The U.S. government I think pulls in $3 trillion or so per year. I think the lowest amount they can survive on and perform necessary government actions (without any of the major services) would be $50 billion. This is 6000% of what they need to do the very basic stuff.
So what is "necessary government actions" then?. Given 1/60th of what they normally get, these "necessary government actions" surely can't include such necessities as schools, higher education, police, military, firemen, medicare/medicaid/social security, roads/electricy/water/sewage/garbage/infrastructur e, etc... All of these are in my opinion "necessary government actions".
If on the other hand, you only consider legislation as "necessary", then I'll be willing to take over the job at an even lower cost. Those $50 billion would go to exactly the parts of the government most people consider "unnecessary paperwork".
And just how would most sane people keep from getting infected again while updating Windows to a reasonably secure level? The average time it takes for a plain vanilla Windows install to get broken by malware is less than the amount of time it takes to navigate to Windows update.
Well, the point is that personal "application-level" firewalls do not help in protecting you from trojans. Which is what they are marketed as. If you are worried about people attacking you from the outside, simply use an external firewall/NAT appliance like everybody else. In addition to making you safe from the above-mentioned problem, it is hassle-free, relatively cheap, offers other advantages such as Internet sharing/home office networking/wireless, and protects you even when you haven't had time to install ZA or whatever personal firewall of choice you intend to use.
I think that perhaps you disqualified yourself from the conversation with the admission that you've never had large problems with malware. There is a very large of people that have precisely that problem and, for those people, a decent firewall can be part of the solution.
(First off, of course I've had problems with malware at some point in the past. It's just that I've learnt from my experiences, and now know what to do and what not to do. Most people, however seem unable to learn from experience. A bad driver usually stays a bad driver, etc... However...)
The people who are too stupid to make use of common sense on the Internet to avoid viruses and malware, are certainly too stupid to effectively make use of a personal firewall. I'm a professional, and I found it unworkable because it was just hassling me too much. An average user who can't even figure out what the never-ending popups from it means, will soon be conditioned into simply clicking "yes", which defeats the whole purpose. It's like having a doorman that looks mean, but lets anyone into the house, and even out of it again, carrying your TV, without even attempting to look at them.
A simple NAT-appliance protects even the stupid people, and because it's always on, even better than a personal firewall. I'll agree that ad-aware and antivirus might help some poor fucker who's already lost the race against malware (and even help protecting the stupid at times), but any the security product that increases "work" significantly more than it increases security, it just isn't worth the hassle. This includes personal firewalls. And unless you're trying out new executables, you don't need your antivirus taking up half the computers resources either.
Perhaps I have the economics wrong, but isn't it more cost effective to build your own cluster out of discarded PCs?
You've got the economics wrong. Building your own cluster out of discarded PCs is not economic. Building your own cluster out of brand new PCs might be.
Still, leasing is attractive for many reasons. Such as predictable costs, complying with yearly budgets, etc... If you build your own cluster, and find it doesn't work as expected, or you didn't really need it, or whatever, you are pretty much fucked. Clusterfucked!
Without Zone Alarm to block the malware traffic while Anti-Vir downloaded updates to its signature files, her internet connection was saturated with so much malware traffic that she couldn't connect to anything else.
In other words: If that is your main problem, by all means, use Zone Alarm. However, for normal users that simply want to "improve the security" of their systems, and not use some expert geek friend to clean their system of garbage they could have easily avoided in the first place, it doesn't work. Besides, most sane people would fix such a problem with a reformat, as if your friends system was that bad, there's surely other problems lurking too.
Further, she gets to see what programs try to access the internet.
Which is exactly why I stopped using zonealarm. Without zonealarm constantly pestering me about dangerous "attacks", either software I used would silently stop working because they needed net access, or I would need to allow most everything by default, reducing any effectivness of the firewall. A few weeks of clicking yellow dialog boxes, and you get enough. I didn't have a big problem with malicious software before ZA, and having the software equivalent of an annoying mum trying to warn you against stepping on something dangerous for every single step you take as you walk down the pavement, is just too annoying, too time-consuming, and too ridiculous. When you consider the additional implication, that you mum only notices the broken glass on the pavement, but never sees madman with the gun sneaking up on you from behind, it becomes even more obvious that it's only a big waste of time.
Because driver's licenses have been so effective in not allowing stupid people to injure others using their cars?
Well, yes. I think you'd find it pretty hard to argue otherwise.
And, because federal regulations *always* fix problems?;-)
Well, not always. But usually. And that should be enough incentive to be in favour of laws. If something must always work better for you to consider it, there isn't a single invention good enough for you to use. So you'd better start running around naked in the woods, or realize that worst case scenario is not a good metric for everyday life...
