You're forgetting the most important thing - "Joe User" will just use whatever comes preinstalled on their new computer. At best they'll have a vague idea that there are other versions of Windows, and may think to ask if the software they buy will work on theirs.
It's really only IT professionals and PC-building enthusiasts that will know or need to know about the differences between the various versions. That's a large chunk of the slashdot readership, but a pretty small proportion of the overall computer using population.
I remember a few years ago Yahoo automatically changed all instances of the word "eval" to "review", in order to prevent script injection/evaluation attacks.
The only problem was that their regexp was a little too sweeping, and changed every instance of "medieval" to "medireview". See for example this article at Plastic. Googling for "medireview" gives a few hundred results.
So yes, this is dumb, but it really shouldn't be a surprise.
The copyright holder can change the licence at any time, yes, but it does not (and cannot) apply to existing releases. As long as one person has a copy of the source licenced under the GPL, it's still free.
GPL is not public domain, and the copyright holder should be able to control his own product and say "any further use of this property is denied."
Again, the copyright holder can say "as of version x.y.z I'm changing the licence", but it does not and cannot apply to previous versions. Further, if they've accepted patches from third parties, they have to either get the agreement of those third parties to the licence change, or remove the code.
So yes, it's possible to buy an open source project and close it off, but no, you can't prevent someone from taking an existing release and running with it.
PDF belongs to adobe and to develop using it you have to pay them for their patents use. So if you want to distribute yourself some PDF that's OK but if you want to use any generating PDF or reading PDF programs you need to pay adobe the big money. And that's just leading to more and more lockin.
Utter rubbish. A number of different libraries capable of generating and working with PDF documents are available; for a free (as in beer and speech) Java one, look no further than Apache's own FOP.
Adobe's desktop applications (eg Distiller) are pay-for, yes, but there are no patents or other licensing issues; the PDF spec is freely available if you want to write your own implementation.
Re:What is wrong with java.util.LinkedList
on
Source Code & Copyright
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· Score: 2, Informative
Well, for one thing the fact that it uses an implementation as the abstraction. The collections should have been things like set, ordered set, fifo sequence, etc... Furthermore they should have been interfaces, not classes.
Seems enterprises with boatloads of PCs to maintain may have increased costs.
Two points:
1) enterprises (along with pretty much every business big enough to have a "real" IT department) are going to be buying PCs from big-name vendors, which will come with Windows pre-installed 2) *if* they then wipe that install (which they may not, due to vendor support issues) they'll almost certainly have a site licence for Windows, Office, etc anyway.
In other words, no, the enterprise isn't going to be affected by this one bit.
10) Upgrade hell....a new motherboard counts as a "new computer" and thus requires a new Windows license.
Given that that's true of no other version of Windows so far released, do you have any proof of that claim?
9) If you don't have a computer capable of running it to it's full potential...why bother?
A fair point, but if it's the case why would you even be considering it?
My (VHS) VCR isn't capable of playing Betamax tapes, so I wouldn't buy them, either.
7) Viruses
6) Worms
5) Spyware
I generally find all three to be a feature of user stupidity (or perhaps naivety is kinder); for the clued-up amongst us, these are non-reasons.
4) Vista will feature ads
As for your first reason, do you have any proof of this?
3) It's still Windows, so it'll still look like something made by Playskool.
So you don't like the default theme - so change it! Again, this is no reason to not buy something.
2) You're going to have to relearn everything anyway, particularly the Office interface which will be radically different with the new release....might as well switch to something new anyway
What does the Office interface have to do with Vista? Even if Office is important to you, you're perfectly at liberty to buy Vista but use OO.o...
1) Gates is evil. What more do you need?
Something more than a bunch of useless half-reasons (at best) and a pointless ad hominem.
Of your reasons, the only one that's really valid is DRM, and even then you're working on the assumption that it'll be a problem, which remains to be seen. Having said that, I'll be waiting until I *have* seen what effect the DRM/trusted computing features have before even thinking of moving to Vista.
Yes, but this article is about the US DHS having words with Sony, and they have no powers under the Computer Misuse Act. I should have been clearer, but (assuming that the poster was USian) I meant to ask what *US* laws have been broken.
