Mythbusters is cool, but it's still a reality show. All those silly little moments where Jamie calls Adam a "bull in a China shop," or Adam complains about Jamie's stuffiness? That crap is totally superfluous, pure "Reality."
The guys have a good, curious spirit but they definitely are NOT scientists.
I think you're on the right track, but actually putting fiber IN the pipes is probably a bad idea for reasons people have already mentioned.
This is due to a lack of wisdom, yes, but the mistake was made decades ago. In hindsight it's obvious, but we can't really blame people 50, 60, 70 years ago for not seeing it: the correct solution would be to build empty conduits with much more space than currently required, and run the water pipes and other stuff through that. Just like we have cable conduit in walls.
I guess it just didn't occur to the people designing the sewer and water systems that people might want to put OTHER stuff in the ground fanning out across the city, not just water pipes. For example, cable TV, telephone, electricity, fiber optics, whatever.
Also, the topology of water systems has to be specially designed because the whole system is based on gravity. There are certain configurations that you simply can't have in a water system. So there might be some disadvantages to forcing all your different kinds of networks to go through the same conduit.
Mozilla Signtool is necessary to make your specific tools, so knowing Mozilla Signtool is your business.
You accuse me of arrogance while presuming to tell me what our business is? Fortunately for us, recommending IE to our users is a viable option. They have business that needs to be done, they need our tool to do it, and they'll use the necessary browser. My point is that it is much easier for us to recommend IE instead of spending a huge amount of time figuring out how to use Signtool. And the FireFox developers are going to have to deal with that reality if they expect their product to be used in the mainstream.
Open source developers are generally helpful people. But they don't like people who feel like they are entitled to help. Perhaps your attitude is the problem.
With all due respect, you have no idea of the content of the conversations that have taken place between us and various people on the FireFox team, the Thawte team, and other third parties. My "attitude" is completely restricted to my posts here on Slashdot.
I could have written a scathing flame, but instead chose to confine my comments to the facts, which are that we cannot get Signtool to work properly having followed all the available documentation (essentially zero) and talking to the appropriate people, and as a result we will continue to recommend IE to our customers over FireFox for the time being. Deal with it.
And before you start flaming the Firefox developers over a change that seems rather unfair and ill-timed to you, keep in mind that no matter how stable Firefox was before the 1.0 release, it was beta software. Beta software can be modified at the drop of a hat.
We fully understand that -- it's not the change that's frustrating, but the complete lack of proper documentation and support from anybody who knows anything at all about it. As a developer myself I find it irresponsible to take an architecture that was tested and working, and re-implement it (seemingly gratuitously) for a prime-time release WITHOUT providing documentation.
Ergo, you should have at least planned for the possibility that something might change in the 1.0 release, ESPECIALLY if you are actually offering production-level software to people.
It's one thing to anticipate change and roll with the punches, quite another to have to deal with people who seem deliberately unhelpful. I lover FireFox and I'd like to say our plugin is supported, but we simply don't have the time or inclination to do the FireFox team's debugging for them.
Although FireFox is a OSS project, they have to deal with the reality that mainstream acceptance is not going to come for them unless they make it easier for software houses like mine to support their products under their browser. It's like they're saying "Behold our leetness" and expecting everyone to jump at their command.
Sorry, this probably makes me sound more bitter than I am...
Sure, they could count torrent downloads, but I'm not particularly interested in that number.
In my experience, the sort of computer users who use BitTorrent tend to be the same sort of people who use FireFox (i.e., tech-savvy geeks). So it's not unexpected that lots of people are downloading FireFox using BitTorrent.
In fact, I think the results are more interesting when you exclude torrent downloads, because non-torrent downloads are more likely to be "Joe user" types of downloads.
In FireFox 1.0 the choice was made to redesign how XPI plugins are cryptographically signed. Suddenly my company's Thawte code signing certificate doesn't want to play ball with FireFox 1.0 (if anyone out there has any information about Thawte certificates, signtool, and FireFox 1.0, PLEASE help me out!) Result? Our plugin won't run under FireFox 1.0 since the browser won't allow the user to install unsigned plugins.
I really have to ask, what was the motivation for changing the signing protocols AGAIN? And even more importantly, why was it ever decided in the first place to use some nonstandard signing protocol? OpenSSL is already built in to the browser, so why not use standard X.509 certificates and signing procedures?
The FireFox signtool team has been extremely unhelpful so far. Their responses have been of the "Figure it out yourself, dumbass" type.
I think that is a terribly counterproductive attitude to have. We are a software company producing specific tools. It is not our business to figure out how the most recent incarnation of Mozilla Signtool works. The end result of all this is that we have to recommend that our customers continue using IE because we can't get the stupid plugin to work under FireFox.
