they still sell DVDs at a profit
There is a separate entity, "BBC Worldwide", which - as you say - sells DVDs at a profit. That is one part of the BBC income stream, as is the TV license fee, You may have noticed that you can buy BBC CDs at the motorway service station, too. Do you watch TopGear repeats on UKTVGold? It's all income for the BBC, as is selling shows abroad. Don't flatter yourself that your £100 is funding everything from Have I Got News For You to Walking With Dinosaurs.
"why should they not try to milk the market any way they see fit?"
Because we've already paid for it. Okay, only us Brits have paid for it, and you might ask why we should pay for the world to benefit. The BBC World Service provides a wonderful service - on Google, you get about 50m results; Wikipedia reports that "The BBC World Service is one of the most widely recognised international broadcasters of radio programming, transmitting in 33 languages to many parts of the world."
It's something that Britain believes in - not in a "British Empire" way, but let's just acknowledge that the BBC creates some fscking good stuff, and - since it's already paid for (much like the Open Source philosophy), there's no additional cost in giving it away... Bonus!
I pay my license fee, and someone on the other side of the world gets free content... That would not appear to be an optimal setup. Yet, I'm happy with it. I get a better deal from my £100/year BBC license fee than the extra I pay Sky for a few more sh1tty channels (unfortunately, my children have outgrown CBeebies, and are not quite old enough to enjoy CBBC, so they watch NickJr, and all the irritating adverts which go with it). That's another great thing about the BBC; Some videos I see on YouTube include adverts, FFS.
So - I'm happy to pay my license fee, because I get good value from it.
In return, I expect to be able to access whatever content the BBC produces, without the need to pay some third party (and not even British) company for a sh*tty OS I do not have, and do not want. The BBC have worked on open media formats; just as BBC Radio is great quality, and free-to-air, so should the BBC's digital output be.
Whoa; calm down, there.
You seem to have confused American views with truth, and Wikipedia with "major information sources".
Oceania is an Orwellian term; Orwell never defined, in 1984, what particular countries / continents it covered, so there is no canonical answer.
However, as/. is not, traditionally, a literary forum, let's stay prosaic, and stick with the fact that THERE IS NO FSCKING THING AS OCEANIA
I'm not exactly the biggest MS Fanboy going, but I'm sure that Win95 did this when you reinstalled it on top of itself (or upgraded 95 to 98, later on).
So - big up to MS for a feature they wrote at least 12 years ago!
You do have a very good point there. MS Exchange is a "killer app", not because it's good, but because if it's deployed once, it has to be deployed everywhere to be useful. So if a corp decides on MS Exchange, it needs to use MS Outlook, therefore it needs to use MS Windows.
I know that Hydrogen et al have done what thay can, but (forgive me, I've not been watching lately), have they got 100% compatibility?
I now get Outlook meeting appointments from third parties, requiring MS Exchange/Outlook all round. But then, it seems that the "innovation" behind this involves a simple one-liner text-based email saying "Accepted: "
Desktop is not my field, but this whole "we need MS because they use MS" thing must be cross between a house of cards and the emperor's new clothes; somebody will come up with the "Eureka!" moment to get us out of this apparent vendor lock-in.
I just wish that I was smart enough to be that person
I have been of the view that OpenOffice can deal with just about every MS Office document, since the days of StarDivision's StarOffice 5.1 (remember that?).
However, I have also been a *nix user all that time. For the past 18 months, my work has required me to work with MS Office (and therefore, Wintel desktop).
I had not realised quite how bad the situation was; I know that the.doc format is undocumented, even internally within MS, but using an entire MS Office suite, provided by one of MS's largest partners (EDS), it is a horrible, ugly mess. We have documents embedded within documents; opening an embedded document means that I have to enable/disable macros within the new document. Unfortunately, it doesn't work, so you double-click the icon, click "Enable", nothing happens, double-click the icon again, and the embedded doc opens. This is apparently "correct behaviour".
