the "lesser platforms" should still be able to access content in a readable form.
...it's interesting how quickly people want the Government to step in and stop this overwelming Capitalistic success.
Ever see Soylent Green? Financially, and literally, those folks were making a killing. Their only problem was hiding the fact that "Solyent Green is people!" And they evidently did that pretty well.
In abscence of laws regulating the market (and what isn't part of "the market?") there is nothing to stop a business from producing Soylent Green. And if they were managed half-way decently they'd be, in your words, an "overwelming Capitalistic success."
The US brand of Capitalism is very government controlled, and it needs to stay that way. Large companies are responsible to no one but their shareholders, who by and large don't give a fsck how they get their money. A totally unregulated economy would turn into a cross between The Matrix and Soylent Green in about 5 years. The rich would literally eat the poor and all the shareholders would be happy. The US Government is the only thing stopping you and me from becoming food.
Don't think it would happen? Then riddle me this, Batman: when was the last time you remember a Fortune 500 compny doing something only because it was the morally correct thing to do? When was the last time you remember a Fortune 500 company doing something in spite of the fact that it was morally repugnant?
I know over 200 people (some at work, some at home) who use Windows on a daily basis. Not a single one of them could write a script to do anything if their life depended on it. It's criminaly insane that M$ installs a scripting host with the OS. If you need scripting you know that you need it, and you can download an installer for it. If you don't need it (or, like most Windows users, don't even know what it is), all it can do is fuck up your life.
...and into the real world. I administer a network of 60 Windows machines (but not on the server - *shudder*), and well over 95% of the viruses that I see are Word and Excel macro viruses. To be honest, I haven't even heard of half the files extensions listed. And as for the rest of them - PhotoCD files? Can you really execute a virus from a PhotoCD file?
Furthermore - what's going to stop people from just archiving these files? When the next worm is an attachment sent in a ZIP file, will Outlook nuke all ZIP files?
This is asinine. The problem here is the execution of the malicious code, not the file attachment. Of course it's much easier to just nuke a few file attachments that try to design an e-mail client that isn't Swiss cheese from a security standpoint.
These reeks to me like a punative mode; M$ got tired of the bad press and knew that had to do something: "Fine. You don't like Outlook? Joke's on you pal - we're going to nuke all file attachments that developers might use. The bad news is that your company is going to keep buying Outlook. Forever. Bwahahahaha."
Ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz? Classic SF from 1956; one of the most infulential and respected books in the genre. Humanity nukes itself, spends 2k years rebuilding from the ashes, then does it again.
They didn't have to control for it. They're probably talking about an increase relative to the rest of the general population, not to the history of that particular area. In this case, the statistics controlled themselves. It's called random sampling: they assume that the conditions in the rest of the sampled area (the country, pry) are similar, and that the radioation is the major difference.
Now you could be saying that the population of the country as a whole is getting older, or having children at an older age, and that's what's causing the increase in Down's Syndrome. But the only way to get those pre-conditions to jive with their findings is to concentrate all the older women in higher numbers in the affected areas or to compare Down's Syndrom rates over time only in the affected areas. Both seem pretty unlikely.
The 64 for SDRAM vs. the 16 for RDRAM is not number of pins but bus width. RDRAM has a 2-bit bus while SDRAM has an 8-bit bus. So RDRAM needs to be clocked 4 times as fast as SDRAM just to provide the same throughput.
More recent articles on Tom's:
Dissecting Rambus: the March 15 article that perhaps (?) triggered Rambus' recent stock dump. Rambus Revisited: Second article, April 3rd.
The little NT-based (shoot me) mail server we use will query ORBS and MAPS RBL. It will either flag the message as possible spam or delete it outright. This is very cool.
Sadly, it only allows IP-based exceptions, so I can't except *.AOL.com from the deletion. Contrary to other posts I've seen on the subject, we do get legitimate mail from AOL (including some recalcitrant employees I can't get off it:/).
AOL absolutely does need to get its head out of its ass RE spam, but this isn't the way to do it. Oddly enough, putting AOL on the ORBS list will allow more spam into my network.
