Parent is wrong in one technical respect. The blocking mechanism does work by version, but the Microsoft add-on has not changed. The bug and the patch were in an underlying operating system component.
The blocking mechanism is brain dead in one respect, in that it does not allow users to override the block decision. However, as the last post on the bug thread states,, the add-on mechanism is also flawed, since it should not be possible for other companies to silently install Firefox add-ons without the user's consent. Microsoft is not the only company to have done this, apparently HP have done it for some of their printer drivers. A prompt the first time the add-on runs would help enormously.
I disagree, at least in the case of Bill Gates, I don't know anything much about how the other guys got their fortune.
Yes, Bill Gates got lucky, but there was an enormous amount of effort required on his part to get the opportunity of being in the lucky situation and there was a lot of courage and intelligence required to recognise and take advantage of the lucky break.
If we take the most famous episode of luck affecting Bill Gates, you have to remember that he must have built up a pretty good software business for IBM to visit him at all and then to take advantage of the unprofessional way IBM were treated by Digital Research took balls (and ruthlessness). I'm sure most of us would have just said "yeah, I'm sure they'll sort out something. Now what about our BASIC interpreter?"
then a drive with 2^65 512 byte blocks would need 0.125 moles. With iron atoms, that works out at around 7g of iron; light enough for a laptop drive.
But calculate how long it would take to write every byte on that drive. Then think about the pointlessness of a drive that takes 100 years just to do a destructive format on.
But the real question is will there ever be a need for a memory of 2^64 bytes?
Firewire 800 can transfer 100Megabytes per second. So a disk with 2^64 bytes will take approximately 5,000 years to fill by transferring data continuously. Clearly we need something faster. A 64 bit data bus that can do writes at 1 Gigahertz can fill the disk in a mere 70 years. That still seems like a long time to me.
There really is no point in going above 64 bit. We just can't use it all. There probably aren't 2^64 bytes in all human knowledge.
I'm afraid you are wrong. Doubling the number of bits doesn't double the "power" it multiplies it by quite a large number.
For instance a 32 bit time_t allows you to express time stamps from 1970 to about 2037 - 67 years. Changing the time_t to 64 bits doesn't give you another 67 years, it gives you another 4 billion times 67 years. That's much longer than the age of the Universe so far. Why do you think we'll ever need a 128 bit time_t?
How much RAM can you address with 64 bits of addressing? That's 2^64 bytes you can address. Each byte has 8 bits, so that's 2^67 bits. That's about 10^20 bits. How many silicon atoms do we need to implement a bit of memory? I'm going to say 1,000 (probably a massive under estimate) or 10^3, so a 64 bit address space would take 10^23 silicon atoms. A mole of silicon (6x10^23 atoms) has a mass of 28 grammes, so our 64 bit address space would take between 4 and 5 grammes of silicon.
How much silicon would you therefore need for a 128 bit address? 8 grammes? No, 2^64 x 4 grammes or about 10^20 x 4 grammes - 4 x 10^14 tonnes.
The Pythons chief weapon was their irreverence, irreverence and surrealism, surrealism and irreverence. Their two chief weapons that made them a success were irreverence and surrealism and uncompromising silliness. Their three weapons were irreverence, surrealism and uncompromising silliness and a fanatical devotion to The Goons. Their four weapons... no... amongst their many weapons were such elements as irreverence, surrealism and uncompromising... I'll post again.
Anyway, to get some idea of the cultural impact of Monty Python, Google Spanish Inquisition. The first link is the Wikipedia reference to the actual Spanish Inquisition. The second, third and fifth links are to various pages about the sketch and three of the five image results show Michael Palin in his "nice red costume".
Monty Python is not a franchise, it really is the six people that wrote and performed the sketches. You might as well say "why doesn't somebody reform the Beatles? We might not get Paul or Ringo to take part but it seems like a wasted opportunity."
"Stable" is a biologist term, it means "dead". The problem with a set specification (the "waterfall" model) is you discover after something was implemented that it was a bad idea, the whirlpool model prevents this.
Stable is a chemist term. It means "could blow up".
