It's not to hard to imagine a container that could be impervious to such an explosion and would land in the ocean harmlessly.
If we had containers that let us store nuclear waste and "harmlessly" dump it at the bottom of the ocean, we would just thorw it in the ocean in the first place rather than going through the expense of launching it into the sun.
There's also nothing that requires a Windows user to use IE or WMP or MS Office, but that didn't stop the federal government (and foreign governments) from trying to extort money from microsoft.
It's very funny that you quote him accusing you of basing your arguments off old systems, and then reply with an argument based on old systems.
In case you didn't know, on XP SP2, the "Are you sure?" dialogs are largely replaced (mainly within IE) with a modeless "infobar" at the top of the window that you can easily ignore and that you have to explicitly click on and go through a menu to unblock whatever "unsafe" behavior just got blocked (like a file download or activex). There is no in your face dialog to which you can accidentally say Ok.
After this was first seen (as an IE feature) in the SP2 beta, Mozilla copied it. From mozillazine:
The most recent Firefox nightlies feature a new user-interface to manage the XPInstall whitelist. When a user tries to install software from a site that is not on the whitelist, a thin non-modal yellow bar appears at the top of the content area, informing the user that the install has been blocked (bug 241705). A button allows the user to add the site to the whitelist if they choose. Testers of the beta release of Windows XP Service Pack 2 will probably find the yellow bar familiar: it's almost a carbon copy of the new Internet Explorer Information Bar that appears when an ActiveX control is blocked.
Oops, are we not supposed to talk about that here? I know that acknowledging when Microsoft adds something good or fixes one of their problems violates the party line that Microsoft never "innovates" and that OSS never copies from them, so feel free to go back to bragging about how stable linux is compared to Win95.
Consider a civilization with a far greater understanding of physical chemistry, and computers far more powerful than we have. I think it's plausible that they could simulate the interactions that would take place in a living entity well enough to get a good picture of its physiology.
Agreed, but if they are that much more advanced than us (and also seeking to harm or exploit us), then we're ppretty much screwed anyway.
It's not about bounded vs. unbounded, it's about polynomial vs. exponential (or worse). Problems in P can be solved in polynomial time.
You're right that you can brute force an answer. But that will require trying all 2^128 keys (in this case). So you can see that the amount of work you have to do will grow exponentially with the input.
Yes, but the point is that intelligence can be very helpful towards the goal of staying alive. And since, as you say, staying alive is part of being successful at reproduction, this means that being smart does help your evolutionary chances (although of course other things can help too, and sometimes enough to offset lack of intelligence). The fact that humans evolved from fairly unintelligent life (at least if you go far enough back) is pretty good evidence of this.
There's no good reason for this, and no benefit to anyone other than Microsoft.
No, there's also benefit to the consumer. If I go to the store and buy a standard blu-ray player that claims to support all the important codecs, I don't want to take it home and find out that it won't work with some discs I buy because they use the Microsoft code and that one is "optional". I don't think it's reasonable to expect a consumer buying a player to know that in order to actually play all their discs they need a player with this "extra" codec, just because the codec happens to come from a company you dislike.
Agreed. The media likes to follow this pattern with lots of things, not just technology. A great example is how they will hype up celebrities to no end, but will also later relish in the same celebrities' decline and fall, using that as a source of endless stories as well.
This is from Robin Williams's old standup material. It's also on his "A Night at the Met" album. He quotes someone who says that "there is no devil; there is only God when he's been drinking" (or something similar). Williams offers that if God drinks, it's logical that he probably smokes up sometimes too. He offers the patypus as proof that the Almighty sometimes gets high. Which seemed to be the same joke that you were making, so I thought you might be drawing from Williams. Apparently just a coincidence. More proof that platypuses really are weird, I guess.
I don't think costing a lot is what makes something a flagship product. If that were the case, I could just as easily say that SQL Server must be Microsoft's flagship.