We also have various templates, which I naively assumed could be edited as required, by an untrained user (such as myself; I'm certified in WfWG3.11, but nothing since from MS!). This is the corporate standard, after all. But no, I have to admit failure. I cannot edit our templates. Maybe that's me, maybe it's MS. I can configure cross-site clusters, but I can't edit an MS Word document. I don't think that the deficiency is in my own IT knowledge.
I have to be open - I don't much care for Windows, it's not a huge dislike, it's just not a big part of my life. I find configuring Samba/CUPS on my Ubuntu print server rather difficult to do (http://steve-parker.org/urandom/?y=2007&m=01#prin ters_hp3180), and in the end, I gave up, scp'd the.doc to the Linux box and opened it in OpenOffice.org, to print it direct. It was a steaming mess, nothing like the original MS Word document.
So, I am finally forced to agree that OOo is no replacement for corporate uses of MS Office. It's not OOo's problem, though; it's MSO's problem. It's an undocumented pile of layers upon layers upon layers, dating back to the late 1980s.
Ugh. I can't deal with MS Office docs using OpenOffice.org, but then again, I can't do much with them using MS Office, either.
The key problem seems to be the format, more than the app itself. Neither app fully understands the format, and so neither app quite manages to display it properly.
In the past, I've opened.doc files in OOo, just to find a random blank page part way through, which I could not delete. I had assumed that that was a flaw of OOo, but I've had the same problem with MS Word documents in MS Word!
Let alone the issues about how future generations are going to access this information, the fact that the corporate standard is MS Office, seems to be a classic example of following the herd over the cliff.
I am still waiting for the perfect (or even near-perfect) office suite. OOo is the closest, with open (if complex) code, and an open (and well-documented) file format.
Re:throwing up my hands so high that I can't count
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 1
Willingly upgraded, sure. But to deride a 512Mb PC as being effectively obsolete? That makes no sense.
Vista is a GUI upgrade at the expense of RAM and graphical processing power.
The license fee is not a "compulsory tax system". If you own a TV (or TV tuner card for your PC, etc), then you must have a BBC License. It's cheaper than most of the "commercial" alternatives, and offers what is widely regarded as the best programming on the planet.
Yes, I'm British.
Yes, I pay the license fee. (It's about 1 month's worth of Council Tax, and I get a far greater benefit from it).
Do I mind that they're "giving it away" on YouTube? Only (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/re view-report-research/pvt_iplayer/bbctrust_pwcrepor t_pva_annexe.pdf seems to be the best link I can find; they'd like to "give away" TV downloads, so long as it's WinXP and WMP 10, to support DRM restrictions so that you can watch within 30 days of download, given that it will self-destruct within 7 days of first viewing). Well, it's good that it's available. It's not good if it's on limited terms to license-fee payers, but available for anyone who can rip from YouTube under whatever terms you choose.
Re:Does Vista have anything we need?
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
David Wheeler has got it all in a screenful. Why it doesn't do the content-providers any good, why it doesn't do the "consumer" any good, and why it's all a waste of time anyway.
All written in clear English.
One quote from the article: "I do not approve of piracy. I don't approve of murder, either, yet I approve of the sale of steak knives and cleaning supplies... and would oppose trying to halt their sales."
I can finally upgrade my graphics card from crap onboard Intel to a 2005/2006 spec gamer's card for next to nothing.
Maybe I'll run Beryl ( for the day it'll take me to get bored of it;-) )
throwing up my hands so high that I can't count
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 1
Sure, research would tell you that 512Mb and a crappy graphics card is inadequate for Vista, but it's quite enough for any other modern OS.
Maybe I'm just some old fart, but why on earth should I *need* more? Windows 98 required 32Mb RAM to run apps, browse the net, email, etc, without being too sluggish. Vista now needs (32*32=1024) 1Gb, 32 times the RAM, to do basically the same job. Do you do 32 times more work? Are you 32 times more productive? No, of course not.