Spam is "all that much." You're making the mistake of thinking that because something doesn't hurt you very much it must not be a problem for anyone else, either. This is very dangerous and sadly short-sighted.
Spam costs my company money in the form of bandwidth and employee time (most notably, my time). World-wide, spam clogs data line and slows traffic, clogs storage and makes some news groups useless while making messages expire faster on others. Spam makes the entire Internet slower and more expensive. Spam makes people afraid to give out their e-mail address, thus hurting e-commerce and legitimate information exchanges.
Spam is a 180-degree reversal of snail-mail direct-marketing, where the transaction cost is paid by the sender. With electronic spam, the sender typically has very low costs; the hapless receivers pick up the tab for him.
Spam should be exactly as illegal as a DoS attack, and there are simple, credible arguments comparing the two.
This isn't a flame, I just want to make a couple points:
AOL's party line is that they're just making things easier, but this is obviously not true. There's no authentic reason for AOL to disable other ISPs. None at all. You can go to Tucows and download 1,000 Internet apps and not a single one will nuke all your dial-up connections.
Their question, "Become default browser" is clearly misleading. If they actually told people what was going to happen in an intelligable manner there would be no problem. "Would you like AOL setup to try to disable all your other Intnert Service Providers?"
The fact that AOL has "brought the Internet to "Mainstream America" is neither here nor there.* We're talking about a different issue. Are you really saying that because AOL brought the 'net to Jon Q Public they should be treated less harshly? The mere fact that a corporation has done something "good" in the past should exonerate them from future blame?
The simple question is: did AOL intentionally mislead it's customers in order to make changes to their systems to give AOL a competitive advantage? The answer is clearly "Yes!"
*Minor quibble - by "America" you of course mean "The United States of America," which is in North America. AOl has very little market share in Uruguay.
Maybe NASA should try blowing a big crater somewhere in the Antartic, dropping the robot into it, and then seeing if they can get a response. From a robot on Mars:)
Of course there's M$ help on usenet, but it doesn't compare in breadth, depth, or passion to Linux help. Your sarcasm is noted, but let's see you say this with a straight face.
"The quality, speed, and accuracy of Microsoft help on usenet is as good as Linux help."
Go on. Say it. We'll wait. And wipe that smirk of your face;)
While we're at it, I explicitly challenge your right to FUD me on this. Fear Uncertainty Doubt. If you can name one software company more worthy of FUD that M$, I'll print out this page and eat it.
While we did not probe these NOSes extensively to expose any security weaknesses, we did look at what they offered in security features.
"Offered" as in "claimed." Well, that's a relief - we all know how forthcoming M$ is about it's OS security. Can you say, "whitewash" boys and girls? No one cares about your opinions on security, CNN - test it or shut up and leave it for the experts.
They very carefully didn't mention how long you can keep alive a Win2k box, compared with a *NIX or Novell box. They didn't mention how long it takes M$ to patch security flaws. They didn't mention tech support ($500/minute at 1-900-micro$oft, or free on usenet). They didn't mention software cost, or Microsoft's gouging with it's new license structure. They didn't mention what hardware they tested on. They didn't mention what hardware you need for an acceptable install of each OS (e.g. 3x more power just to run the oh-so-pretty Win GUI).
I guess you can't expect too much from CNN, eh? Sad how many people will read this and not think about any of the unmentioned issues.
I run a Netware 4.11 box at work for file/print/directory, and an NT box for mail/proxy (I know, I know - I'm building Linux boxen to replace it). I know NT much, much better than Netware for one simple reason - the Netware box never needs any attention. It sits in a dark room and hums along, oblivious to the world. I patch it every 9 months or so, but otherwise it's never down. NT, on the other hand, has made me an expert - I can rebuild an NT box in my sleep (because I've had to).
"...if they click yes during installation to allow AOL to become their default Internet browser, AOL largely takes over all the online functions on the computer." [emphasis mine]
So who's going to know, reading this, what exactly they mean? If IE or Netscape ask you this, it means simply that - for HTTP requests they will be the default. The mail apps included with them ask, also. The checkbox for that option isn't too hard to find, and it's described in the help file.