We have developed ever shorter attention spans so that if something doesn't blow up or someone doesn't get shot every few minutes it doesn't hold people's attentions.
You make it sound as if at the time the movie came out, everyone understood and loved it, whereas today, people find it boring. And this really isn't the case. When it first came out, initial screenings of it went terribly, it got many bad reviews and a lot of people hated it. Obviously, some people enjoyed it, but it took a while for it to be recognized as a classic and there are probably a lot more people today who would acknowledge that it's a great movie than there were back them.
It's one of my favorite movies, btw. When I bought my new tv (well, about a year ago now), which was a 48" widescreen set that I had bought specifically for movies, the first thing I did with it was watch 2001. What a great movie. Also, right around new years 2001, there was a theater in times square that was showing the movie. Watching that in a theater on the big screen was a really great experience.
The entire point of your original post was that the number they claimed in their advertising was inaccurate. You then attributed a number to them that is very different than the one they claimed. Pointing that out isn't "petty". If you claim that they lied about a number, then the value of that number is obviously extremely signficant.
For some reason, dropping down into 'overly-ignorant-mode' is some form of debate format that, surprisingly, is used to impress us with how smart one is.
I wasn't being disingenuous or trying to show off my intelligence by pointing out a factual error in your original post. I was simply making a significant correction.
This isn't a "common sense" issue and it's not about how "interpret" your post. Your original post was factually wrong. You said that Microsoft claimed "five nines" uptime for server 2000, and that that means 99.99999%. This simply isn't the case. "Five nines" is a standard industry term and always means 99.999%. The figure you attributed to microsoft's advertising was not the one they claimed, which is a very important disctinction when you are accusing them of false advertising specifically about that claim.
I'm not usually one to argue grammar or semantics or spelling. But when someone states a number or fact that is incorrect, that's a different story. If I say that the population of the United States is 2.5 million and you point out that that is incorrect, there's an important correction, not a quibbling "interpetation" issue with my post.
There are compaints about how the SP2 security panel can be spoofed.
Guess what: Once you have arbitrary code running on your system, it can do whatever it wants (if you are running as root) including spoofing UI to make you think you haven't been pwned. This isn't new and isn't really a "bug" that can be fixed, it's just a fact of life. The fact that this is the worst complaint you can come up with about sp2 is demonstration of its quality, not its bugginess.
My complaints center around MS Office's tendency to get all up in my shit all the time: automatic spelling/syntax/formatting "correction" and the like.
So just turn off automatic spelling/syntax/formatting correction.
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Yes, salsemen always say that the product they are pushing is good, but not actually good enough to justify paying the current price for it.
If we had containers that let us store nuclear waste and "harmlessly" dump it at the bottom of the ocean, we would just thorw it in the ocean in the first place rather than going through the expense of launching it into the sun.
Linux has been around in some form for more than a decade. How is this "quick"?
There's also nothing that requires a Windows user to use IE or WMP or MS Office, but that didn't stop the federal government (and foreign governments) from trying to extort money from microsoft.
Live phish. Some other bands hand similar services now as well.
In case you didn't know, on XP SP2, the "Are you sure?" dialogs are largely replaced (mainly within IE) with a modeless "infobar" at the top of the window that you can easily ignore and that you have to explicitly click on and go through a menu to unblock whatever "unsafe" behavior just got blocked (like a file download or activex). There is no in your face dialog to which you can accidentally say Ok.
After this was first seen (as an IE feature) in the SP2 beta, Mozilla copied it. From mozillazine:
Oops, are we not supposed to talk about that here? I know that acknowledging when Microsoft adds something good or fixes one of their problems violates the party line that Microsoft never "innovates" and that OSS never copies from them, so feel free to go back to bragging about how stable linux is compared to Win95.
No, it doesn't have to be defended because it's their music and they should be free to sell it in whatever form they want.
Agreed, but if they are that much more advanced than us (and also seeking to harm or exploit us), then we're ppretty much screwed anyway.