My crappy 2.8GHz 512Mb box (plain Ubuntu, since you ask, and no tweaking; what Joe Public gets out of the box is fine) works as a desktop PC (granted, usually only two users at a time, but that's twice the simultaneous users a typical Windows PC would have), database, webserver, and more, without ever breaking into a sweat. Granted, I don't play games, but it sounds like the OP wasn't complaining about app performance, but the ability of the OS itself to cope with such a config (presumably without running any services on top of that).
Man got to the moon with 20Kb RAM. If an OS needs 1Gb just to exist, that's got to be a pointer to a fundamental design issue.
I've got a 128Mb 433MHz Celeron box, which runs Xubuntu quite happily, also. So it seems that I could run 8 of those for the RAM needed for a single workable Vista install.
None of this points to Vista being a bloated steaming PoS? Are you sure? If it worked 2, 5, 10 years ago, why shouldn't it work now? The only significant change in the life of the PC was the 80386 CPU; other than that difference, I've got an IBM XT upstairs with 256Kb RAM. It can do word-processing and other office-based functions.
There is no arms race.
"My PC is bigger" is a concession to badly-written software, not an advertisement for it.
And, as has been noted, the patch has been available for about 3 weeks now.
This is a terrible bug, which should never have got in to Solaris in the first place, but it did, and it was fixed.
OTOH, if you've
a) Chosen to run telnetd in the first place, and
b) Explicitly enabled remote root login for maximum damange Then you can't really whine that "if a cracker can access the network, he can get root", because presumably "even if this bug did not exist, the same hacker could run snoop/tcpdump/ethereal/etc and simply *find the root password as YOU type it in*.
So: Yes, it's bad. No, it shouldn't have happened. Is it news? Oh, redundant question, this is slashdot. It's not news, and it doesn't matter (to anyone with the slightest care about security).
Good point; I just downloaded it. It just stores the 5 most recent errors:
hda has had 356 errors in its short life (I've had it about a year; 200Gb Seagate IDE)
hdc has had 4,560 errors its life (after nearly 3 years of service; 80Gb Maxtor IDE)
That does't sound good to me.
I got the Seagate because my previous drive had failed fsck a few times and had some dodgy-looking data on it.
These figures suggest about 1 error/day for the Seagate, and 4 errors/day for the Maxtor.
To be fair, a default Ubuntu (being a popular example of "run-as-user, admin-as-root") install will do all installations as root: "sudo apt-get upgrade"
sudo is far more fine-grained than that, and is an incredibly powerful tool. The way in which it is most commonly used (on the desktop, to be fair to the Vista comparison) is the Ubuntu method, which is to say that "Yes, I'm a normal user, but I can become God at any time I need any demi-God abilities"
*nix, especially combined with su, sudo, file permissions (and if you want to feck it up for the sake of a little bit of gloss, ACLs), allows for far better protection that Vista seems to provide.
And from what I read, Vista appears to provide certain privileges based upon how it decides to characterise the process. That seems pretty dangerous.
If you add a package to a Solaris box, you have to be root to start with. However, you will still get several prompts, due to the files-to-be-installed, and the pre- and post- install files. You will have to allow SUID files to be installed, you will have to allow pre- and post- install scripts to run with superuser privs. That's all done without even going to the level of sudo, it's just within the package manager. So Solaris has got Vista beat, on this particular score, for years.
We are on the brink of a load of spurios (very specific) comparisons between "config A of OS B" vs "config X of OS Y", which will surely drag on for a few years, until we get used to the different discussion, and the pros and cons of each implementation.
Vista's all-or-nothing approach is pretty blind, but also pretty easy for "know a little about PCs, but not a guru" users to understand. A corporate-wide *nix installation deserves a proper sudo config, with certain parties allowed to do certain things under certain circumstances. Both have their place, and I'm sure (from past performance) that the MS implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
But, just bashing Vista for a "user-or-root" approach doesn't seem terribly wise from a community whose best answer to Vista (for Joe Sixpack) is Ubuntu, which does just the same.
Speaking as a parent of young children, I feel (scrub that; I *know*) that it is my responsibility to guide their "online" life, just as it is my responsibility to guide their "physical" life. My job is to provide them with the tools they need to get through their own life. I hope not to sound like some kind of martyr by saying that their lives are more important than my own; it's hard to explain to a non-parent.