That's a pretty far f*cking cry from what AOL 5 is doing, IMHO. If one were to assume that AOL operates the same way IE and Netscape do (reasonable, I think, for most people), then you'd say, "Yeah, I want AOL to be my browser - duh - that's why I'm installing it." If the warning had said "AOL will disable all other Internet apps until you sacrifice a chicken, dancing around while sprinkling the blood in a prescribed pattern on the motherboard, singing a Vanilla Ice song" (which is how most people view the inner working of Windows) I guarantee that many people would have given different answers.
If you lie to your customers and literally damage their computers, and the find out, they get pissed off. If your customers get pissed off but can't leave you for a competitor, you're a monopoly. But what about a monopoly where the only thing keeping your customers with you is their wanton ignorance?
So you can get 20 measly hours out of a laptop - that's still pathetic. Sure, by today's standards that's a lot of time, but Transmetta and Motorola are obviously thinking pretty far beyond current technological limitations and needs. If 20 hours sounds good, how about 50 hours for a Crusoe/ethanol laptop? How about 100? How about using this technology in a UPS?
Now, if Crusoe were a competing way of building batteries, maybe Motorola would be offering competition, but it certainly wouldn't make it obsolete. As it is, these two techs are a marriage made in heaven. Not to mention the lower heat of the Crusoe...
Intelligent people will ignore the cyber-jerks, you say, as if that's a good thing. It is neither a good thing for you, nor the community in question, nor the web as a whole. If you enjoy frequenting a/chat board/web forum/whatever/ and it becomes unpleasant, you have no good options. Sure, you can say "f*ck this" and leave, but then you lose the potentially valuable information you would have gained if you'd stayed. Or you can stay, and put up with it, but then it's a constant negative experience.
How much pain are you willing to put up with to get the information you want? How much pain should you have to put up with?
I don't know anyone who's been driven off the web entirely, but I know plenty who have been flamed away from portions of it. If you shout loud enough, pretty soon all you hear is yourself, and the people who are shouting the same things. Pretty boring.
So that's two big media splashes about those Evil Crackers. What do you bet that for every time we hear of this, there are many more instances where the hackers were paid off?
Slashdot Mirror
Your word-choice errors aside (uniformed? uninformed?), you really need to buy a clue. So you can configure X to your liking. So what? How many people browse under X, compared with other platforms? Or compared with the dominant platform (Windows, remember)?
Your sad little bigotry (The interviewee is obviously stuck on some lesser platform) says much more about you than about Zeldman's platform of choice. Anyone can design a web page that renders perfectly on one platform - this isn't even hard. The point of the web is that all the "lesser platforms" should still be able to access content in a readable form.
Quoth the poster:
...it's interesting how quickly people want the Government to step in and stop this overwelming Capitalistic success.
Ever see Soylent Green? Financially, and literally, those folks were making a killing. Their only problem was hiding the fact that "Solyent Green is people!" And they evidently did that pretty well.
In abscence of laws regulating the market (and what isn't part of "the market?") there is nothing to stop a business from producing Soylent Green. And if they were managed half-way decently they'd be, in your words, an "overwelming Capitalistic success."
The US brand of Capitalism is very government controlled, and it needs to stay that way. Large companies are responsible to no one but their shareholders, who by and large don't give a fsck how they get their money. A totally unregulated economy would turn into a cross between The Matrix and Soylent Green in about 5 years. The rich would literally eat the poor and all the shareholders would be happy. The US Government is the only thing stopping you and me from becoming food.
Don't think it would happen? Then riddle me this, Batman: when was the last time you remember a Fortune 500 compny doing something only because it was the morally correct thing to do? When was the last time you remember a Fortune 500 company doing something in spite of the fact that it was morally repugnant?
I know over 200 people (some at work, some at home) who use Windows on a daily basis. Not a single one of them could write a script to do anything if their life depended on it. It's criminaly insane that M$ installs a scripting host with the OS. If you need scripting you know that you need it, and you can download an installer for it. If you don't need it (or, like most Windows users, don't even know what it is), all it can do is fuck up your life.