I agree that here in the UK, they really ought to be having their collective backside handed to them on a plate by the courts.
The people/government expect companies to "do the right thing" and protect our Bill of Rights abroad on philosophical grounds. Except it's not the private industries job to do that, that's the governments job
If you're talking about this being a moral or ethical duty, then surely it's every American citizen's job to do this?
I didn't mean to give the impression that I thought that it was a good idea - I consider both RIPA and this proposed backdoor to be utterly contrary to the principles of a free society.
Then I thought a little longer, and thought that perhaps they think that despite having the RIP Act, it would be nice if they could still have the backdoor anyway. That way they can get at the data, and if it's clean but they're *sure* the guy's a wrong 'un, they can still lock him (or her) up under the provisions of RIP for witholding the key. Conversely, if they hit pay dirt, they can send the guy down for even longer (assuming the crime warrants it), perhaps even take down associates, etc.
At the time that RIP was proposed, I thought how stupid it was - anyone facing a serious charge would just go down for witholding their keys, laughing as they get 3 years rather than 10 or 20 or even life. Looks like perhaps the government has finally thought of that, and is trying to do something about it.
But if you disagree, old versions of firefox still work great (I still haven't upgraded myself).
I've found Firefox to be a memory hog for the last several versions. There may well be an issue with this feature using lots of RAM, but it's been a general Firefox problem for a good couple of years now. People have been complaining about it for a long time.
Theories become law when they are basically irrefutable
No, that's not what happens. Laws say what happens, theories say why and/or how it happens. Laws don't try to explain behaviour, they just state it. Hence the laws of thermodynamics are laws, while the theory of relativity is a theory and always will be.
Ordinarily, you'd be right - if you take (say) carbon and add a couple of neutrons, all you get is an isotope of carbon, for example carbon 14, which is used in carbon dating.
However, most isotopes are radioactively unstable - that's the reason most substances mostly occur in one or two isotopic forms. Even carbon 14, which occurs naturally, decays - it's this decay that's used in carbon dating. We know what proportion we'd expect it to be in and its half life, so by measuring how much there actually is we can calculate roughly how old the object is.
Coming back to high intensity neutron sources such as a fusion reaction, the atoms that absorb those neutrons tend to absorb a lot of them. This makes them radioactively very unstable, and so they decay by emitting radiation - alpha particles (helium nuclei), beta particles (electrons) and more neutrons.
That's why the material becomes radioactive. Anything that absorbs a lot of neutrons is going to develop some concentration of unstable isotopes, and those isotopes are going to undergo radioactive decay. It's not a chemistry thing, it's a physics thing:)
It would mean less computer literate folk but also a lower demand for those that are still in the business. At best, salaries would stay as they are now, but for fewer people - a net loss, assuming you care about society as a whole:)
If you do some reading about fusion you'll see them throwing around terms like 'MeV'(Million electron Volts, which refers to the velocity of a particle due to an electric potential field of X MeV)
No. An electron volt (eV) is the energy gained by an electron falling through a potential difference of 1 volt. It has nothing to do with velocity, other than that the two are related by the equation for the kinetic energy of the particle (1/2mv^2, at non-relativistic speeds). Electric potentials are measured in V, not eV.
when talking about individual fusion reactions(only two particles)
In order to cause two particles (eg two protons or deuterium nuclei) to fuse, you have to overcome the electrostatic repulsion between them. That requires a certain amount of kinetic energy; too little (or too much) and it won't happen. When talking about individual atomic and subatominc particles, the eV is the natural unit of measurement, especially in this situation.
when they talk about all the particles they talk about temperature
Temperature is what we call the measurement of how much heat energy a substance has. As others have said, heat is the kinetic energy of the random motion of the particles with respect to each other. As this is random, and as the particles are constantly colliding with one another, they have a distribution of speeds (in equillibrium conditions, this will follow the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution). Thus it doesn't really make sense to talk in terms of the energy of the particles, as they have a wide range of energies, from practically zero to very much higher than the average. That's why the temperature is used when talking of the particles collectively.
Aside, I don't see why heat must be an aggregate of unordered motion, because the case in which all the particles move in the same direction is still within the subset of possible aggregate motions called 'random motion.'