I intend to block certain stuff (as I am able), but more significantly, I shall explain to my children that the net isn't just about pretty cartoons of "Bob the Builder". They will know not to disclose personal details, etc, over the internet.
However, if my daughter was 17 years old and chose to send a "racy" picture of herself, to her boyfriend, then I have to admit that I believe that she has a right to do so, but that it is my responsibility (as her father) to ensure that before she does such a thing, she understands that posting a digital image, by email or otherwise, may live with her forever.
That is a fact which the current generation must live with. It, in itself, is something that parents need to teach their children (whether they understand it or not); If a teen posts something unwise on MySpace or whatever. do they really understand how that mmay be retained? Do their parents even know that it happened at all?
It all comes down to parenting, whatever "this generation's" issue may be: rock'n'roll is Evilm dontchaknow?
The simple truth of it is that we want really cheap gadgets. Pay more, get higher quality. But in many markets, there is no demand for quality, so all the gadgets break if you just look at them a bit funny...
I stumbled upon a site recently suggesting that plus-addressing is somehow a feature of GMail.
It is a feature of email, and although some web designers tell their forms not to accept "+" as part of an email address (doubtless due to a lack of ability to read the RFCs). It is not specific to GMail.
Slashdot Mirror
they still sell DVDs at a profit
There is a separate entity, "BBC Worldwide", which - as you say - sells DVDs at a profit. That is one part of the BBC income stream, as is the TV license fee, You may have noticed that you can buy BBC CDs at the motorway service station, too. Do you watch TopGear repeats on UKTVGold? It's all income for the BBC, as is selling shows abroad. Don't flatter yourself that your £100 is funding everything from Have I Got News For You to Walking With Dinosaurs.
"why should they not try to milk the market any way they see fit?"
Because we've already paid for it. Okay, only us Brits have paid for it, and you might ask why we should pay for the world to benefit. The BBC World Service provides a wonderful service - on Google, you get about 50m results; Wikipedia reports that "The BBC World Service is one of the most widely recognised international broadcasters of radio programming, transmitting in 33 languages to many parts of the world."
It's something that Britain believes in - not in a "British Empire" way, but let's just acknowledge that the BBC creates some fscking good stuff, and - since it's already paid for (much like the Open Source philosophy), there's no additional cost in giving it away... Bonus!
I pay my license fee, and someone on the other side of the world gets free content... That would not appear to be an optimal setup. Yet, I'm happy with it. I get a better deal from my £100/year BBC license fee than the extra I pay Sky for a few more sh1tty channels (unfortunately, my children have outgrown CBeebies, and are not quite old enough to enjoy CBBC, so they watch NickJr, and all the irritating adverts which go with it). That's another great thing about the BBC; Some videos I see on YouTube include adverts, FFS.
So - I'm happy to pay my license fee, because I get good value from it.
In return, I expect to be able to access whatever content the BBC produces, without the need to pay some third party (and not even British) company for a sh*tty OS I do not have, and do not want. The BBC have worked on open media formats; just as BBC Radio is great quality, and free-to-air, so should the BBC's digital output be.
You need a license to sell seeds.
Whoa; calm down, there. You seem to have confused American views with truth, and Wikipedia with "major information sources". Oceania is an Orwellian term; Orwell never defined, in 1984, what particular countries / continents it covered, so there is no canonical answer. However, as /. is not, traditionally, a literary forum, let's stay prosaic, and stick with the fact that THERE IS NO FSCKING THING AS OCEANIA
So did I. Tell me again, how does "many eyeballs" make *everything* better?!!! fscking eedjits.
I'm not exactly the biggest MS Fanboy going, but I'm sure that Win95 did this when you reinstalled it on top of itself (or upgraded 95 to 98, later on).
So - big up to MS for a feature they wrote at least 12 years ago!