However, I will agree that in this particular case, regulation is probably not a good idea. Demanding that computer users need a "license" to use their computers, makes about as much sense as demanding that hammer users need a "license" to use a hammer (for most people, the hammer is even more dangerous). Unless we are willing to punish people for mismanaging their computers (e.g. getting "owned" becomes a punishable offence), demanding that they have a license makes little sense.
I'm not sure of any way in which different parties can independently come up with unique keys without allocating them through a central authority, other than a large random value.
Why would one not want to allocate them through a central authority. It's not that hard. Any secretary could do it. Conventions could be established to minimize work for the "central authority". Besides, collitions of textual filenames have never been reported to be a big problem for Microsoft (well, apart from the arcane 8+3 limitation). Do you suggest they should stop giving files textual names, and replace filenames with GUIDs too?
{098f2470-bae0-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb} is apparently the identity of the null persistent handler; it's the class used by the content indexer for files that explicitly don't have indexable content. This class is exported by query.dll. I just looked up the key "{098f2470-bae0-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb}" under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID.
But if the key had been named HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\null_persistent_handler then collitions would have been much more likely?
Some of the criticisms in the article are perfectly valid, but many of them are (supposedly) going to be fixed in Vista (whenever that gets out..)
I'm sorry. But I have another operating system that is scheduled to come out any time now. It will beat even Windows Vista to the ground. Well, at least on paper, since both are vapourware...
It always boggles me, how extremely good Microsoft is at selling vaporware. I mean, no other vendor can even approach their ability to make customers delay a buying decision, simply because a new version will come out "real soon now", with all the spiffy features we really want.
And perhaps even more surprising, the customers never learn. Even though Microsoft has always been using this tactic, and even though Microsoft never releases on time, and even though Microsoft has never released a product as spiffy as their press releases, the customers are still willing to wait for the next version, instead of buying from a competitor.
Get over it. Windows Vista will be late, and it will not be worth waiting for. At servicepack 2 or 3, it might be worth considering. Untill then, make your buying decisions by comparing software that's actually on the market!
Hurd is a failure because Linux exists. Without Linux, the same developers working on it would be working on Hurd (or a fork of hurd).
I seriously doubt that. Hurd development was slow before linux existed, and it remains slow after linux came to life. Now it's 15 years since linux was first created, and linux is at this stage the centerpiece of an entire industry of software products and services. Meanwhile, lots of other operating systems have been written from scratch, and I can probably list dozens that are (a) more usable than hurd, (b) younger than both hurd and linux, and (c) still written by volunteers.
Hurd development is not slow because of a lack of developers, it is slow because of bad architectural decisions, a severe case of second system effect, mach instability, failure to follow a "worse is better"-philosophy, and so on. Adding more developers to this kind of project can in many cases slow it down even further (read: "the mythical man-month").
Torvolds was in the right place at the right time, and did a competent job of capitalizing on it.
His name is Torvalds, not Torvolds. His place was minix enthusiasts, and yes, it probably was the correct place to find developers for a new free unix kernel. I'm quite sure I would disagree that he did a competent job of capitalizing on it, Torvalds remained a poor student for a pretty long time.
In this respect he is like Bill Gates, with people saying how if it hadn't been for Microsoft we'd still be using DOS.
Uh, Microsoft was the company that brought us DOS in the first place (although they didn't write it, they bought the right to it, and sold it to us consumers). And no, Torvalds is not filthy rich, like Bill Gates.
I think this kind of argument, that it could never have turned out as well without <insert person here>, is pretty absurd.
Maybe you find it absurd, but sometimes it's just the truth. The right man in the right place can and do make an important difference at times. You can argue that without Linus, someone else would soon have written a free 386 unix-clone. And you would probably be right, but what happened afterwards, the unique community, and so on, is largely a result of Linus being who he is, it would happened differently with another person at the center.
I've never been able to figure out how people manage to scratch a disc so badly that it causes read errors. I've been using CD's as long as anyone and I have yet to screw one up badly enough to notice.
Wow, your life must be exciting.
The only thing I can think of is maybe these people have, or are, children.
Other possible explanations is that they (a) have parties (b) bring CDs to parties (c) uses a portable CD-player and carries CDs in sleeves instead of the original covers (d) have damaged the original covers but continue to use them (e) are slightly clumsy (f) etc...
I have plenty of stuff. It all breaks, usually sooner than expected. My cell-phone must be replaced every year (including this year, and it was a Nokia 5140). My last washing machine broke after just 3 years, and I'm single. I've yet to keep a pair of sunglasses more than 2 weeks (and it's not because I sit on them). And I've never felt a reason to trust CDs or DVDs with valuable data either (even if they never leave the house). In short: things break all the time. It's not that it's impossible to take proper care for things, but usually cheap modern consumer items are designed to break, and unless you take a lot of care to avoid it, it will happen.
You can choose to use things that are designed better (and cost more), or you can live with the losses. Or you can go around being careful all the time, but that's not my idea of having fun...
