Strikes me that this is a "crime" somewhat akin to stealing money from a drug dealer. Sure, I guess you are doing something "illegal" since it's not your money, but it's not like the drug dealer is going to report you to the police...
Announcing this activity publicly doesn't strike me as particularly prudent, even if it is valuable information...
I don't think you realize just how protected you are from fraud and similar crimes by the fact that they are crimes. You can knock our justice system for being imperfect, but you can't knock it for being ineffective. ('cepting the "war on drugs", of course)
The truth is that we have a first-rate police force and criminal investigation system that is quite effective at enforcing laws of commerce - protections that provide you with a refund if the item purchased didn't work out, etc - that you use so casually, you hardly know they are there.
And that leaves a population terribly unprepared for the wild wooly Internet, where those protections so painstakingly put into place mean almost nothing. You can talk all you want about education and eliminating the source of the problem, but it's never worked before and all of social commerce is set up to work the other way.
Why is this being presented as if it were something new?
As early back is 2001, as an admin for an ISP, I would see what I called a "spam attack" - a large number of emails sent over a 24 hour period or so, adding up to (typically) around a million attempted emails to random addresses at the domain name(s) for which I administered.
We used greylisting to stop these attacks, but it was *very* taxing - in a typical attack, I logged well over 10,000 source IP addresses.
These so-called "snow-shoe" spam attacks are pretty much exactly what I saw some 8 years ago.
Zimbra gets underplayed. It's the Exhange killer that works well, easy to addminister, cross platform, mac/win/lin/winmo/web/outlook/etc. compatible. It has antivirus, antispam, archiving, clustering, scalable to nearly any size, ldap/AD integration, shared calendars, should I continue?
Strikes me that mesh networks would be fantastic for aviation. The FAA is in the starting stages of their next-gen ATC system, that will solve all the problems now in place with airplanes and trying not to hit something else. Air traffic control still depends on RADAR and transponders, which are fraught with problems. For example, aircraft typically just announce where they are, like:
"Smallville traffic, Cessna N1235 altitude three thousand, 5 miles northwest of the field, making left downwind for three three".
Which means: "For the airport in Smallville, I'm a Cessna with a License number of N1235, I'm three thousand feet above sea level, I'm 5 miles away from the field coming from the northwest, and I'm going to maneuver to the runway pointed North north west. (compass heading 330)"
It's almost all trust-based, self announced. If you make a mistake, and announce NorthEast instead of NorthWest, the likelyhood of an accident rises sharply. Yet it's a mistake that's simple to make. I've made it - announcing East instead of West, etc. When I notice, I'll re-announce, but it's still error prone.
But a simple mesh network that allows aircraft to automatically broadcast their location (latitude/longitude/altitude from GPS) in a simple packet in a protocol similar to that used for wifi or ethernet, where aircraft closer than 200 miles will rebroadcast (aircraft on the ground have a broadcast range of less than 5 miles, at 5 thousand feet the range extends to hundreds of miles) and the result would be that all aircraft would know about all other aircraft with perhaps a 10 second latency, even in very heavy traffic.
If this bill passes, it won't change anything. The professors that write these books will simply reject the U.S. funds and get money from other places like IBM, Microsoft, Ford, and so on. Professors want to be reimbursed for their many hours of work, not give books away for free (or cheap).
It won't change anything suddenly. We won't suddenly end up with a raft of freely licensed textbooks. But the switch has already begun. Arnold Swarzenegger (sp?) called for open-licensed digital text books like a year ago, and already there's about a dozen e-books with open licenses that are now available. And schools are definitely taking notes, since they are chopping budgets left, right, and center.
Market forces will drive this change, and the change is all but inevitable. Textbooks won't disappear overnight, but already, I save about 50% on the college textbooks for my wife and kids (all going to school) by hitting up Amazon and Froogle as soon as I get the ISBN #.
And let us not forget: we're not talking about not paying for curriculum development. In the bill, the state will pay a reasonable wage for developing the curriculum. What we're talking about is *only* paying for curriculum development. A qualified professor could still make a good living producing quality, open-license textbooks. The only difference here is that the professor will only make that good living by producing the books, and not for sales thereafter forever.