"or Neo fly through the air like Superman"
(my emphasis) :-)
You do have a very good point there. MS Exchange is a "killer app", not because it's good, but because if it's deployed once, it has to be deployed everywhere to be useful. So if a corp decides on MS Exchange, it needs to use MS Outlook, therefore it needs to use MS Windows.
I know that Hydrogen et al have done what thay can, but (forgive me, I've not been watching lately), have they got 100% compatibility?
I now get Outlook meeting appointments from third parties, requiring MS Exchange/Outlook all round. But then, it seems that the "innovation" behind this involves a simple one-liner text-based email saying "Accepted: "
Desktop is not my field, but this whole "we need MS because they use MS" thing must be cross between a house of cards and the emperor's new clothes; somebody will come up with the "Eureka!" moment to get us out of this apparent vendor lock-in.
I just wish that I was smart enough to be that person
I have been of the view that OpenOffice can deal with just about every MS Office document, since the days of StarDivision's StarOffice 5.1 (remember that?).
.doc format is undocumented, even internally within MS, but using an entire MS Office suite, provided by one of MS's largest partners (EDS), it is a horrible, ugly mess. We have documents embedded within documents; opening an embedded document means that I have to enable/disable macros within the new document. Unfortunately, it doesn't work, so you double-click the icon, click "Enable", nothing happens, double-click the icon again, and the embedded doc opens. This is apparently "correct behaviour".
n ters_hp3180), and in the end, I gave up, scp'd the .doc to the Linux box and opened it in OpenOffice.org, to print it direct. It was a steaming mess, nothing like the original MS Word document.
.doc files in OOo, just to find a random blank page part way through, which I could not delete. I had assumed that that was a flaw of OOo, but I've had the same problem with MS Word documents in MS Word!
However, I have also been a *nix user all that time. For the past 18 months, my work has required me to work with MS Office (and therefore, Wintel desktop).
I had not realised quite how bad the situation was; I know that the
We also have various templates, which I naively assumed could be edited as required, by an untrained user (such as myself; I'm certified in WfWG3.11, but nothing since from MS!). This is the corporate standard, after all. But no, I have to admit failure. I cannot edit our templates. Maybe that's me, maybe it's MS. I can configure cross-site clusters, but I can't edit an MS Word document. I don't think that the deficiency is in my own IT knowledge.
I have to be open - I don't much care for Windows, it's not a huge dislike, it's just not a big part of my life. I find configuring Samba/CUPS on my Ubuntu print server rather difficult to do (http://steve-parker.org/urandom/?y=2007&m=01#pri
So, I am finally forced to agree that OOo is no replacement for corporate uses of MS Office. It's not OOo's problem, though; it's MSO's problem. It's an undocumented pile of layers upon layers upon layers, dating back to the late 1980s.
Ugh. I can't deal with MS Office docs using OpenOffice.org, but then again, I can't do much with them using MS Office, either.
The key problem seems to be the format, more than the app itself. Neither app fully understands the format, and so neither app quite manages to display it properly.
In the past, I've opened
Let alone the issues about how future generations are going to access this information, the fact that the corporate standard is MS Office, seems to be a classic example of following the herd over the cliff.
I am still waiting for the perfect (or even near-perfect) office suite. OOo is the closest, with open (if complex) code, and an open (and well-documented) file format.
Willingly upgraded, sure. But to deride a 512Mb PC as being effectively obsolete? That makes no sense.
Vista is a GUI upgrade at the expense of RAM and graphical processing power.
PLEASE, somebody tell me I'm wrong.
Oh, cripes and bloody Nora, I'd better check my birth certificate, then.
OTOH, if US/UK are two nations separated by a common language, I'm sure that I've learned more Ameriglish from the internet than anywhere else.
Other than that, bollocks to the lot of ya.
I was right with you until the mention of GRC.COM. Steve Gibson is a clueless idiot, or if not, he does a damn' good impression of one.