...and into the real world. I administer a network of 60 Windows machines (but not on the server - *shudder*), and well over 95% of the viruses that I see are Word and Excel macro viruses. To be honest, I haven't even heard of half the files extensions listed. And as for the rest of them - PhotoCD files? Can you really execute a virus from a PhotoCD file?
Furthermore - what's going to stop people from just archiving these files? When the next worm is an attachment sent in a ZIP file, will Outlook nuke all ZIP files?
This is asinine. The problem here is the execution of the malicious code, not the file attachment. Of course it's much easier to just nuke a few file attachments that try to design an e-mail client that isn't Swiss cheese from a security standpoint.
These reeks to me like a punative mode; M$ got tired of the bad press and knew that had to do something: "Fine. You don't like Outlook? Joke's on you pal - we're going to nuke all file attachments that developers might use. The bad news is that your company is going to keep buying Outlook. Forever. Bwahahahaha."
Quoth the poster:
Sure they do, they just want you as a legal, non-pirating user.
You can't be serious. Stand in front of a mirror and say, with a straight face, "Napster wants to kick all music pirates of their service."
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz? Classic SF from 1956; one of the most infulential and respected books in the genre. Humanity nukes itself, spends 2k years rebuilding from the ashes, then does it again.
;)
Unless you were being sarcastic
They didn't have to control for it. They're probably talking about an increase relative to the rest of the general population, not to the history of that particular area. In this case, the statistics controlled themselves. It's called random sampling: they assume that the conditions in the rest of the sampled area (the country, pry) are similar, and that the radioation is the major difference.
Now you could be saying that the population of the country as a whole is getting older, or having children at an older age, and that's what's causing the increase in Down's Syndrome. But the only way to get those pre-conditions to jive with their findings is to concentrate all the older women in higher numbers in the affected areas or to compare Down's Syndrom rates over time only in the affected areas. Both seem pretty unlikely.
The 64 for SDRAM vs. the 16 for RDRAM is not number of pins but bus width. RDRAM has a 2-bit bus while SDRAM has an 8-bit bus. So RDRAM needs to be clocked 4 times as fast as SDRAM just to provide the same throughput.
More recent articles on Tom's:
Dissecting Rambus: the March 15 article that perhaps (?) triggered Rambus' recent stock dump.
Rambus Revisited: Second article, April 3rd.
The little NT-based (shoot me) mail server we use will query ORBS and MAPS RBL. It will either flag the message as possible spam or delete it outright. This is very cool.
:/).
Sadly, it only allows IP-based exceptions, so I can't except *.AOL.com from the deletion. Contrary to other posts I've seen on the subject, we do get legitimate mail from AOL (including some recalcitrant employees I can't get off it
AOL absolutely does need to get its head out of its ass RE spam, but this isn't the way to do it. Oddly enough, putting AOL on the ORBS list will allow more spam into my network.
Spam is "all that much." You're making the mistake of thinking that because something doesn't hurt you very much it must not be a problem for anyone else, either. This is very dangerous and sadly short-sighted.
Spam costs my company money in the form of bandwidth and employee time (most notably, my time). World-wide, spam clogs data line and slows traffic, clogs storage and makes some news groups useless while making messages expire faster on others. Spam makes the entire Internet slower and more expensive. Spam makes people afraid to give out their e-mail address, thus hurting e-commerce and legitimate information exchanges.
Spam is a 180-degree reversal of snail-mail direct-marketing, where the transaction cost is paid by the sender. With electronic spam, the sender typically has very low costs; the hapless receivers pick up the tab for him.
Spam should be exactly as illegal as a DoS attack, and there are simple, credible arguments comparing the two.
This isn't a flame, I just want to make a couple points:
*Minor quibble - by "America" you of course mean "The United States of America," which is in North America. AOl has very little market share in Uruguay.
Maybe NASA should try blowing a big crater somewhere in the Antartic, dropping the robot into it, and then seeing if they can get a response. From a robot on Mars :)
Of course there's M$ help on usenet, but it doesn't compare in breadth, depth, or passion to Linux help. Your sarcasm is noted, but let's see you say this with a straight face.
;)
"The quality, speed, and accuracy of Microsoft help on usenet is as good as Linux help."