And believe me, it doesn't make us happy to recommend IE to our users. But so far we have no choice, and the FireFox development team has done nothing to help us. Quite frankly, they seem arrogant.
As a comparison, here in Oregon it is illegal to wear body armor while committing another crime. It is legal to possess body armor as long as you do not use it for an illegal purpose.
I would expect a similar application of common sense in this case. The DMCA was conceived (perhaps ill-conceived, but that isn't the point) to protect copyright holders. It was definitely not intended to allow criminals to protect their own illegal behaviors. I really doubt the DMCA would apply in this case.
And that's not even to mention the obvious: why would a virus writer step forward and admit to computer crimes? It's like calling the cops to report that someone has stolen 2 kilos of heroin from your apartment.
You do realize in 1943 the 'reds' were on the same side, don't you?
You can fight in a war with an ally and still not want to let them in on every single one of your secrets... Especially when many of those secrets involved calculations regarding atomic weapons.
Anyway, the guy who was giving the tour proudly displayed their Hard Drive that held an amazing 420 MEGAbytes.
You're probably not much younger than I am, which is what makes this absolutely crazy... To me, a 420 meg drive is no antique. I've got a 20 megabyte MFM drive sitting in an 8088 with an EGA video adapter. And even that isn't that old.
My boss tells me stories of the first hard drives he used. They were about the size of a washing machine, held about 2 megabytes, and could actually "walk" across the floor due to the vibration of the various mechanisms.
He also used to program relay computers, which were computers made entirely out of (you guessed it) magnetic relays and reed switches. He said they sounded like a chainsaw when operating, due to all the contacts opening and closing hundreds of times a second. He also told me about how you would debug your program by listening to the clicking of the relays. He said a program stuck in an infinite loop produced a very distinctive sound.
A union WILL NOT WORK in this instance. Why? Cause if you and all the game programmers join a union, the gaming companies will just replace each and every person. EVERY coder has, at one time or another, wanted to code video games. For each video game programmer that is employed right now, there is a hundred programmers that would kill for the job.
I'd say that the majority of us reading Slashdot have, at one time, really wanted to fly fighter jets. Yet that doesn't mean there is some unending supply of skilled fighter jet pilots among the Slashdot readership.
Sure, there's plenty of people who want to code games, but given the chance, the majority of them would utterly suck at it.
I just found an upgrade to the Roomba. It [...] uses no power [...]
Not true. It uses human power, which is provided by the calories you eat, which come from meat and grain raised on commercial farms. A tremendous amount of energy is used in the production of that meat and grain (much more energy than you actually gain by eating it). Imagine all the tractors and processing plants. Think about the farm and factory employees, who commute to work by car.
I admit I haven't run the numbers, but I'd wager that an electrical device is always a more efficient use of fossil fuel energy than the extremely complicated energy flow of human power.
It's funny this article posted today, because I just picked up one of these things last night.
It works amazingly well considering its size and the small dust bin. My house is entirely hardwood floors, and this little device works perfectly on it. I hear it has difficulty on carpet, with the thicker carpets being nearly impossible to do. But after just 10 minutes of maneuvering around my living room the dust bin was absolutely full with dirt, dog hair, dry leaves, and other gunk. I actually was astonished at the amount of crap that was on my floor!
I hear they require careful cleaning, otherwise they tend to burn out bearings, but that's the only downside I am immediately aware of. It even came with two "artificial walls" which are (I think) infrared emitters which produce a beam that the Roomba will not cross. You use these to constrain it to a certain area, like my kitchen, which has an open doorway.
I started the little guy up in the kitchen this morning before heading to work. I watched it for a couple minutes to make sure it wouldn't get stuck under the cabinets, then I left and let it do the work for me...
Segway wins, Roomba loses, owner of segway still doesn't get laid.
But the Roomba didn't lose. After the Segway ran over it, it beeped a little bit and merrily continued along. The thing survived being run over by a Segway with the weight of a person riding on it!
Care to explain why you think tidal energy will have no impact on the ecology of coastlines? You do realize that most coastal lifeforms depend on tidal action in many different ways, right? And hopefully you also understand that by extracting energy from the tides we decrease their intensity?
You're a perfect example of the typical, completely irrational "environmentalist" who latches on to his own pet idea and trumpets it as more safe, more efficient, and simply better than any other solution. The fact is, you have nothing more to go on than your "feeling" because nobody has ever implemented any of these ideas on a large enough scale to accurately judge their effects.
Humanity consumes such a ridiculously huge amount of power that there is no way to extract that energy from our environment without having some kind of serious impact. Stop deluding yourself with this tidal magic. Every energy source has tradeoffs, and there is nothing special about this one.