It's not about bounded vs. unbounded, it's about polynomial vs. exponential (or worse). Problems in P can be solved in polynomial time.
You're right that you can brute force an answer. But that will require trying all 2^128 keys (in this case). So you can see that the amount of work you have to do will grow exponentially with the input.
Yes, but the point is that intelligence can be very helpful towards the goal of staying alive. And since, as you say, staying alive is part of being successful at reproduction, this means that being smart does help your evolutionary chances (although of course other things can help too, and sometimes enough to offset lack of intelligence). The fact that humans evolved from fairly unintelligent life (at least if you go far enough back) is pretty good evidence of this.
No, there's also benefit to the consumer. If I go to the store and buy a standard blu-ray player that claims to support all the important codecs, I don't want to take it home and find out that it won't work with some discs I buy because they use the Microsoft code and that one is "optional". I don't think it's reasonable to expect a consumer buying a player to know that in order to actually play all their discs they need a player with this "extra" codec, just because the codec happens to come from a company you dislike.
Did you consider stabbing them instead?
Agreed. The media likes to follow this pattern with lots of things, not just technology. A great example is how they will hype up celebrities to no end, but will also later relish in the same celebrities' decline and fall, using that as a source of endless stories as well.
I hope that in your nasty letter you referred to the recipient as a "case-insenstive clod".
This is from Robin Williams's old standup material. It's also on his "A Night at the Met" album. He quotes someone who says that "there is no devil; there is only God when he's been drinking" (or something similar). Williams offers that if God drinks, it's logical that he probably smokes up sometimes too. He offers the patypus as proof that the Almighty sometimes gets high. Which seemed to be the same joke that you were making, so I thought you might be drawing from Williams. Apparently just a coincidence. More proof that platypuses really are weird, I guess.
Yes, we're familiar with the works of Robin Williams.
No, the current version (IE6sp2) has popup blocking.
Ow! Stop that.
I don't think costing a lot is what makes something a flagship product. If that were the case, I could just as easily say that SQL Server must be Microsoft's flagship.
You make it sound as if at the time the movie came out, everyone understood and loved it, whereas today, people find it boring. And this really isn't the case. When it first came out, initial screenings of it went terribly, it got many bad reviews and a lot of people hated it. Obviously, some people enjoyed it, but it took a while for it to be recognized as a classic and there are probably a lot more people today who would acknowledge that it's a great movie than there were back them.
It's one of my favorite movies, btw. When I bought my new tv (well, about a year ago now), which was a 48" widescreen set that I had bought specifically for movies, the first thing I did with it was watch 2001. What a great movie. Also, right around new years 2001, there was a theater in times square that was showing the movie. Watching that in a theater on the big screen was a really great experience.
Ok, just added it to my queue. Thanks.
I wasn't being disingenuous or trying to show off my intelligence by pointing out a factual error in your original post. I was simply making a significant correction.
This isn't a "common sense" issue and it's not about how "interpret" your post. Your original post was factually wrong. You said that Microsoft claimed "five nines" uptime for server 2000, and that that means 99.99999%. This simply isn't the case. "Five nines" is a standard industry term and always means 99.999%. The figure you attributed to microsoft's advertising was not the one they claimed, which is a very important disctinction when you are accusing them of false advertising specifically about that claim.
I'm not usually one to argue grammar or semantics or spelling. But when someone states a number or fact that is incorrect, that's a different story. If I say that the population of the United States is 2.5 million and you point out that that is incorrect, there's an important correction, not a quibbling "interpetation" issue with my post.
Guess what: Once you have arbitrary code running on your system, it can do whatever it wants (if you are running as root) including spoofing UI to make you think you haven't been pwned. This isn't new and isn't really a "bug" that can be fixed, it's just a fact of life. The fact that this is the worst complaint you can come up with about sp2 is demonstration of its quality, not its bugginess.
So just turn off automatic spelling/syntax/formatting correction.