Stable is a physics term. It means "won't sterilise you with large quantities of radiation.
Stable is an aeronautics term. It means the plane doesn't require a hotshot pilot to stop it from crashing and burning.
Stable is a civil engineering term. It means the ground is firm enough so your building won't collapse.
Why do you think picking an irrelevant meaning for a word out of context makes an argument? Stable in the context of software engineering certainly doesn't mean dead. If you don't know what it does mean, I suggest you go back to school.
In other news, people are worried about the pension situation in the UK because the population is ageing and there are not enough people of working age to support the pensioners.
There is no overcrowding issue in the UK. We could probably absorb everybody who wants to come here. The issues we do have are caused entirely by our mismanagement of immigrants once we let them in.
The problem isn't the scientific validity of the test; the problem is the idea that an emigrant's nationality should factor into whether they should be allowed residency.
No. This is about asylum seekers i.e. people who are claiming entry on the basis that they would be persecuted in their own country. Nationality is a huge factor in determining the validity of that claim. For instance, if somebody came to the UK claiming that they would be persecuted in their home country of North Korea but it was found they had South Korean nationality, their claim would be treated somewhat sceptically.
So, yes, the problem is the scientific validity of the test. I honestly can't see how it would have any validity at all.
Your secretary will automagically know Thunderbird
no, but your Secretary will be amazed at how fast things happen compared to Outlook on her old PC.
Good one. I nearly wet myself laughing at that.
In reality, Thunderbird using IMAP4 is slower than Outlook using Exchange protocol and of course the secretary will whinge constantly about how Thunderbird Is not like her old e-mail client and doesn't do calendaring etc in one nice friendly window. She'll spend so much time whinging that all the savings you made on Open Source will go down the toilet because of her time (which costs money too). Eventually, she'll accept her new tools or leave the company. Actually, even if she accepts her new tools, she'll eventually leave her company and you won't be able to find a replacement, because, guess what, all secretaries only know Microsoft. If you find a replacement, she'll whinge constantly about how Thunderbird Is not like her old e-mail client and doesn't do calendaring etc in one nice friendly window. She'll spend so much time whinging that all the savings you made on Open Source will go down the toilet because of her time (which costs money too). Eventually, she'll accept her new tools or leave the company. Actually, even if she accepts her new tools, she'll eventually leave her company and you won't be able to find a replacement, because, guess what, all secretaries only know Microsoft.... etc...
Her manager will then insist on you putting Microsoft back.
No, but if he perceives it as a cool technology, or fashionable, or otherwise good for his career, he'll be all over you for training courses desperate to give up Windows.
But he won't. As a Windows administrator, he's invested his intellectual capital in Windows. He'll regard Linux as amateur hackery with the same religious zeal that Open Source gurus regard microsoft as the money grabbing lock innery spawn of Satan.
The good F/OSS really is good, your biggest problem is finding which projects are good and which are bad.
No, the biggest problem is persuading people that the "skills" they have invested a career in acquiring no longer mean anything. I put "skills" in inverted commas because we both know the skill is not the operating system or package but the application of the tool at hand to a problem, but people out there in the real World don't look at it like that. To them Windows is the skill or Word is the skill.
I've been working in IT for even longer than my low 6 digit id would suggest and I can say that for all but a small group of elite or lucky people, IT has always been a dreary grind of database access code, support calls, and test scripts.
Even in the 70's when you had the Xerox PARC team of about 50 people, they were outnumbered thousands of times over by all the people writing non Y2K compliant accounting systems in COBOL.
This just isn't true. I have to invest quite some time to familiarize myself with an application and set my preferences, expecting to be able to use it in the future. With closed software, I never know if can do just that. A closed application may change in a way that makes new versions unusable for me at any time. What's worse, closed source locks me in, forcing me to eat all the little nuisances they decide to inflict upon me.
For the vast majority of users i.e. those who can't write code, open source software has exactly the same problems.
With FOSS-software I would fork from the version that has the functionality I need, trust or can use efficiently, and just keep up with any holes as they appear.
You can, yes. But can a salesman? A secretary? My aged mother? No.