Sooner or later, somebody who is qualified will find this agreement acceptable, and when they do, it's end game for the classic, bloated, inefficient model of the past.
Gasoline is only explosive under very specific circumstances. That's why cars have exotic hardware like carburettors and multi port fuel injection systems - to get the exact mix of gasoline and air that will ignite with the biggest bang.
Gasoline BURNS quite readily, but except for an initial "whoosh", it's not particularly explosive. In a sealed container it won't burn at all.
Apparently submitter didn't RTFA, it's not -GOOGLE- that is doing this, but a company called Micello, they just use google maps. I realize that not reading the article is the norm, but can the editors at least read the first paragraph in the linked article before approving?
And, of course, Google doesn't log what you do using their Google Maps product....
Better 2D performance?!?!? Are you actually serious?
You mean, OSS drivers are outperforming crappy binaries in an area that was well covered in 1990?!?! It's like I've died and gone to heaven! I might even be able to watch a flash video full screen!?!?!
I'm a Linux junkie. But this state of affairs for video drivers just has me feeling a bit cranky.
Worse than that even, this is using your strength in one industry segment (physics acceleration) to support sales of an arguably different segment (graphics acceleration).
Which is nasty and unethical to be sure, but it's not illegal unless it can be legally shown that Nvidia is a monopoly. It's amazing to me how many slashbots don't understand this distinction.
I'm pissed at ATI for dropping binary support for FGLRX for Linux kernels later than 2.6.29, and was considering getting an Nvidia GPU in my next laptop, but now it looks an awful lot like Intel is getting my $50....
You DO know that they're scared, though, if they have to trash it like this. You _should_ be scared if Microsoft enters your segment with a free product. It may not be the best, but that's never stopped Microsoft from crushing competitors in the past.
You probably don't remember when Microsoft came out with their own antivirus package as part of DOS 6, do you? I do. It was nice, for a while. Support fell off when MS decided to change their focus.
And answer me this: how is MSE conceptually any different than Windows Defender? Why TWO products that do pretty much the same thing?
So your average, reasonably protected Windows install has:
1) Microsoft Security Essentials 2) Windows Defender 3) Spybot Search and Destroy 4) AVG antivirus 5) Windows Firewall
Do you *create* software? Build software systems to solve complex problems?
If somebody says "I need emailz!" and you install sendmail/exchange/postfix, you are not engineering software. If somebody says "I need a way to track X doohickeys " and you put together a database and a user interface to track X doohickeys in a way nobody's done before, you are engineering software.
The glory of IT is not in IT, but in software engineering. IT is the dark, smelly, hairy underbelly of computing technology. Software engineering is the light, bright, wonderful topside, basking in sunshine and wonder.
IT personnel are responsible for keeping crappy, obsolete, virus-laden servers working without enough money to get anything better. Any money spent on IT is considered an expense. "Good" IT consists of finding the cheapest off-the-shelf software to sorta do the job.
Software engineers are given the challenge of a problem to solve, and the money and time to do it in. Good software engineering consists of designing the most elegant technical architecture to solve the problem.
IT personnel are regularly yelled at as if they were barely more valuable than a "click next to install package" monkey because that's often what they are. Even when personally far more capable, the job only requires you to "click next" when installing somebody else's software, perform backups, and set passwords. IT personnel are relegated to the back store room and not allowed to see anybody, except accidentally on the bus on the way to the local Carl's Jr.
Software engineers regularly meet with executives in fancy boardrooms with glass tables. They are there to design quality solutions that will be used by thousands or millions. They are treated with accord, respect, and often, mild deference. Lunch is often provided by hired caterers at design meetings.
No matter how "senior" you are in IT, you are easily replaceable by anybody with the requisite MCSE certificate.
There are never enough qualified software engineers - they are pretty much always in high demand and paid to match. When software engineers work in a field, they quickly acquire domain expertise that's almost impossible to replace.