Any complaints about keeping code up-to-date are highly exaggerated.
Fine. Please find one of your (or someone elses) old backups, and get a 10 year old linux binary of some commercial software (either a demo, or something you've bought). Now, get it to run on a modern linux system.
As a comparison, find a 10 year old windows binary of some commercial software (either a demo, or something you've bought). Now get it to run on a modern windows system.
And to really make my point, try this: Take the same windows binary, and attempt to run it under wine in linux.
My guess is that in terms of how easy it was to get the programs to run: old windows binary on windows won; then old windows binary under wine; and at jumbo place, running an old linux binary under linux.
Naitoh shuns the use of aluminium in laptop manufacturing, calling it 'weak', instead praising titanium (used in the construction of the 3000) for its light-weight and scratch-resistant properties.
Yeah, because what we consumers really want, is something ridiculously expensive, with a perceived feeling of exclusivity. No matter that most of the parts are plastic anyway. No matter that aluminium seems to work fine for other weight/strength-sensitive tasks, such as in the aero-industry, mountain-bikes, etc... No matter that just a little bit of coffee, rain, salt-water, other liquids, sand, ants, etc..., easily gets into the electronics and short-circuits it. No matter that harddrives are fine-tuned mechanical things that are easy to destroy just by loosing your laptop onto the concrete floor.
No, what we want is to be seduced by marketers, adding ridiculously expensive substances, such as titanium, to our laptops, just so it can be perceived as more high-tech and "exclusive". This has nothing to do with aluminium being "weak", with todays designs laptops won't be any stronger using titanium, than they will be faster if you boost the (electrical) power.
...And the answer I give is always the same: "don't".
It's not your job to build your sisters computer, and it's not your job to fix it when it breaks down. I have a theory as to why you keep doing it though. And as I see it, there are two possibilities:
Most likely, the problem is with you, and not with your sister. Your sister notices that whenever she complains about some minor problem with her computer, you seem to "love" to help her fix it. Therefore she doesn't see it as rude to continue asking for help, or even mention computer problems. If you acted a bit more mature, and gave her some hints that you are fed up with this, and/or simply recommended some teenager or support-company that would do it for money, you'd get rid of the problem. Just the same way your cousin who's a car mechanic simply says no to your 3rd or 4th request for free help with your car. Since the problem is with you, the only one who can fix it is you. It's your time, your life, and your sister will understand it, if you choose not to help her. She's already more than thankful for all the help she's already gotten.
Alternately, and less likely, your sister is the problem. Your sister is a psychopath, or almost a psychopath, and abuses you to do whatever she wants. If you don't do what she wants, she has an almost uncanny ability to get back at you, whether it is with violence, words, or talking with others behind your back. I find this very unlikely, but if it's the case, try to contact a support-organization for victims of psychopaths for better advice. The best thing to do would probably be to stop all contact with your sister, and help other people who are hurt by her to make the same choice.
For the first time, I have become worried about an unbalanced singularity. If one country reaches the singularity first, the power they would gain might allow them to prevent a singularity in other countries. The US should invest in technology to speed and guide the development of singularity technology here at home. We can't afford to let the singularity happen somewhere else first.
What do you mean? That some super-intelligent AI created somewhere in the world, would want to have an active part in human geopolitics?
I'm sorry, but that just sounds a bit far-fetched to me. Once (if) AI intelligence surpasses human intelligence, their (non-)interest in human geopolitics would be comparable to our own (non-)interest in the territorial urine-marking of other mammals.
There are plenty of things that worry me about a (hypothetical) singularity. Whether the breakthrough happens in the US, Japan, North Korea, Iran, Israel, Sudan, China, or somewhere else is not one of them.
Now Intel's comeback means we're seeing the start of a new growth of CPU power, this time into multi-core land, a nice solid metric on which to compete.
Look, we have hyper-threading/SMT/whatever, so our 2 cores are as good as 4 of your cores. Besides each of our cores are faster than your cores. And nobody needs more than 4 cores anyway. With our supercallifragilisticexpiallidotious memory bandwidth, even our dual core processors will beat your 16-core processor, because memory bandwidth is what really matters. So in order to make consumers think about performance again, and not just the number of cores, we will name our processors with a "virtual core number" that reflect real-world performance better. Thank You!
The Olympics should be about being the best athlete
Actually no! The olympics should be about having fun. That's why it's called the Olympic games. But that was a long time ago, these days it's a race of sponsors, tv-rights, doping and winning the gold medal. The old idea of free amateurs competing together as a symbolic gesture of peace between nations somehow got forgotten somewhere.