As another poster pointed out, such a subset is infinitessimally small compared to the sum total of all possible velocity states. Even ignoring that, the mass motion of the substance has no bearing whatsoever on its temperature - if it did, then simply setting the object in motion would increase its temperature. Would you expect a lump of lead, propelled at high speed in a vacuum, to spontaneously melt? That's what would happen if mass motion caused heating, and you moved the lead fast enough.
I was a plasma physicist, and did some research on topics related to fusion before quiting to become a programmer.
Basically, you're right. The nice things about fusion (or some of them at least) are that there's no scope for a Chernobyl-style meltdown and the reaction products and reactants are safe.
The problem, as you say, is that it's an excellent source of neutrons. The generator and its housing have to be designed to absorb as much of that neutron flux as possible. This inevitably produces radioactive isotopes in these materials, which will eventually break down to the point that they must be replaced.
The nuclear waste associated with a fusion power plant isn't as bad as that for a fission one, but it still exists and still needs to be dealt with.
How long will it be before Free Software is banned entirely, since it's fundamentally incompatible with DRM (regardless of what Linus thinks)?
Is it? DRM is essentially just a specific use of encryption, and all of the trustworthy encryption algos are open - in fact, I'd think very long and hard before using one that wasn't.
Any truly effective DRM scheme is going to have a hardware component - most likely it'll involve hardware decryption and decoding of the protected media stream. If you hack the DRM out of the software, well tough shit - the hardware just won't play ball with you. All the software will do is ask the hardware nicely to take a stream, decrypt it, and send it to the display device - at no point will the unecrypted data go anywhere near the software.
Slashdot Mirror
You're forgetting the most important thing - "Joe User" will just use whatever comes preinstalled on their new computer. At best they'll have a vague idea that there are other versions of Windows, and may think to ask if the software they buy will work on theirs.
It's really only IT professionals and PC-building enthusiasts that will know or need to know about the differences between the various versions. That's a large chunk of the slashdot readership, but a pretty small proportion of the overall computer using population.
I remember a few years ago Yahoo automatically changed all instances of the word "eval" to "review", in order to prevent script injection/evaluation attacks.
The only problem was that their regexp was a little too sweeping, and changed every instance of "medieval" to "medireview". See for example this article at Plastic. Googling for "medireview" gives a few hundred results.
So yes, this is dumb, but it really shouldn't be a surprise.
So basically, you shitcan the ones who like to leave their work at work and have outside interests.
The copyright holder can change the licence at any time, yes, but it does not (and cannot) apply to existing releases. As long as one person has a copy of the source licenced under the GPL, it's still free.
GPL is not public domain, and the copyright holder should be able to control his own product and say "any further use of this property is denied."
Again, the copyright holder can say "as of version x.y.z I'm changing the licence", but it does not and cannot apply to previous versions. Further, if they've accepted patches from third parties, they have to either get the agreement of those third parties to the licence change, or remove the code.
So yes, it's possible to buy an open source project and close it off, but no, you can't prevent someone from taking an existing release and running with it.
PDF belongs to adobe and to develop using it you have to pay them for their patents use. So if you want to distribute yourself some PDF that's OK but if you want to use any generating PDF or reading PDF programs you need to pay adobe the big money. And that's just leading to more and more lockin.
Utter rubbish. A number of different libraries capable of generating and working with PDF documents are available; for a free (as in beer and speech) Java one, look no further than Apache's own FOP.
Adobe's desktop applications (eg Distiller) are pay-for, yes, but there are no patents or other licensing issues; the PDF spec is freely available if you want to write your own implementation.
Well, for one thing the fact that it uses an implementation as the abstraction. The collections should have been things like set, ordered set, fifo sequence, etc... Furthermore they should have been interfaces, not classes.
You mean like the List, Set and Map interfaces?
Seems enterprises with boatloads of PCs to maintain may have increased costs.
Two points:
1) enterprises (along with pretty much every business big enough to have a "real" IT department) are going to be buying PCs from big-name vendors, which will come with Windows pre-installed
2) *if* they then wipe that install (which they may not, due to vendor support issues) they'll almost certainly have a site licence for Windows, Office, etc anyway.
In other words, no, the enterprise isn't going to be affected by this one bit.