The license fee is not a "compulsory tax system". If you own a TV (or TV tuner card for your PC, etc), then you must have a BBC License. It's cheaper than most of the "commercial" alternatives, and offers what is widely regarded as the best programming on the planet.
e view-report-research/pvt_iplayer/bbctrust_pwcrepor t_pva_annexe.pdf seems to be the best link I can find; they'd like to "give away" TV downloads, so long as it's WinXP and WMP 10, to support DRM restrictions so that you can watch within 30 days of download, given that it will self-destruct within 7 days of first viewing). Well, it's good that it's available. It's not good if it's on limited terms to license-fee payers, but available for anyone who can rip from YouTube under whatever terms you choose.
Yes, I'm British.
Yes, I pay the license fee. (It's about 1 month's worth of Council Tax, and I get a far greater benefit from it).
Do I mind that they're "giving it away" on YouTube? Only (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/r
http://www.dwheeler.com/blog/2007/01/07/#drm-nonse nse-hddvd
Nuff Said.
David Wheeler has got it all in a screenful. Why it doesn't do the content-providers any good, why it doesn't do the "consumer" any good, and why it's all a waste of time anyway.
All written in clear English.
One quote from the article: "I do not approve of piracy. I don't approve of murder, either, yet I approve of the sale of steak knives and cleaning supplies... and would oppose trying to halt their sales."
Good point. I hadn't thought of that.
;-) )
I can finally upgrade my graphics card from crap onboard Intel to a 2005/2006 spec gamer's card for next to nothing.
Maybe I'll run Beryl ( for the day it'll take me to get bored of it
Sure, research would tell you that 512Mb and a crappy graphics card is inadequate for Vista, but it's quite enough for any other modern OS.
Maybe I'm just some old fart, but why on earth should I *need* more? Windows 98 required 32Mb RAM to run apps, browse the net, email, etc, without being too sluggish. Vista now needs (32*32=1024) 1Gb, 32 times the RAM, to do basically the same job. Do you do 32 times more work? Are you 32 times more productive? No, of course not.
My crappy 2.8GHz 512Mb box (plain Ubuntu, since you ask, and no tweaking; what Joe Public gets out of the box is fine) works as a desktop PC (granted, usually only two users at a time, but that's twice the simultaneous users a typical Windows PC would have), database, webserver, and more, without ever breaking into a sweat. Granted, I don't play games, but it sounds like the OP wasn't complaining about app performance, but the ability of the OS itself to cope with such a config (presumably without running any services on top of that).
Man got to the moon with 20Kb RAM. If an OS needs 1Gb just to exist, that's got to be a pointer to a fundamental design issue.
I've got a 128Mb 433MHz Celeron box, which runs Xubuntu quite happily, also. So it seems that I could run 8 of those for the RAM needed for a single workable Vista install.
None of this points to Vista being a bloated steaming PoS? Are you sure? If it worked 2, 5, 10 years ago, why shouldn't it work now? The only significant change in the life of the PC was the 80386 CPU; other than that difference, I've got an IBM XT upstairs with 256Kb RAM. It can do word-processing and other office-based functions.
There is no arms race.
"My PC is bigger" is a concession to badly-written software, not an advertisement for it.
Telnet is *not* enabled out-of-the-box.
And, as has been noted, the patch has been available for about 3 weeks now.
This is a terrible bug, which should never have got in to Solaris in the first place, but it did, and it was fixed.
OTOH, if you've
a) Chosen to run telnetd in the first place, and
b) Explicitly enabled remote root login for maximum damange
Then you can't really whine that "if a cracker can access the network, he can get root", because presumably "even if this bug did not exist, the same hacker could run snoop/tcpdump/ethereal/etc and simply *find the root password as YOU type it in*.
So: Yes, it's bad. No, it shouldn't have happened. Is it news? Oh, redundant question, this is slashdot. It's not news, and it doesn't matter (to anyone with the slightest care about security).
Good point; I just downloaded it. It just stores the 5 most recent errors:
:-(
hda has had 356 errors in its short life (I've had it about a year; 200Gb Seagate IDE)
hdc has had 4,560 errors its life (after nearly 3 years of service; 80Gb Maxtor IDE)
That does't sound good to me.