The ability to have intelligent free-form conversations with the computer, is far beyond current technology. Even voice synthesis is currently in a pretty bad state (ever listened to one of the commercial screen-readers for blind people?) So unless you count "having a pre-written script and using an actor" as the task to be solved, the computer UI in ST:TOS is still unbelievably far beyond current technology, although most of the tasks it performed seemed to be pretty simple DSP operations:-)
I think you misunderstand. I don't know what the laws in Australia are, but in many places, it's up to the victim whether they want to press charges against the offender. In some cases, depending on the crime, the state can bring their own case regardless. However, the victim is often the primary or only witness, and bringing a case can be a waste of time and money without their cooperation.
I see. But in this case, you can be a witness yourself, simply by having a broadband connection and some proficiency in usingg google.com.
I doubt there are many civilized countries where the police can't press charges themselves if a crime has been committed, although there are probably boatloads of cases where they don't bother, since it's only a minor crime, uncooperative witness, etc..., and therefore a waste of time/resources. And of course, there are also civilian lawsuits...
I have no idea why you are talking about bartering. Under communism, "the elderly, disabled or infirmed" will "receive according to their needs", just like everybody else. And since they have no abilities of any use to anyone, they will also "give according to their abilities".
And that's why communism will never succeed. I "need" only food, water, clothing, shelter, and access to medical treatment if I ever get sick. But there's just no way in hell that's going to motivate me to "give according to my ability". In that case, I need a bit of money as well (or perhaps a slave-driver with a whip).
(If you want to hang on to the bartering idea, replace money with "hours" or whatever they use to evade taxes (don't tell me that anyone is capable of creating a real bartering culture these days, the money meme has been to deeply embedded into our culture for the last 1000 years, and so "bartering" is just a way to avoid paying taxes)).
Well, can you point out any place where something even remotely similar to communism exists? A place where people actually "give according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs", at least in principle?
It's incredible that one of the cited reasons for WinFS' death is that Microsoft couldn't figure out how to expose the technology to the user. Call me crazy, but planning how the user was supposed to interact with the technology should have been one of the first design steps.
Why? Programming is both a top-down and a bottom-up type of activity. To think up a pretty user interface is simple. Star Trek did it in the 1950s. So far, noone has implemented it. It's just not possible with todays technology. So sometimes, in order to invent something new, you have to work bottom-up: "these are the tools we have, let's build something useful with them, and find out how to interact with it later".
In fact, it kind of illustrates a difference between Microsoft and Apple in that area.
If it really illustrates that, then Microsoft truly are innovative, while Apple only write pretty widgets around well-understood and well-known concepts.
Whether or not a crime has been committed is up to the victim. It's important to remember that.
Wherever you've got that idea from, it's WRONG! The whole idea of having a system of laws to govern your country, is that it should be possible to know in advance about what is legal or not. Ideally these laws should also to some degree be the same that the majority of people think is "right".
If a crime has been committed anytime some "victim" claims to have become a "victim of a crime", it would be pretty hard for pretty much anyone not to commit crimes. Instead we have specific laws against things such as: removing a persons freedom, battering, violence, assault, rape, etc...
Now, in this case, since the incident was broadcasted across the Internet, and the police say they lack evidence, it pretty much means that what they saw on the video was not sufficient evidence of a crime, for them to consider it worth pursuing. While I haven't seen the video, the narration of the girl seems pretty believable. At least to anyone who's ever been drunk at a teenage party. The boys acted in bad taste and bad manners, but not illegally. That is, unless the boys had continued the treatment after the girl had made it pretty clear that it was no longer funny.
Look, it's some form of identification of a person, allright?
So let's assume the FBI wanted to figure out who a person with those characteristics were. What do you think the FBI would do? They would contact Pay By Touch, and Pay By Touch would give them the data they wanted.
It doesn't matter at all if it's not "the same". If it's some kind of hash, it still uniquely identifies the customer from their fingerprint, and would be useful to law enforcement. If it's some other way of identifying people from fingerprints that is somehow different from the standard way, it still uniquely identifies the customer from their fingerprint, and would be useful to law enforcement. If it's not a fingerprint at all, they're lying, because they say it's a fingerprint.
But most likely, what they mean with "not the same as those collected by the federal government or law enforcement", is exactly that. It's not the same, it's a different database containing different data. FBI's database contains name, address, SSN, criminal records, fingerprints, and so on; while Pay By Touch's database contains name, billing address, account no/card info, fingerprint of index finger, and so on... That the two will eventually be linked is obvious, and is only a matter of time, current law and company guarantees notwithstanding. On the other hand, for privacy concerns this is no different than paying with your card, which FBI can access within seconds, if they choose to. If you want to remain anonymous, use cash!
It's only for security that it's a bad idea. Unlike cards, fingerprints can't be changed if they're stolen. But any combination of "two out of three", such as fingerprint and card, fingerprint and pin-code, or card and pin-code would be acceptable. Of course the best would be a combination of all three.
Sort of a problem for something designed to solve cross-platform communication problems. (If that's actually what it was supposed to do; I'm still not sure about that.;-)
Oh, it most definitely was. It just never happened. They all needed to be source compatible, so they all used IDL. Which was mostly fine.