I see. I level a legitimate criticism against an idea, and you respond by attacking me personally. Hope it makes you feel better to have me on your "Foes" list. That's real rational, by the way -- I express a sentiment you disagree with, and for that you decide that I am never worth hearing from again, on any topic, at any time?
Apparently spam has got you so pissed off that you've completely lost sight of who the real enemy is here.
At any rate, I refuse to implement any of the "solutions" suggested in the Objections FAQ. A solution which requires me to do work is a non-solution. A solution which requires senders of genuine email to waste their cycles is a non-solution.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what sort of dog you have, but if I simply HAD to smell shit, I'd much prefer horse shit over dog shit...
The guys have a good, curious spirit but they definitely are NOT scientists.
No, but in this case they have become enamoured with a gross caricature of knowledge, not knowledge itself.
People get really excited about Star Trek physics, too.
Jeez man, everybody knows that before you blame it on polarity shift, you should run a level 2 diagnostic on the phase transducers.
I mean DUH...
This is due to a lack of wisdom, yes, but the mistake was made decades ago. In hindsight it's obvious, but we can't really blame people 50, 60, 70 years ago for not seeing it: the correct solution would be to build empty conduits with much more space than currently required, and run the water pipes and other stuff through that. Just like we have cable conduit in walls.
I guess it just didn't occur to the people designing the sewer and water systems that people might want to put OTHER stuff in the ground fanning out across the city, not just water pipes. For example, cable TV, telephone, electricity, fiber optics, whatever.
Also, the topology of water systems has to be specially designed because the whole system is based on gravity. There are certain configurations that you simply can't have in a water system. So there might be some disadvantages to forcing all your different kinds of networks to go through the same conduit.
In other words, you're assuming that if a guy has dark skin, he must be here illegally?
If you are capable of seeing the obvious bias in the reporting, what's the problem? Bias only matters when you don't know it's there.
Is it out of compassion for the rest of humanity?
You say it like it's a bad thing. If the stock is really recovering, wouldn't now be a good time to BUY while the prices are still low?
It's frustrating, isn't it? That's what we've been dealing with for weeks.
Frankly, it's easier for us to just say "Use IE" instead of jumping through these hoops.
You accuse me of arrogance while presuming to tell me what our business is? Fortunately for us, recommending IE to our users is a viable option. They have business that needs to be done, they need our tool to do it, and they'll use the necessary browser. My point is that it is much easier for us to recommend IE instead of spending a huge amount of time figuring out how to use Signtool. And the FireFox developers are going to have to deal with that reality if they expect their product to be used in the mainstream.
Open source developers are generally helpful people. But they don't like people who feel like they are entitled to help. Perhaps your attitude is the problem.
With all due respect, you have no idea of the content of the conversations that have taken place between us and various people on the FireFox team, the Thawte team, and other third parties. My "attitude" is completely restricted to my posts here on Slashdot.
I could have written a scathing flame, but instead chose to confine my comments to the facts, which are that we cannot get Signtool to work properly having followed all the available documentation (essentially zero) and talking to the appropriate people, and as a result we will continue to recommend IE to our customers over FireFox for the time being. Deal with it.
We fully understand that -- it's not the change that's frustrating, but the complete lack of proper documentation and support from anybody who knows anything at all about it. As a developer myself I find it irresponsible to take an architecture that was tested and working, and re-implement it (seemingly gratuitously) for a prime-time release WITHOUT providing documentation.
Ergo, you should have at least planned for the possibility that something might change in the 1.0 release, ESPECIALLY if you are actually offering production-level software to people.
It's one thing to anticipate change and roll with the punches, quite another to have to deal with people who seem deliberately unhelpful. I lover FireFox and I'd like to say our plugin is supported, but we simply don't have the time or inclination to do the FireFox team's debugging for them.
Although FireFox is a OSS project, they have to deal with the reality that mainstream acceptance is not going to come for them unless they make it easier for software houses like mine to support their products under their browser. It's like they're saying "Behold our leetness" and expecting everyone to jump at their command.
Sorry, this probably makes me sound more bitter than I am...
In my experience, the sort of computer users who use BitTorrent tend to be the same sort of people who use FireFox (i.e., tech-savvy geeks). So it's not unexpected that lots of people are downloading FireFox using BitTorrent.
In fact, I think the results are more interesting when you exclude torrent downloads, because non-torrent downloads are more likely to be "Joe user" types of downloads.
I really have to ask, what was the motivation for changing the signing protocols AGAIN? And even more importantly, why was it ever decided in the first place to use some nonstandard signing protocol? OpenSSL is already built in to the browser, so why not use standard X.509 certificates and signing procedures?