People who confuse IT and Software Engineering often wind up working in the wrong field. Put in the time to become a software engineer, and you won't ever regret it. Cram through your MCSE or CCNA, and become one of the faceless droids. (Yay! I know what an MSI file is! I can calculate a subnet!)
Or it would be if I, as the sysadmin, couldn't easily send email in anyone's name...
Wow. Don't you feel important? Except that, really, ANYONE can send an email as ANYONE else, at ANY TIME. Here's a tip: type the following in a telnet prompt, where your ISP's mail server is called "smtp.myisp.com"
# telnet smtp.myisp.com 25 HELO foobar MAIL FROM: billgates@microsoft.com RCPT TO: samjones109@yahoo.com SUBJECT: Free drinks on the house!
Hey! I gots my billions of dollars so come down to Joe's bar at 5:30 and drinks are on me!
-Billie Richboy..
Congratulations! You've just faked being Bill Gates to Sam Jones! Wasn't that hard?
A few times, I've gotten a cheap kick sending text messages via the SMS gateway to cell phone users from themselves. It helped out once when I had a gal friend whose ex-boyfriend was giving her grief - freaked her ex out to send messages that looked to him like they came from his phone: ("Just leave me alone...")
There are some very knowledgeable salesmen out there. Unfortunately, they are the minority. That's because being knowledgeable is not a particularly well-rewarded attribute. Take a look at the following:
1) When you walk into Best Buy or call Dell, you've already committed yourself: you are pretty much ready to buy, or you wouldn't be there.
2) Salesmen are paid on commission. The more you spend, the more they make.
3) Most people can't define the difference between a megabyte and a megahertz.
4) If you leave without buying, the salesman will lose the commission, even if you buy later based on their advice.
Put it all together, and you have a situation where salespeople are highly motivated to spout whatever bullshit they can concoct to get you to buy the more expensive doohickey RIGHT NOW, as long as they can get you to buy it. Since people typically judge the truthfullness of other people based on the confidence that they seem to have in what they are saying, you end up with a pack of know-nothing liars who make any kind of bullshit... with confidence.
It's really not much different than the techno-babble bullshiz that they say on Star Trek - the words are unimportant, but it's important that it sound real. And since any computer that anybody buys can do pretty much whatever they need, the people are typically content with the scenario because they got something that actually does what they need. They will tend to accept this as evidence that their salesman was telling the truth in the first place.
It's a sad, sad situation, and one that's not likely to improve any time soon.
It was more of a programming language than an Operating System, but ERLANG has the stuff to do multi-core, well. Using ERLANG, they've actually achieved nine nines of uptime. That works out to well under a SECOND of downtime in a year. It scales (near) linearly as the number of cores go up, IO is the limitation.
You can read all about it here. Concepts like message passing and immutability is what makes it work.
Erlang actually lets you update the program while it's running. It has extensive error recovery. It's lack of shared state means you can not only go multi-core, but multi-system over networks - invisibly.
Seriously, It's the cat's meow for ultra-high-end high-performance, industrial-grade software solutions. If I were writing a stock exchange management system, I would probably consider ERLANG.
I actually got one of my systems pwned (for the first time in > 10 years) via Chrome, in incognito mode no less. Not saying that any other browser would have stopped it, least of all IE; it was a Java -- not javascript -- vulnerability... http://blog.cr0.org/2009/05/write-once-own-everyone.html [cr0.org]. This vulnerability allowed an applet to escape both Chrome's and Java's sandboxing.
... and the fact that this happened while you were using Chrome's "incognito mode" is a good indication of the types of sites that you were visiting when this happened.
Look - wearing a bullet-proof vest does offer a degree of protection greater than normal clothing, but that doesn't mean that you should be walking around the red-light district of Oakland, CA after dark. You can still get knifed, kidnapped, or shot in the head. It also won't protect you from the impact of hitting the ground after jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.
No tool is invulnerable, and no tool will protect you from risky behavior.
The truth is, more and more people are attempting to use a browser as a general purpose user interface for many applications which were previously considered unattainable with older browser technology and I only see additional momentum building in this direction.