The next step would be to let different CORBA implementations to talk to each other. Which they didn't. So OMG defined IIOP, which was a common wire-level protocol. IIOP was never mandatory in use, it only had to be supported. So the vendors "supported" it by using their own proprietary protocol, and adding a slower, buggier, less featureful implementation of IIOP, that required some hoops to go through to be able to be used at all. The vendors would claim that their protocol was "better" (i.e. faster, easier to use, more robust, etc) then IIOP since IIOP was designed mostly for "interoperation" while their protocol was designed for being "better".
But in any case, you needed a CORBA library, and an IDL "compiler" to generate the "stubs". Exactly what was contained in this library and all the magic in the stubs was how CORBA vendors "improved" upon each other, and where they had the most fun breaking specifications and adding bugs. Of course there was a common core somewhere, but since every implementation was incomplete, and added proprietary features, this common subset was very difficult to find, and also very tiny!
The few vendors left today follow the standard closer, and they also have a better standard to follow, so people shouldn't be as scared to delve into CORBA today, as they should have been when it was hyped. But it's still not "fun".
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The U.S. government I think pulls in $3 trillion or so per year. I think the lowest amount they can survive on and perform necessary government actions (without any of the major services) would be $50 billion. This is 6000% of what they need to do the very basic stuff.
So what is "necessary government actions" then?. Given 1/60th of what they normally get, these "necessary government actions" surely can't include such necessities as schools, higher education, police, military, firemen, medicare/medicaid/social security, roads/electricy/water/sewage/garbage/infrastructur e, etc... All of these are in my opinion "necessary government actions".
If on the other hand, you only consider legislation as "necessary", then I'll be willing to take over the job at an even lower cost. Those $50 billion would go to exactly the parts of the government most people consider "unnecessary paperwork".
And just how would most sane people keep from getting infected again while updating Windows to a reasonably secure level? The average time it takes for a plain vanilla Windows install to get broken by malware is less than the amount of time it takes to navigate to Windows update.
Well, the point is that personal "application-level" firewalls do not help in protecting you from trojans. Which is what they are marketed as. If you are worried about people attacking you from the outside, simply use an external firewall/NAT appliance like everybody else. In addition to making you safe from the above-mentioned problem, it is hassle-free, relatively cheap, offers other advantages such as Internet sharing/home office networking/wireless, and protects you even when you haven't had time to install ZA or whatever personal firewall of choice you intend to use.
I think that perhaps you disqualified yourself from the conversation with the admission that you've never had large problems with malware. There is a very large of people that have precisely that problem and, for those people, a decent firewall can be part of the solution.
(First off, of course I've had problems with malware at some point in the past. It's just that I've learnt from my experiences, and now know what to do and what not to do. Most people, however seem unable to learn from experience. A bad driver usually stays a bad driver, etc... However...)
The people who are too stupid to make use of common sense on the Internet to avoid viruses and malware, are certainly too stupid to effectively make use of a personal firewall. I'm a professional, and I found it unworkable because it was just hassling me too much. An average user who can't even figure out what the never-ending popups from it means, will soon be conditioned into simply clicking "yes", which defeats the whole purpose. It's like having a doorman that looks mean, but lets anyone into the house, and even out of it again, carrying your TV, without even attempting to look at them.
A simple NAT-appliance protects even the stupid people, and because it's always on, even better than a personal firewall. I'll agree that ad-aware and antivirus might help some poor fucker who's already lost the race against malware (and even help protecting the stupid at times), but any the security product that increases "work" significantly more than it increases security, it just isn't worth the hassle. This includes personal firewalls. And unless you're trying out new executables, you don't need your antivirus taking up half the computers resources either.
Perhaps I have the economics wrong, but isn't it more cost effective to build your own cluster out of discarded PCs?
You've got the economics wrong. Building your own cluster out of discarded PCs is not economic. Building your own cluster out of brand new PCs might be.
Still, leasing is attractive for many reasons. Such as predictable costs, complying with yearly budgets, etc... If you build your own cluster, and find it doesn't work as expected, or you didn't really need it, or whatever, you are pretty much fucked. Clusterfucked!
Without Zone Alarm to block the malware traffic while Anti-Vir downloaded updates to its signature files, her internet connection was saturated with so much malware traffic that she couldn't connect to anything else.
In other words: If that is your main problem, by all means, use Zone Alarm. However, for normal users that simply want to "improve the security" of their systems, and not use some expert geek friend to clean their system of garbage they could have easily avoided in the first place, it doesn't work. Besides, most sane people would fix such a problem with a reformat, as if your friends system was that bad, there's surely other problems lurking too.
Further, she gets to see what programs try to access the internet.