Is it okay to use the vendor ID to work with your software to the exclusion of others?
I would say yes. In fact, your software should be required to check to make sure it is talking to a compatible device. If you plugged your Android phone into your PC's USB port and the PC merrily overwrote its firmware with iPhone OS 3.1, I doubt you'd be impressed.
Is the use of a vendor ID an acceptable means of keeping others out of your marketplace?
Indeed, but I fail to see how Apple is keeping other vendors out of its market place.
Is it possible to buy music from elsewhere and put it on your iPod? Yes.
Is it possible to buy music from the iTunes store and put it on your non Apple music player? Yes, but you'll need to write a syncing app and there is still DRM on video content.
It took me about two minutes just now to reverse engineer Apple's iTunes library format (the meta data is mirrored to an XML file and the media files are all there in directories).
Does Apple have a 95% share of the portable music player market? I don't think so, a quick Google shows it to be between 70 and 80%. That's not a monopoly.
Does Apple have a 95% share in the legal music download market? I doubt it. Again it looks like about 70%.
Apple is not a monopoly, merely the dominant vendor.
No the Enigma machine was not a cryptographically sound device. It's major technical flaw was that it would never substitute a letter for itself thanks to the way its circuitry worked.
"Legends of the New Zealand Maori tell of giant man-eating birds. New scientific evidence proves that these birds did exist and were around the same time as humans in New Zealand.
If you are a giant man-eating bird, it's pretty much essential to be around at the same time as some humans.
Slashdot Mirror
Parent is wrong in one technical respect. The blocking mechanism does work by version, but the Microsoft add-on has not changed. The bug and the patch were in an underlying operating system component.
The blocking mechanism is brain dead in one respect, in that it does not allow users to override the block decision. However, as the last post on the bug thread states,, the add-on mechanism is also flawed, since it should not be possible for other companies to silently install Firefox add-ons without the user's consent. Microsoft is not the only company to have done this, apparently HP have done it for some of their printer drivers. A prompt the first time the add-on runs would help enormously.
"I have 14 lines of code in the Linux kernel" is more impressive than "coded an OS from scratch".
Not if your name is Linus Torvalds.
I disagree, at least in the case of Bill Gates, I don't know anything much about how the other guys got their fortune.
Yes, Bill Gates got lucky, but there was an enormous amount of effort required on his part to get the opportunity of being in the lucky situation and there was a lot of courage and intelligence required to recognise and take advantage of the lucky break.
If we take the most famous episode of luck affecting Bill Gates, you have to remember that he must have built up a pretty good software business for IBM to visit him at all and then to take advantage of the unprofessional way IBM were treated by Digital Research took balls (and ruthlessness). I'm sure most of us would have just said "yeah, I'm sure they'll sort out something. Now what about our BASIC interpreter?"
That's enough to address every atom in the observable Universe.
then a drive with 2^65 512 byte blocks would need 0.125 moles. With iron atoms, that works out at around 7g of iron; light enough for a laptop drive.
But calculate how long it would take to write every byte on that drive. Then think about the pointlessness of a drive that takes 100 years just to do a destructive format on.
After all, there are a few servers in the world that handle truly epic amounts of data, and really might be able to use more than 64-bits.
No, really there aren't. You don't understand how big 2^64 bytes really is.
If I had a Firewire 800 disk with 2^64 bytes capacity, it would take me 5,000 years to fill it if I was writing continuously at maximum speed.
I note that the DDR3 RAM in my laptop can transfer 64x10^9 bytes per second. So using the main memory bus of my laptop, it would only take 10 years.
But the real question is will there ever be a need for a memory of 2^64 bytes?
Firewire 800 can transfer 100Megabytes per second. So a disk with 2^64 bytes will take approximately 5,000 years to fill by transferring data continuously. Clearly we need something faster. A 64 bit data bus that can do writes at 1 Gigahertz can fill the disk in a mere 70 years. That still seems like a long time to me.
There really is no point in going above 64 bit. We just can't use it all. There probably aren't 2^64 bytes in all human knowledge.
I'm afraid you are wrong. Doubling the number of bits doesn't double the "power" it multiplies it by quite a large number.