Go on. Say it. We'll wait. And wipe that smirk of your face
While we're at it, I explicitly challenge your right to FUD me on this. Fear Uncertainty Doubt. If you can name one software company more worthy of FUD that M$, I'll print out this page and eat it.
While we did not probe these NOSes extensively to expose any security weaknesses, we did look at what they offered in security features.
"Offered" as in "claimed." Well, that's a relief - we all know how forthcoming M$ is about it's OS security. Can you say, "whitewash" boys and girls? No one cares about your opinions on security, CNN - test it or shut up and leave it for the experts.
They very carefully didn't mention how long you can keep alive a Win2k box, compared with a *NIX or Novell box. They didn't mention how long it takes M$ to patch security flaws. They didn't mention tech support ($500/minute at 1-900-micro$oft, or free on usenet). They didn't mention software cost, or Microsoft's gouging with it's new license structure. They didn't mention what hardware they tested on. They didn't mention what hardware you need for an acceptable install of each OS (e.g. 3x more power just to run the oh-so-pretty Win GUI).
I guess you can't expect too much from CNN, eh? Sad how many people will read this and not think about any of the unmentioned issues.
I run a Netware 4.11 box at work for file/print/directory, and an NT box for mail/proxy (I know, I know - I'm building Linux boxen to replace it). I know NT much, much better than Netware for one simple reason - the Netware box never needs any attention. It sits in a dark room and hums along, oblivious to the world. I patch it every 9 months or so, but otherwise it's never down. NT, on the other hand, has made me an expert - I can rebuild an NT box in my sleep (because I've had to).
"...if they click yes during installation to allow AOL to become their default Internet browser, AOL largely takes over all the online functions on the computer." [emphasis mine]
So who's going to know, reading this, what exactly they mean? If IE or Netscape ask you this, it means simply that - for HTTP requests they will be the default. The mail apps included with them ask, also. The checkbox for that option isn't too hard to find, and it's described in the help file.
That's a pretty far f*cking cry from what AOL 5 is doing, IMHO. If one were to assume that AOL operates the same way IE and Netscape do (reasonable, I think, for most people), then you'd say, "Yeah, I want AOL to be my browser - duh - that's why I'm installing it." If the warning had said "AOL will disable all other Internet apps until you sacrifice a chicken, dancing around while sprinkling the blood in a prescribed pattern on the motherboard, singing a Vanilla Ice song" (which is how most people view the inner working of Windows) I guarantee that many people would have given different answers.
If you lie to your customers and literally damage their computers, and the find out, they get pissed off. If your customers get pissed off but can't leave you for a competitor, you're a monopoly. But what about a monopoly where the only thing keeping your customers with you is their wanton ignorance?
So you can get 20 measly hours out of a laptop - that's still pathetic. Sure, by today's standards that's a lot of time, but Transmetta and Motorola are obviously thinking pretty far beyond current technological limitations and needs. If 20 hours sounds good, how about 50 hours for a Crusoe/ethanol laptop? How about 100? How about using this technology in a UPS?
Now, if Crusoe were a competing way of building batteries, maybe Motorola would be offering competition, but it certainly wouldn't make it obsolete. As it is, these two techs are a marriage made in heaven. Not to mention the lower heat of the Crusoe...
Intelligent people will ignore the cyber-jerks, you say, as if that's a good thing. It is neither a good thing for you, nor the community in question, nor the web as a whole. If you enjoy frequenting a /chat board/web forum/whatever/ and it becomes unpleasant, you have no good options. Sure, you can say "f*ck this" and leave, but then you lose the potentially valuable information you would have gained if you'd stayed. Or you can stay, and put up with it, but then it's a constant negative experience.
How much pain are you willing to put up with to get the information you want? How much pain should you have to put up with?
I don't know anyone who's been driven off the web entirely, but I know plenty who have been flamed away from portions of it. If you shout loud enough, pretty soon all you hear is yourself, and the people who are shouting the same things. Pretty boring.
So that's two big media splashes about those Evil Crackers. What do you bet that for every time we hear of this, there are many more instances where the hackers were paid off?