I got the Seagate because my previous drive had failed fsck a few times and had some dodgy-looking data on it.
These figures suggest about 1 error/day for the Seagate, and 4 errors/day for the Maxtor.
I don't like those numbers
To be fair, a default Ubuntu (being a popular example of "run-as-user, admin-as-root") install will do all installations as root: "sudo apt-get upgrade" sudo is far more fine-grained than that, and is an incredibly powerful tool. The way in which it is most commonly used (on the desktop, to be fair to the Vista comparison) is the Ubuntu method, which is to say that "Yes, I'm a normal user, but I can become God at any time I need any demi-God abilities" *nix, especially combined with su, sudo, file permissions (and if you want to feck it up for the sake of a little bit of gloss, ACLs), allows for far better protection that Vista seems to provide. And from what I read, Vista appears to provide certain privileges based upon how it decides to characterise the process. That seems pretty dangerous. If you add a package to a Solaris box, you have to be root to start with. However, you will still get several prompts, due to the files-to-be-installed, and the pre- and post- install files. You will have to allow SUID files to be installed, you will have to allow pre- and post- install scripts to run with superuser privs. That's all done without even going to the level of sudo, it's just within the package manager. So Solaris has got Vista beat, on this particular score, for years. We are on the brink of a load of spurios (very specific) comparisons between "config A of OS B" vs "config X of OS Y", which will surely drag on for a few years, until we get used to the different discussion, and the pros and cons of each implementation. Vista's all-or-nothing approach is pretty blind, but also pretty easy for "know a little about PCs, but not a guru" users to understand. A corporate-wide *nix installation deserves a proper sudo config, with certain parties allowed to do certain things under certain circumstances. Both have their place, and I'm sure (from past performance) that the MS implementation leaves a lot to be desired. But, just bashing Vista for a "user-or-root" approach doesn't seem terribly wise from a community whose best answer to Vista (for Joe Sixpack) is Ubuntu, which does just the same.
Speaking as a parent of young children, I feel (scrub that; I *know*) that it is my responsibility to guide their "online" life, just as it is my responsibility to guide their "physical" life. My job is to provide them with the tools they need to get through their own life. I hope not to sound like some kind of martyr by saying that their lives are more important than my own; it's hard to explain to a non-parent. I intend to block certain stuff (as I am able), but more significantly, I shall explain to my children that the net isn't just about pretty cartoons of "Bob the Builder". They will know not to disclose personal details, etc, over the internet. However, if my daughter was 17 years old and chose to send a "racy" picture of herself, to her boyfriend, then I have to admit that I believe that she has a right to do so, but that it is my responsibility (as her father) to ensure that before she does such a thing, she understands that posting a digital image, by email or otherwise, may live with her forever. That is a fact which the current generation must live with. It, in itself, is something that parents need to teach their children (whether they understand it or not); If a teen posts something unwise on MySpace or whatever. do they really understand how that mmay be retained? Do their parents even know that it happened at all? It all comes down to parenting, whatever "this generation's" issue may be: rock'n'roll is Evilm dontchaknow?
I assume that the poster is a USAian.
Your country was founded* by Puritans.
Feel free to emigrate.
Better still, vote for a President in ownership of his (or her) own brain. Go on, take a chance on it!
*well, invaded by, but - after all - that is the American Way
That's your mistake right there.... if his shirt said "Coca Cola", it'd be a different matter
The simple truth of it is that we want really cheap gadgets. Pay more, get higher quality. But in many markets, there is no demand for quality, so all the gadgets break if you just look at them a bit funny...
Yes, GMail do allow you to do this, but so do many MTAs. eg: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/mail/addressing/ (dated 1998) This is not a feature created by GMail.
I stumbled upon a site recently suggesting that plus-addressing is somehow a feature of GMail.
It is a feature of email, and although some web designers tell their forms not to accept "+" as part of an email address (doubtless due to a lack of ability to read the RFCs). It is not specific to GMail.
Good reply. Still not up to the quality of the original, but not far off.
I doff my cap in admiration.