For instance a 32 bit time_t allows you to express time stamps from 1970 to about 2037 - 67 years. Changing the time_t to 64 bits doesn't give you another 67 years, it gives you another 4 billion times 67 years. That's much longer than the age of the Universe so far. Why do you think we'll ever need a 128 bit time_t?
How much RAM can you address with 64 bits of addressing? That's 2^64 bytes you can address. Each byte has 8 bits, so that's 2^67 bits. That's about 10^20 bits. How many silicon atoms do we need to implement a bit of memory? I'm going to say 1,000 (probably a massive under estimate) or 10^3, so a 64 bit address space would take 10^23 silicon atoms. A mole of silicon (6x10^23 atoms) has a mass of 28 grammes, so our 64 bit address space would take between 4 and 5 grammes of silicon.
How much silicon would you therefore need for a 128 bit address? 8 grammes? No, 2^64 x 4 grammes or about 10^20 x 4 grammes - 4 x 10^14 tonnes.
A fashion company publishes a provocative ad.
A blogger picks it up and republishes it. This is free exposure.
The fashion company issues a takedown notice.
Boom! The Streisand effect gets the ad published everywhere for free.
The Pythons chief weapon was their irreverence, irreverence and surrealism, surrealism and irreverence. Their two chief weapons that made them a success were irreverence and surrealism and uncompromising silliness. Their three weapons were irreverence, surrealism and uncompromising silliness and a fanatical devotion to The Goons. Their four weapons... no... amongst their many weapons were such elements as irreverence, surrealism and uncompromising... I'll post again.
Anyway, to get some idea of the cultural impact of Monty Python, Google Spanish Inquisition. The first link is the Wikipedia reference to the actual Spanish Inquisition. The second, third and fifth links are to various pages about the sketch and three of the five image results show Michael Palin in his "nice red costume".
Monty Python is not a franchise, it really is the six people that wrote and performed the sketches. You might as well say "why doesn't somebody reform the Beatles? We might not get Paul or Ringo to take part but it seems like a wasted opportunity."
Nah. Life of Brian is their masterpiece. Meaning of Life was very hit and miss.
Woah, have I just time travelled into the future. Last I checked, there were no still Beatles recordings on iTunes.
Buggered that up:
The first one: s/could/won't/
"Stable" is a biologist term, it means "dead". The problem with a set specification (the "waterfall" model) is you discover after something was implemented that it was a bad idea, the whirlpool model prevents this.
Stable is a chemist term. It means "could blow up".
Stable is a physics term. It means "won't sterilise you with large quantities of radiation.
Stable is an aeronautics term. It means the plane doesn't require a hotshot pilot to stop it from crashing and burning.
Stable is a civil engineering term. It means the ground is firm enough so your building won't collapse.
Why do you think picking an irrelevant meaning for a word out of context makes an argument? Stable in the context of software engineering certainly doesn't mean dead. If you don't know what it does mean, I suggest you go back to school.
I'm Donal Blaney and so's my wife.
In other news, people are worried about the pension situation in the UK because the population is ageing and there are not enough people of working age to support the pensioners.
There is no overcrowding issue in the UK. We could probably absorb everybody who wants to come here. The issues we do have are caused entirely by our mismanagement of immigrants once we let them in.
The problem isn't the scientific validity of the test; the problem is the idea that an emigrant's nationality should factor into whether they should be allowed residency.
No. This is about asylum seekers i.e. people who are claiming entry on the basis that they would be persecuted in their own country. Nationality is a huge factor in determining the validity of that claim. For instance, if somebody came to the UK claiming that they would be persecuted in their home country of North Korea but it was found they had South Korean nationality, their claim would be treated somewhat sceptically.
So, yes, the problem is the scientific validity of the test. I honestly can't see how it would have any validity at all.
Your secretary will automagically know Thunderbird
no, but your Secretary will be amazed at how fast things happen compared to Outlook on her old PC.
Good one. I nearly wet myself laughing at that.