10) Upgrade hell....a new motherboard counts as a "new computer" and thus requires a new Windows license.
Given that that's true of no other version of Windows so far released, do you have any proof of that claim?
9) If you don't have a computer capable of running it to it's full potential...why bother?
A fair point, but if it's the case why would you even be considering it?
My (VHS) VCR isn't capable of playing Betamax tapes, so I wouldn't buy them, either.
7) Viruses
6) Worms
5) Spyware
I generally find all three to be a feature of user stupidity (or perhaps naivety is kinder); for the clued-up amongst us, these are non-reasons.
4) Vista will feature ads
As for your first reason, do you have any proof of this?
3) It's still Windows, so it'll still look like something made by Playskool.
So you don't like the default theme - so change it! Again, this is no reason to not buy something.
2) You're going to have to relearn everything anyway, particularly the Office interface which will be radically different with the new release....might as well switch to something new anyway
What does the Office interface have to do with Vista? Even if Office is important to you, you're perfectly at liberty to buy Vista but use OO.o...
1) Gates is evil. What more do you need?
Something more than a bunch of useless half-reasons (at best) and a pointless ad hominem.
Of your reasons, the only one that's really valid is DRM, and even then you're working on the assumption that it'll be a problem, which remains to be seen. Having said that, I'll be waiting until I *have* seen what effect the DRM/trusted computing features have before even thinking of moving to Vista.
Yes, but this article is about the US DHS having words with Sony, and they have no powers under the Computer Misuse Act. I should have been clearer, but (assuming that the poster was USian) I meant to ask what *US* laws have been broken.
I agree that here in the UK, they really ought to be having their collective backside handed to them on a plate by the courts.
I agree with your first point, but:
Laws have already been broken
Which ones? I don't mean to be difficult, but can you name the actual statutes that apply?
The people/government expect companies to "do the right thing" and protect our Bill of Rights abroad on philosophical grounds. Except it's not the private industries job to do that, that's the governments job
If you're talking about this being a moral or ethical duty, then surely it's every American citizen's job to do this?
They can effectively kill the upgrades to MySQL that would turn it into a real database.
How can they stop someone from forking MySQL and adding in those upgrades themselves?
I didn't mean to give the impression that I thought that it was a good idea - I consider both RIPA and this proposed backdoor to be utterly contrary to the principles of a free society.
No, I think he's right - the US government definitely put an upper limit on the strength of any exported crypto, and 40 bits rings a large bell.
That's exactly what I thought.
Then I thought a little longer, and thought that perhaps they think that despite having the RIP Act, it would be nice if they could still have the backdoor anyway. That way they can get at the data, and if it's clean but they're *sure* the guy's a wrong 'un, they can still lock him (or her) up under the provisions of RIP for witholding the key. Conversely, if they hit pay dirt, they can send the guy down for even longer (assuming the crime warrants it), perhaps even take down associates, etc.
At the time that RIP was proposed, I thought how stupid it was - anyone facing a serious charge would just go down for witholding their keys, laughing as they get 3 years rather than 10 or 20 or even life. Looks like perhaps the government has finally thought of that, and is trying to do something about it.
Somehow Thunderbird and Mozilla share this bug.
Well, Thunderbird and Firefox both use Gecko, so the problem may be there.
But if you disagree, old versions of firefox still work great (I still haven't upgraded myself).
I've found Firefox to be a memory hog for the last several versions. There may well be an issue with this feature using lots of RAM, but it's been a general Firefox problem for a good couple of years now. People have been complaining about it for a long time.
Theories become law when they are basically irrefutable
No, that's not what happens. Laws say what happens, theories say why and/or how it happens. Laws don't try to explain behaviour, they just state it. Hence the laws of thermodynamics are laws, while the theory of relativity is a theory and always will be.
Ordinarily, you'd be right - if you take (say) carbon and add a couple of neutrons, all you get is an isotope of carbon, for example carbon 14, which is used in carbon dating.
:)
However, most isotopes are radioactively unstable - that's the reason most substances mostly occur in one or two isotopic forms. Even carbon 14, which occurs naturally, decays - it's this decay that's used in carbon dating. We know what proportion we'd expect it to be in and its half life, so by measuring how much there actually is we can calculate roughly how old the object is.