We are doing *exactly* this. We provide a hosted, vertical software system, and for years we've done everything in our servers.
However, recent builds of the FireFox JS engine are fast enough that we can start moving the processing out from our hosted application server cluster into the user's browser. The users love the results - applications that load in a few seconds, and run from their computer at near-native speeds, accessible anywhere.
But, rather than spend inordinate amounts of time trying to get stuff to work in IE, we simply require Firefox. That way, we can support Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and any other platform that runs FF 3.0+. It's not been hard for us to make this requirement, basically only minor complaining from techs.
Our customers are more interested in "Cross Platform" meaning "Can I get it to run on MY computer" than "Can I get it to run in MY browser".
The evolution of javascript performance is an industry changer - it's what makes hosted applications actually WORK, despite all its warts.
Their strategy wasn't to cripple IE. Their strategy was to leverage their domiant position so that smaller third parties could never get into the game, by not supporting stuff that didn't encourage developers to go 100% Microsoft.
Sure, you could have a plugin, but who wants to require ANOTHER plugin?
Rarely do sales taxes cover things like rent, utilities, and food. Since these are most of the 'base load' for the poor, they are effectively only taxed on their bad habits, EG booze and ciggs, for which a strong argument can be made that they should be discouraged anyway.
Rich people buy fancy cars, boats, buy lots of gas, etc. that DO get taxed.
Slashdot Mirror
Strikes me that this is a "crime" somewhat akin to stealing money from a drug dealer. Sure, I guess you are doing something "illegal" since it's not your money, but it's not like the drug dealer is going to report you to the police...
Announcing this activity publicly doesn't strike me as particularly prudent, even if it is valuable information...
I don't think you realize just how protected you are from fraud and similar crimes by the fact that they are crimes. You can knock our justice system for being imperfect, but you can't knock it for being ineffective. ('cepting the "war on drugs", of course)
The truth is that we have a first-rate police force and criminal investigation system that is quite effective at enforcing laws of commerce - protections that provide you with a refund if the item purchased didn't work out, etc - that you use so casually, you hardly know they are there.
And that leaves a population terribly unprepared for the wild wooly Internet, where those protections so painstakingly put into place mean almost nothing. You can talk all you want about education and eliminating the source of the problem, but it's never worked before and all of social commerce is set up to work the other way.
So, good luck with that.
Wha?
You think I didn't block home PCs and dynamic IP address ranges via DNS RBL? I'm talking about what got *past* those obvious filters...
Why is this being presented as if it were something new?
As early back is 2001, as an admin for an ISP, I would see what I called a "spam attack" - a large number of emails sent over a 24 hour period or so, adding up to (typically) around a million attempted emails to random addresses at the domain name(s) for which I administered.
We used greylisting to stop these attacks, but it was *very* taxing - in a typical attack, I logged well over 10,000 source IP addresses.
These so-called "snow-shoe" spam attacks are pretty much exactly what I saw some 8 years ago.
Everything old is new again...
Zimbra gets underplayed. It's the Exhange killer that works well, easy to addminister, cross platform, mac/win/lin/winmo/web/outlook/etc. compatible. It has antivirus, antispam, archiving, clustering, scalable to nearly any size, ldap/AD integration, shared calendars, should I continue?
THIS IS IT, FOLKS!
Why doesn't it get more press?
It's slightly more complicated than "Sell PCs to the guy who buys PCs," but it's not rocket surgery.
Score one for an excellent example of a mixed metaphor. WTF is "rocket surgery"? I think you meant either "rocket science" or "brain surgery"?
GO AHEAD, MODERATORS! I HAVE MORE KARMA THAN YOU CAN SHAKE A STICK AT! DO YOU WORST!!!!
Strikes me that mesh networks would be fantastic for aviation. The FAA is in the starting stages of their next-gen ATC system, that will solve all the problems now in place with airplanes and trying not to hit something else. Air traffic control still depends on RADAR and transponders, which are fraught with problems. For example, aircraft typically just announce where they are, like:
"Smallville traffic, Cessna N1235 altitude three thousand, 5 miles northwest of the field, making left downwind for three three".