Which is exactly why I stopped using zonealarm. Without zonealarm constantly pestering me about dangerous "attacks", either software I used would silently stop working because they needed net access, or I would need to allow most everything by default, reducing any effectivness of the firewall. A few weeks of clicking yellow dialog boxes, and you get enough. I didn't have a big problem with malicious software before ZA, and having the software equivalent of an annoying mum trying to warn you against stepping on something dangerous for every single step you take as you walk down the pavement, is just too annoying, too time-consuming, and too ridiculous. When you consider the additional implication, that you mum only notices the broken glass on the pavement, but never sees madman with the gun sneaking up on you from behind, it becomes even more obvious that it's only a big waste of time.
Because driver's licenses have been so effective in not allowing stupid people to injure others using their cars?
Well, yes. I think you'd find it pretty hard to argue otherwise.
And, because federal regulations *always* fix problems? ;-)
Well, not always. But usually. And that should be enough incentive to be in favour of laws. If something must always work better for you to consider it, there isn't a single invention good enough for you to use. So you'd better start running around naked in the woods, or realize that worst case scenario is not a good metric for everyday life...
However, I will agree that in this particular case, regulation is probably not a good idea. Demanding that computer users need a "license" to use their computers, makes about as much sense as demanding that hammer users need a "license" to use a hammer (for most people, the hammer is even more dangerous). Unless we are willing to punish people for mismanaging their computers (e.g. getting "owned" becomes a punishable offence), demanding that they have a license makes little sense.
Learn why GUIDs are the way they are, please.
Yes, please tell me why people still use names when GUIDs and webpages such as these do the same job?
I'm not sure of any way in which different parties can independently come up with unique keys without allocating them through a central authority, other than a large random value.
Why would one not want to allocate them through a central authority. It's not that hard. Any secretary could do it. Conventions could be established to minimize work for the "central authority". Besides, collitions of textual filenames have never been reported to be a big problem for Microsoft (well, apart from the arcane 8+3 limitation). Do you suggest they should stop giving files textual names, and replace filenames with GUIDs too?
{098f2470-bae0-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb} is apparently the identity of the null persistent handler; it's the class used by the content indexer for files that explicitly don't have indexable content. This class is exported by query.dll. I just looked up the key "{098f2470-bae0-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb}" under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID.
But if the key had been named HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\null_persistent_handler then collitions would have been much more likely?
Some of the criticisms in the article are perfectly valid, but many of them are (supposedly) going to be fixed in Vista (whenever that gets out..)
I'm sorry. But I have another operating system that is scheduled to come out any time now. It will beat even Windows Vista to the ground. Well, at least on paper, since both are vapourware...
It always boggles me, how extremely good Microsoft is at selling vaporware. I mean, no other vendor can even approach their ability to make customers delay a buying decision, simply because a new version will come out "real soon now", with all the spiffy features we really want.
And perhaps even more surprising, the customers never learn. Even though Microsoft has always been using this tactic, and even though Microsoft never releases on time, and even though Microsoft has never released a product as spiffy as their press releases, the customers are still willing to wait for the next version, instead of buying from a competitor.
Get over it. Windows Vista will be late, and it will not be worth waiting for. At servicepack 2 or 3, it might be worth considering. Untill then, make your buying decisions by comparing software that's actually on the market!
Hurd is a failure because Linux exists. Without Linux, the same developers working on it would be working on Hurd (or a fork of hurd).
I seriously doubt that. Hurd development was slow before linux existed, and it remains slow after linux came to life. Now it's 15 years since linux was first created, and linux is at this stage the centerpiece of an entire industry of software products and services. Meanwhile, lots of other operating systems have been written from scratch, and I can probably list dozens that are (a) more usable than hurd, (b) younger than both hurd and linux, and (c) still written by volunteers.
Hurd development is not slow because of a lack of developers, it is slow because of bad architectural decisions, a severe case of second system effect, mach instability, failure to follow a "worse is better"-philosophy, and so on. Adding more developers to this kind of project can in many cases slow it down even further (read: "the mythical man-month").
Torvolds was in the right place at the right time, and did a competent job of capitalizing on it.
His name is Torvalds, not Torvolds. His place was minix enthusiasts, and yes, it probably was the correct place to find developers for a new free unix kernel. I'm quite sure I would disagree that he did a competent job of capitalizing on it, Torvalds remained a poor student for a pretty long time.
In this respect he is like Bill Gates, with people saying how if it hadn't been for Microsoft we'd still be using DOS.
Uh, Microsoft was the company that brought us DOS in the first place (although they didn't write it, they bought the right to it, and sold it to us consumers). And no, Torvalds is not filthy rich, like Bill Gates.
I think this kind of argument, that it could never have turned out as well without <insert person here>, is pretty absurd.