Coming back to high intensity neutron sources such as a fusion reaction, the atoms that absorb those neutrons tend to absorb a lot of them. This makes them radioactively very unstable, and so they decay by emitting radiation - alpha particles (helium nuclei), beta particles (electrons) and more neutrons.
That's why the material becomes radioactive. Anything that absorbs a lot of neutrons is going to develop some concentration of unstable isotopes, and those isotopes are going to undergo radioactive decay. It's not a chemistry thing, it's a physics thing
It would mean less computer literate folk but also a lower demand for those that are still in the business. At best, salaries would stay as they are now, but for fewer people - a net loss, assuming you care about society as a whole :)
If you do some reading about fusion you'll see them throwing around terms like 'MeV'(Million electron Volts, which refers to the velocity of a particle due to an electric potential field of X MeV)
No. An electron volt (eV) is the energy gained by an electron falling through a potential difference of 1 volt. It has nothing to do with velocity, other than that the two are related by the equation for the kinetic energy of the particle (1/2mv^2, at non-relativistic speeds). Electric potentials are measured in V, not eV.
when talking about individual fusion reactions(only two particles)
In order to cause two particles (eg two protons or deuterium nuclei) to fuse, you have to overcome the electrostatic repulsion between them. That requires a certain amount of kinetic energy; too little (or too much) and it won't happen. When talking about individual atomic and subatominc particles, the eV is the natural unit of measurement, especially in this situation.
when they talk about all the particles they talk about temperature
Temperature is what we call the measurement of how much heat energy a substance has. As others have said, heat is the kinetic energy of the random motion of the particles with respect to each other. As this is random, and as the particles are constantly colliding with one another, they have a distribution of speeds (in equillibrium conditions, this will follow the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution). Thus it doesn't really make sense to talk in terms of the energy of the particles, as they have a wide range of energies, from practically zero to very much higher than the average. That's why the temperature is used when talking of the particles collectively.
Aside, I don't see why heat must be an aggregate of unordered motion, because the case in which all the particles move in the same direction is still within the subset of possible aggregate motions called 'random motion.'
As another poster pointed out, such a subset is infinitessimally small compared to the sum total of all possible velocity states. Even ignoring that, the mass motion of the substance has no bearing whatsoever on its temperature - if it did, then simply setting the object in motion would increase its temperature. Would you expect a lump of lead, propelled at high speed in a vacuum, to spontaneously melt? That's what would happen if mass motion caused heating, and you moved the lead fast enough.
I was a plasma physicist, and did some research on topics related to fusion before quiting to become a programmer.
Basically, you're right. The nice things about fusion (or some of them at least) are that there's no scope for a Chernobyl-style meltdown and the reaction products and reactants are safe.
The problem, as you say, is that it's an excellent source of neutrons. The generator and its housing have to be designed to absorb as much of that neutron flux as possible. This inevitably produces radioactive isotopes in these materials, which will eventually break down to the point that they must be replaced.
The nuclear waste associated with a fusion power plant isn't as bad as that for a fission one, but it still exists and still needs to be dealt with.
1. When was the last time Google stopped working?
I've lost access to google for various amounts of time due to:
* my ADSL link going down
* google deciding to temporarily block my subnet due to excessive traffic
In all of those times (and the first happened a lot for a number of months until I bought a new router) Windows was just fine.
Also, as others have pointed out, if Windows goes down, so does your access to google...
AMD recently announced plans for quad core chips, slated for availability sometime next year. Intel are hardly going to be left out of the race.
How long will it be before Free Software is banned entirely, since it's fundamentally incompatible with DRM (regardless of what Linus thinks)?
Is it? DRM is essentially just a specific use of encryption, and all of the trustworthy encryption algos are open - in fact, I'd think very long and hard before using one that wasn't.
Any truly effective DRM scheme is going to have a hardware component - most likely it'll involve hardware decryption and decoding of the protected media stream. If you hack the DRM out of the software, well tough shit - the hardware just won't play ball with you. All the software will do is ask the hardware nicely to take a stream, decrypt it, and send it to the display device - at no point will the unecrypted data go anywhere near the software.