Which means: "For the airport in Smallville, I'm a Cessna with a License number of N1235, I'm three thousand feet above sea level, I'm 5 miles away from the field coming from the northwest, and I'm going to maneuver to the runway pointed North north west. (compass heading 330)"
It's almost all trust-based, self announced. If you make a mistake, and announce NorthEast instead of NorthWest, the likelyhood of an accident rises sharply. Yet it's a mistake that's simple to make. I've made it - announcing East instead of West, etc. When I notice, I'll re-announce, but it's still error prone.
But a simple mesh network that allows aircraft to automatically broadcast their location (latitude/longitude/altitude from GPS) in a simple packet in a protocol similar to that used for wifi or ethernet, where aircraft closer than 200 miles will rebroadcast (aircraft on the ground have a broadcast range of less than 5 miles, at 5 thousand feet the range extends to hundreds of miles) and the result would be that all aircraft would know about all other aircraft with perhaps a 10 second latency, even in very heavy traffic.
If this bill passes, it won't change anything. The professors that write these books will simply reject the U.S. funds and get money from other places like IBM, Microsoft, Ford, and so on. Professors want to be reimbursed for their many hours of work, not give books away for free (or cheap).
It won't change anything suddenly. We won't suddenly end up with a raft of freely licensed textbooks. But the switch has already begun. Arnold Swarzenegger (sp?) called for open-licensed digital text books like a year ago, and already there's about a dozen e-books with open licenses that are now available. And schools are definitely taking notes, since they are chopping budgets left, right, and center.
Market forces will drive this change, and the change is all but inevitable. Textbooks won't disappear overnight, but already, I save about 50% on the college textbooks for my wife and kids (all going to school) by hitting up Amazon and Froogle as soon as I get the ISBN #.
And let us not forget: we're not talking about not paying for curriculum development. In the bill, the state will pay a reasonable wage for developing the curriculum. What we're talking about is *only* paying for curriculum development. A qualified professor could still make a good living producing quality, open-license textbooks. The only difference here is that the professor will only make that good living by producing the books, and not for sales thereafter forever.
Sooner or later, somebody who is qualified will find this agreement acceptable, and when they do, it's end game for the classic, bloated, inefficient model of the past.
And a normal petrol tank is also a bomb.
Gasoline is only explosive under very specific circumstances. That's why cars have exotic hardware like carburettors and multi port fuel injection systems - to get the exact mix of gasoline and air that will ignite with the biggest bang.
Gasoline BURNS quite readily, but except for an initial "whoosh", it's not particularly explosive. In a sealed container it won't burn at all.
Apparently submitter didn't RTFA, it's not -GOOGLE- that is doing this, but a company called Micello, they just use google maps. I realize that not reading the article is the norm, but can the editors at least read the first paragraph in the linked article before approving?
And, of course, Google doesn't log what you do using their Google Maps product....
Better 2D performance?!?!? Are you actually serious?
You mean, OSS drivers are outperforming crappy binaries in an area that was well covered in 1990?!?! It's like I've died and gone to heaven! I might even be able to watch a flash video full screen!?!?!
I'm a Linux junkie. But this state of affairs for video drivers just has me feeling a bit cranky.
Worse than that even, this is using your strength in one industry segment (physics acceleration) to support sales of an arguably different segment (graphics acceleration).
Which is nasty and unethical to be sure, but it's not illegal unless it can be legally shown that Nvidia is a monopoly. It's amazing to me how many slashbots don't understand this distinction.
I'm pissed at ATI for dropping binary support for FGLRX for Linux kernels later than 2.6.29, and was considering getting an Nvidia GPU in my next laptop, but now it looks an awful lot like Intel is getting my $50....
Yeah, I remember their grand opening, too.
Somehow, I doubt it, since it was in 1983....
You DO know that they're scared, though, if they have to trash it like this. You _should_ be scared if Microsoft enters your segment with a free product. It may not be the best, but that's never stopped Microsoft from crushing competitors in the past.