In reality, Thunderbird using IMAP4 is slower than Outlook using Exchange protocol and of course the secretary will whinge constantly about how Thunderbird Is not like her old e-mail client and doesn't do calendaring etc in one nice friendly window. She'll spend so much time whinging that all the savings you made on Open Source will go down the toilet because of her time (which costs money too). Eventually, she'll accept her new tools or leave the company. Actually, even if she accepts her new tools, she'll eventually leave her company and you won't be able to find a replacement, because, guess what, all secretaries only know Microsoft. If you find a replacement, she'll whinge constantly about how Thunderbird Is not like her old e-mail client and doesn't do calendaring etc in one nice friendly window. She'll spend so much time whinging that all the savings you made on Open Source will go down the toilet because of her time (which costs money too). Eventually, she'll accept her new tools or leave the company. Actually, even if she accepts her new tools, she'll eventually leave her company and you won't be able to find a replacement, because, guess what, all secretaries only know Microsoft.... etc...
Her manager will then insist on you putting Microsoft back.
No, but if he perceives it as a cool technology, or fashionable, or otherwise good for his career, he'll be all over you for training courses desperate to give up Windows.
But he won't. As a Windows administrator, he's invested his intellectual capital in Windows. He'll regard Linux as amateur hackery with the same religious zeal that Open Source gurus regard microsoft as the money grabbing lock innery spawn of Satan.
The good F/OSS really is good, your biggest problem is finding which projects are good and which are bad.
No, the biggest problem is persuading people that the "skills" they have invested a career in acquiring no longer mean anything. I put "skills" in inverted commas because we both know the skill is not the operating system or package but the application of the tool at hand to a problem, but people out there in the real World don't look at it like that. To them Windows is the skill or Word is the skill.
Has there ever been glory in IT?
No.
I've been working in IT for even longer than my low 6 digit id would suggest and I can say that for all but a small group of elite or lucky people, IT has always been a dreary grind of database access code, support calls, and test scripts.
Even in the 70's when you had the Xerox PARC team of about 50 people, they were outnumbered thousands of times over by all the people writing non Y2K compliant accounting systems in COBOL.
This just isn't true. I have to invest quite some time to familiarize myself with an application and set my preferences, expecting to be able to use it in the future. With closed software, I never know if can do just that. A closed application may change in a way that makes new versions unusable for me at any time. What's worse, closed source locks me in, forcing me to eat all the little nuisances they decide to inflict upon me.
For the vast majority of users i.e. those who can't write code, open source software has exactly the same problems.
With FOSS-software I would fork from the version that has the functionality I need, trust or can use efficiently, and just keep up with any holes as they appear.
You can, yes. But can a salesman? A secretary? My aged mother? No.
Is it okay to use the vendor ID to work with your software to the exclusion of others?
I would say yes. In fact, your software should be required to check to make sure it is talking to a compatible device. If you plugged your Android phone into your PC's USB port and the PC merrily overwrote its firmware with iPhone OS 3.1, I doubt you'd be impressed.
Is the use of a vendor ID an acceptable means of keeping others out of your marketplace?
Indeed, but I fail to see how Apple is keeping other vendors out of its market place.
Is it possible to buy music from elsewhere and put it on your iPod? Yes.
Is it possible to buy music from the iTunes store and put it on your non Apple music player? Yes, but you'll need to write a syncing app and there is still DRM on video content.
It took me about two minutes just now to reverse engineer Apple's iTunes library format (the meta data is mirrored to an XML file and the media files are all there in directories).
Does Apple have a 95% share of the portable music player market? I don't think so, a quick Google shows it to be between 70 and 80%. That's not a monopoly.
Does Apple have a 95% share in the legal music download market? I doubt it. Again it looks like about 70%.
Apple is not a monopoly, merely the dominant vendor.
No the Enigma machine was not a cryptographically sound device. It's major technical flaw was that it would never substitute a letter for itself thanks to the way its circuitry worked.
"Legends of the New Zealand Maori tell of giant man-eating birds. New scientific evidence proves that these birds did exist and were around the same time as humans in New Zealand.
If you are a giant man-eating bird, it's pretty much essential to be around at the same time as some humans.