Maybe you find it absurd, but sometimes it's just the truth. The right man in the right place can and do make an important difference at times. You can argue that without Linus, someone else would soon have written a free 386 unix-clone. And you would probably be right, but what happened afterwards, the unique community, and so on, is largely a result of Linus being who he is, it would happened differently with another person at the center.
I've never been able to figure out how people manage to scratch a disc so badly that it causes read errors. I've been using CD's as long as anyone and I have yet to screw one up badly enough to notice.
Wow, your life must be exciting.
The only thing I can think of is maybe these people have, or are, children.
Other possible explanations is that they (a) have parties (b) bring CDs to parties (c) uses a portable CD-player and carries CDs in sleeves instead of the original covers (d) have damaged the original covers but continue to use them (e) are slightly clumsy (f) etc...
I have plenty of stuff. It all breaks, usually sooner than expected. My cell-phone must be replaced every year (including this year, and it was a Nokia 5140). My last washing machine broke after just 3 years, and I'm single. I've yet to keep a pair of sunglasses more than 2 weeks (and it's not because I sit on them). And I've never felt a reason to trust CDs or DVDs with valuable data either (even if they never leave the house). In short: things break all the time. It's not that it's impossible to take proper care for things, but usually cheap modern consumer items are designed to break, and unless you take a lot of care to avoid it, it will happen.
You can choose to use things that are designed better (and cost more), or you can live with the losses. Or you can go around being careful all the time, but that's not my idea of having fun...
Any complaints about keeping code up-to-date are highly exaggerated.
Fine. Please find one of your (or someone elses) old backups, and get a 10 year old linux binary of some commercial software (either a demo, or something you've bought). Now, get it to run on a modern linux system.
As a comparison, find a 10 year old windows binary of some commercial software (either a demo, or something you've bought). Now get it to run on a modern windows system.
And to really make my point, try this: Take the same windows binary, and attempt to run it under wine in linux.
My guess is that in terms of how easy it was to get the programs to run: old windows binary on windows won; then old windows binary under wine; and at jumbo place, running an old linux binary under linux.
Yeah, because what we consumers really want, is something ridiculously expensive, with a perceived feeling of exclusivity. No matter that most of the parts are plastic anyway. No matter that aluminium seems to work fine for other weight/strength-sensitive tasks, such as in the aero-industry, mountain-bikes, etc... No matter that just a little bit of coffee, rain, salt-water, other liquids, sand, ants, etc..., easily gets into the electronics and short-circuits it. No matter that harddrives are fine-tuned mechanical things that are easy to destroy just by loosing your laptop onto the concrete floor.
No, what we want is to be seduced by marketers, adding ridiculously expensive substances, such as titanium, to our laptops, just so it can be perceived as more high-tech and "exclusive". This has nothing to do with aluminium being "weak", with todays designs laptops won't be any stronger using titanium, than they will be faster if you boost the (electrical) power.
It's not your job to build your sisters computer, and it's not your job to fix it when it breaks down. I have a theory as to why you keep doing it though. And as I see it, there are two possibilities:
What do you mean? That some super-intelligent AI created somewhere in the world, would want to have an active part in human geopolitics?
I'm sorry, but that just sounds a bit far-fetched to me. Once (if) AI intelligence surpasses human intelligence, their (non-)interest in human geopolitics would be comparable to our own (non-)interest in the territorial urine-marking of other mammals.
There are plenty of things that worry me about a (hypothetical) singularity. Whether the breakthrough happens in the US, Japan, North Korea, Iran, Israel, Sudan, China, or somewhere else is not one of them.
Look, we have hyper-threading/SMT/whatever, so our 2 cores are as good as 4 of your cores. Besides each of our cores are faster than your cores. And nobody needs more than 4 cores anyway. With our supercallifragilisticexpiallidotious memory bandwidth, even our dual core processors will beat your 16-core processor, because memory bandwidth is what really matters. So in order to make consumers think about performance again, and not just the number of cores, we will name our processors with a "virtual core number" that reflect real-world performance better. Thank You!
Actually no! The olympics should be about having fun. That's why it's called the Olympic games. But that was a long time ago, these days it's a race of sponsors, tv-rights, doping and winning the gold medal. The old idea of free amateurs competing together as a symbolic gesture of peace between nations somehow got forgotten somewhere.
The ability to have intelligent free-form conversations with the computer, is far beyond current technology. Even voice synthesis is currently in a pretty bad state (ever listened to one of the commercial screen-readers for blind people?) So unless you count "having a pre-written script and using an actor" as the task to be solved, the computer UI in ST:TOS is still unbelievably far beyond current technology, although most of the tasks it performed seemed to be pretty simple DSP operations :-)
I see. But in this case, you can be a witness yourself, simply by having a broadband connection and some proficiency in usingg google.com.
I doubt there are many civilized countries where the police can't press charges themselves if a crime has been committed, although there are probably boatloads of cases where they don't bother, since it's only a minor crime, uncooperative witness, etc..., and therefore a waste of time/resources. And of course, there are also civilian lawsuits...