You probably don't remember when Microsoft came out with their own antivirus package as part of DOS 6, do you? I do. It was nice, for a while. Support fell off when MS decided to change their focus.
And answer me this: how is MSE conceptually any different than Windows Defender? Why TWO products that do pretty much the same thing?
So your average, reasonably protected Windows install has:
1) Microsoft Security Essentials
2) Windows Defender
3) Spybot Search and Destroy
4) AVG antivirus
5) Windows Firewall
Sucks that you have more programs running to stop malware than you actually intend to use, doesn't it? By latest statistics, 59% of Windows computers worldwide are now infected. Pathetic that it's more than HALF... If that's not a reason to ditch, what is?
PS: I'm a Mac/Linux user, Windows is a sometimes necessary evil...
Do you *create* software? Build software systems to solve complex problems?
If somebody says "I need emailz!" and you install sendmail/exchange/postfix, you are not engineering software. If somebody says "I need a way to track X doohickeys " and you put together a database and a user interface to track X doohickeys in a way nobody's done before, you are engineering software.
The glory of IT is not in IT, but in software engineering. IT is the dark, smelly, hairy underbelly of computing technology. Software engineering is the light, bright, wonderful topside, basking in sunshine and wonder.
IT personnel are responsible for keeping crappy, obsolete, virus-laden servers working without enough money to get anything better. Any money spent on IT is considered an expense. "Good" IT consists of finding the cheapest off-the-shelf software to sorta do the job.
Software engineers are given the challenge of a problem to solve, and the money and time to do it in. Good software engineering consists of designing the most elegant technical architecture to solve the problem.
IT personnel are regularly yelled at as if they were barely more valuable than a "click next to install package" monkey because that's often what they are. Even when personally far more capable, the job only requires you to "click next" when installing somebody else's software, perform backups, and set passwords. IT personnel are relegated to the back store room and not allowed to see anybody, except accidentally on the bus on the way to the local Carl's Jr.
Software engineers regularly meet with executives in fancy boardrooms with glass tables. They are there to design quality solutions that will be used by thousands or millions. They are treated with accord, respect, and often, mild deference. Lunch is often provided by hired caterers at design meetings.
No matter how "senior" you are in IT, you are easily replaceable by anybody with the requisite MCSE certificate.
There are never enough qualified software engineers - they are pretty much always in high demand and paid to match. When software engineers work in a field, they quickly acquire domain expertise that's almost impossible to replace.
People who confuse IT and Software Engineering often wind up working in the wrong field. Put in the time to become a software engineer, and you won't ever regret it. Cram through your MCSE or CCNA, and become one of the faceless droids. (Yay! I know what an MSI file is! I can calculate a subnet!)
Speaking of Windows 1.0....
I have a copy! (yes, for real!)
This is brilliant!
Or it would be if I, as the sysadmin, couldn't easily send email in anyone's name...
Wow. Don't you feel important? Except that, really, ANYONE can send an email as ANYONE else, at ANY TIME. Here's a tip: type the following in a telnet prompt, where your ISP's mail server is called "smtp.myisp.com"
# telnet smtp.myisp.com 25
HELO foobar
MAIL FROM: billgates@microsoft.com
RCPT TO: samjones109@yahoo.com
SUBJECT: Free drinks on the house!
Hey! I gots my billions of dollars so come down to Joe's bar at 5:30 and drinks are on me!
-Billie Richboy. .
Congratulations! You've just faked being Bill Gates to Sam Jones! Wasn't that hard?
A few times, I've gotten a cheap kick sending text messages via the SMS gateway to cell phone users from themselves. It helped out once when I had a gal friend whose ex-boyfriend was giving her grief - freaked her ex out to send messages that looked to him like they came from his phone: ("Just leave me alone...")
There are some very knowledgeable salesmen out there. Unfortunately, they are the minority. That's because being knowledgeable is not a particularly well-rewarded attribute. Take a look at the following:
1) When you walk into Best Buy or call Dell, you've already committed yourself: you are pretty much ready to buy, or you wouldn't be there.