The FireFox signtool team has been extremely unhelpful so far. Their responses have been of the "Figure it out yourself, dumbass" type.
I think that is a terribly counterproductive attitude to have. We are a software company producing specific tools. It is not our business to figure out how the most recent incarnation of Mozilla Signtool works. The end result of all this is that we have to recommend that our customers continue using IE because we can't get the stupid plugin to work under FireFox.
And believe me, it doesn't make us happy to recommend IE to our users. But so far we have no choice, and the FireFox development team has done nothing to help us. Quite frankly, they seem arrogant.
I would expect a similar application of common sense in this case. The DMCA was conceived (perhaps ill-conceived, but that isn't the point) to protect copyright holders. It was definitely not intended to allow criminals to protect their own illegal behaviors. I really doubt the DMCA would apply in this case.
And that's not even to mention the obvious: why would a virus writer step forward and admit to computer crimes? It's like calling the cops to report that someone has stolen 2 kilos of heroin from your apartment.
You can fight in a war with an ally and still not want to let them in on every single one of your secrets... Especially when many of those secrets involved calculations regarding atomic weapons.
You're probably not much younger than I am, which is what makes this absolutely crazy... To me, a 420 meg drive is no antique. I've got a 20 megabyte MFM drive sitting in an 8088 with an EGA video adapter. And even that isn't that old.
My boss tells me stories of the first hard drives he used. They were about the size of a washing machine, held about 2 megabytes, and could actually "walk" across the floor due to the vibration of the various mechanisms.
He also used to program relay computers, which were computers made entirely out of (you guessed it) magnetic relays and reed switches. He said they sounded like a chainsaw when operating, due to all the contacts opening and closing hundreds of times a second. He also told me about how you would debug your program by listening to the clicking of the relays. He said a program stuck in an infinite loop produced a very distinctive sound.
I'd say that the majority of us reading Slashdot have, at one time, really wanted to fly fighter jets. Yet that doesn't mean there is some unending supply of skilled fighter jet pilots among the Slashdot readership.
Sure, there's plenty of people who want to code games, but given the chance, the majority of them would utterly suck at it.
Not true. It uses human power, which is provided by the calories you eat, which come from meat and grain raised on commercial farms. A tremendous amount of energy is used in the production of that meat and grain (much more energy than you actually gain by eating it). Imagine all the tractors and processing plants. Think about the farm and factory employees, who commute to work by car.
I admit I haven't run the numbers, but I'd wager that an electrical device is always a more efficient use of fossil fuel energy than the extremely complicated energy flow of human power.
It works amazingly well considering its size and the small dust bin. My house is entirely hardwood floors, and this little device works perfectly on it. I hear it has difficulty on carpet, with the thicker carpets being nearly impossible to do. But after just 10 minutes of maneuvering around my living room the dust bin was absolutely full with dirt, dog hair, dry leaves, and other gunk. I actually was astonished at the amount of crap that was on my floor!
I hear they require careful cleaning, otherwise they tend to burn out bearings, but that's the only downside I am immediately aware of. It even came with two "artificial walls" which are (I think) infrared emitters which produce a beam that the Roomba will not cross. You use these to constrain it to a certain area, like my kitchen, which has an open doorway.
I started the little guy up in the kitchen this morning before heading to work. I watched it for a couple minutes to make sure it wouldn't get stuck under the cabinets, then I left and let it do the work for me...
But the Roomba didn't lose. After the Segway ran over it, it beeped a little bit and merrily continued along. The thing survived being run over by a Segway with the weight of a person riding on it!
I think a likely theory is that he was trying to search for "More evil than good" (which is quite a bit more plausible) and simply made a typo.
Fair enough, but if I couldn't rant on Slashdot, I'd end up doing it in real life. Better here than somewhere it really matters.
You're a perfect example of the typical, completely irrational "environmentalist" who latches on to his own pet idea and trumpets it as more safe, more efficient, and simply better than any other solution. The fact is, you have nothing more to go on than your "feeling" because nobody has ever implemented any of these ideas on a large enough scale to accurately judge their effects.
Humanity consumes such a ridiculously huge amount of power that there is no way to extract that energy from our environment without having some kind of serious impact. Stop deluding yourself with this tidal magic. Every energy source has tradeoffs, and there is nothing special about this one.
Quickly glancing over my spam box, I receive on average 5 spams per day. It could get 1000 times worse and I wouldn't even feel it.
Apparently spam has got you so pissed off that you've completely lost sight of who the real enemy is here.
At any rate, I refuse to implement any of the "solutions" suggested in the Objections FAQ. A solution which requires me to do work is a non-solution. A solution which requires senders of genuine email to waste their cycles is a non-solution.