And that's why communism will never succeed. I "need" only food, water, clothing, shelter, and access to medical treatment if I ever get sick. But there's just no way in hell that's going to motivate me to "give according to my ability". In that case, I need a bit of money as well (or perhaps a slave-driver with a whip).
(If you want to hang on to the bartering idea, replace money with "hours" or whatever they use to evade taxes (don't tell me that anyone is capable of creating a real bartering culture these days, the money meme has been to deeply embedded into our culture for the last 1000 years, and so "bartering" is just a way to avoid paying taxes)).
Well, can you point out any place where something even remotely similar to communism exists? A place where people actually "give according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs", at least in principle?
I'm sorry, but if you can't see the value of historical records, you've just proven that you are either completely clueless, or a troll.
Why? Programming is both a top-down and a bottom-up type of activity. To think up a pretty user interface is simple. Star Trek did it in the 1950s. So far, noone has implemented it. It's just not possible with todays technology. So sometimes, in order to invent something new, you have to work bottom-up: "these are the tools we have, let's build something useful with them, and find out how to interact with it later".
In fact, it kind of illustrates a difference between Microsoft and Apple in that area.
If it really illustrates that, then Microsoft truly are innovative, while Apple only write pretty widgets around well-understood and well-known concepts.
Silly, silly, silly.
I disagree.
Wherever you've got that idea from, it's WRONG! The whole idea of having a system of laws to govern your country, is that it should be possible to know in advance about what is legal or not. Ideally these laws should also to some degree be the same that the majority of people think is "right".
If a crime has been committed anytime some "victim" claims to have become a "victim of a crime", it would be pretty hard for pretty much anyone not to commit crimes. Instead we have specific laws against things such as: removing a persons freedom, battering, violence, assault, rape, etc...
Now, in this case, since the incident was broadcasted across the Internet, and the police say they lack evidence, it pretty much means that what they saw on the video was not sufficient evidence of a crime, for them to consider it worth pursuing. While I haven't seen the video, the narration of the girl seems pretty believable. At least to anyone who's ever been drunk at a teenage party. The boys acted in bad taste and bad manners, but not illegally. That is, unless the boys had continued the treatment after the girl had made it pretty clear that it was no longer funny.
So let's assume the FBI wanted to figure out who a person with those characteristics were. What do you think the FBI would do? They would contact Pay By Touch, and Pay By Touch would give them the data they wanted.
It doesn't matter at all if it's not "the same". If it's some kind of hash, it still uniquely identifies the customer from their fingerprint, and would be useful to law enforcement. If it's some other way of identifying people from fingerprints that is somehow different from the standard way, it still uniquely identifies the customer from their fingerprint, and would be useful to law enforcement. If it's not a fingerprint at all, they're lying, because they say it's a fingerprint.
But most likely, what they mean with "not the same as those collected by the federal government or law enforcement", is exactly that. It's not the same, it's a different database containing different data. FBI's database contains name, address, SSN, criminal records, fingerprints, and so on; while Pay By Touch's database contains name, billing address, account no/card info, fingerprint of index finger, and so on... That the two will eventually be linked is obvious, and is only a matter of time, current law and company guarantees notwithstanding. On the other hand, for privacy concerns this is no different than paying with your card, which FBI can access within seconds, if they choose to. If you want to remain anonymous, use cash!
It's only for security that it's a bad idea. Unlike cards, fingerprints can't be changed if they're stolen. But any combination of "two out of three", such as fingerprint and card, fingerprint and pin-code, or card and pin-code would be acceptable. Of course the best would be a combination of all three.
Oh, it most definitely was. It just never happened. They all needed to be source compatible, so they all used IDL. Which was mostly fine.
The next step would be to let different CORBA implementations to talk to each other. Which they didn't. So OMG defined IIOP, which was a common wire-level protocol. IIOP was never mandatory in use, it only had to be supported. So the vendors "supported" it by using their own proprietary protocol, and adding a slower, buggier, less featureful implementation of IIOP, that required some hoops to go through to be able to be used at all. The vendors would claim that their protocol was "better" (i.e. faster, easier to use, more robust, etc) then IIOP since IIOP was designed mostly for "interoperation" while their protocol was designed for being "better".
But in any case, you needed a CORBA library, and an IDL "compiler" to generate the "stubs". Exactly what was contained in this library and all the magic in the stubs was how CORBA vendors "improved" upon each other, and where they had the most fun breaking specifications and adding bugs. Of course there was a common core somewhere, but since every implementation was incomplete, and added proprietary features, this common subset was very difficult to find, and also very tiny!
The few vendors left today follow the standard closer, and they also have a better standard to follow, so people shouldn't be as scared to delve into CORBA today, as they should have been when it was hyped. But it's still not "fun".