2) Salesmen are paid on commission. The more you spend, the more they make.
3) Most people can't define the difference between a megabyte and a megahertz.
4) If you leave without buying, the salesman will lose the commission, even if you buy later based on their advice.
Put it all together, and you have a situation where salespeople are highly motivated to spout whatever bullshit they can concoct to get you to buy the more expensive doohickey RIGHT NOW, as long as they can get you to buy it. Since people typically judge the truthfullness of other people based on the confidence that they seem to have in what they are saying, you end up with a pack of know-nothing liars who make any kind of bullshit... with confidence.
It's really not much different than the techno-babble bullshiz that they say on Star Trek - the words are unimportant, but it's important that it sound real. And since any computer that anybody buys can do pretty much whatever they need, the people are typically content with the scenario because they got something that actually does what they need. They will tend to accept this as evidence that their salesman was telling the truth in the first place.
It's a sad, sad situation, and one that's not likely to improve any time soon.
Try SkyFire. It's what makes browsing the 'net actually work with my HTC WinMo 6.0 phone. The IE that comes on there is spectacularly worthless.
It was more of a programming language than an Operating System, but ERLANG has the stuff to do multi-core, well. Using ERLANG, they've actually achieved nine nines of uptime. That works out to well under a SECOND of downtime in a year. It scales (near) linearly as the number of cores go up, IO is the limitation.
You can read all about it here. Concepts like message passing and immutability is what makes it work.
Erlang actually lets you update the program while it's running. It has extensive error recovery. It's lack of shared state means you can not only go multi-core, but multi-system over networks - invisibly.
Seriously, It's the cat's meow for ultra-high-end high-performance, industrial-grade software solutions. If I were writing a stock exchange management system, I would probably consider ERLANG.
I actually got one of my systems pwned (for the first time in > 10 years) via Chrome, in incognito mode no less. Not saying that any other browser would have stopped it, least of all IE; it was a Java -- not javascript -- vulnerability... http://blog.cr0.org/2009/05/write-once-own-everyone.html [cr0.org]. This vulnerability allowed an applet to escape both Chrome's and Java's sandboxing.
... and the fact that this happened while you were using Chrome's "incognito mode" is a good indication of the types of sites that you were visiting when this happened.
Look - wearing a bullet-proof vest does offer a degree of protection greater than normal clothing, but that doesn't mean that you should be walking around the red-light district of Oakland, CA after dark. You can still get knifed, kidnapped, or shot in the head. It also won't protect you from the impact of hitting the ground after jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.
No tool is invulnerable, and no tool will protect you from risky behavior.
The truth is, more and more people are attempting to use a browser as a general purpose user interface for many applications which were previously considered unattainable with older browser technology and I only see additional momentum building in this direction.
We are doing *exactly* this. We provide a hosted, vertical software system, and for years we've done everything in our servers.
However, recent builds of the FireFox JS engine are fast enough that we can start moving the processing out from our hosted application server cluster into the user's browser. The users love the results - applications that load in a few seconds, and run from their computer at near-native speeds, accessible anywhere.
But, rather than spend inordinate amounts of time trying to get stuff to work in IE, we simply require Firefox. That way, we can support Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and any other platform that runs FF 3.0+. It's not been hard for us to make this requirement, basically only minor complaining from techs.
Our customers are more interested in "Cross Platform" meaning "Can I get it to run on MY computer" than "Can I get it to run in MY browser".
The evolution of javascript performance is an industry changer - it's what makes hosted applications actually WORK, despite all its warts.
Their strategy wasn't to cripple IE. Their strategy was to leverage their domiant position so that smaller third parties could never get into the game, by not supporting stuff that didn't encourage developers to go 100% Microsoft.
Sure, you could have a plugin, but who wants to require ANOTHER plugin?
Rarely do sales taxes cover things like rent, utilities, and food. Since these are most of the 'base load' for the poor, they are effectively only taxed on their bad habits, EG booze and ciggs, for which a strong argument can be made that they should be discouraged anyway.
Rich people buy fancy cars, boats, buy lots of gas, etc. that DO get taxed.