Yes of course it is, but it's a noun - it's the plural of architect.
However, there is a (depressingly stupid, imho) trend at the moment to use nouns as verbs - hence people are "tasked" with doing things, rather than being assigned tasks, you "architect" a system rather than designing it, etc. In this case it's almost forgivable, as technical design is a distinct discipline from visual or graphic design, so it's nice to have a separate word, rather than having to use "technical design" and "graphic design", which are a little cumbersome.
In contrast, nVidia drivers and composite work now.
True, you can't buy Vista yet - but you can not only download Beta 1 (if you're an MSDN subscriber), you can also download a tech preview of WPF ("Avalon", the new presentation layer).
In a very real way, for a number of people, Vista's compositing stuff works now, too. In fact, I'd not be at all surprised if there were comparable numbers of people running the Vista/WPF betas and XGL.
And what's the right thing? Rushing out an untested patch as fast as possible that either doesn't fix things or even makes them worse? Or is it taking your time to make sure that you get it right and don't end up making an even bigger mess of things?
I'd like to make a couple of points, as I have some experience in a tangentially-related area.
Firstly, the amount of storage space you're talking about for keeping all this stuff forever is huge. Hundreds of thousands of cameras (if not millions), all filming 24/7 - I can't be bothered to do the maths, but if you assume no audio, grey-scale and a crappy resolution (but still high enough to identify "everyone you talk to" and "everything you do") you're talking about hundreds of megabytes per camera per day, if not gigabytes.
Secondly, those cameras are fixed. They're not following you around, you move from camera to camera. In order to produce a file on any one person, you'd have to check through the logs of every single camera they passed and extract the relevant clip(s). To do that for any non-trivial period of time would be a very time-consuming process; image processing software isn't good enough (yet?) to do it automatically. You'd be sat trawling through hours of footage. I wouldn't do it for a "couple of cases of beer".
Finally, I've worked with the (UK) police on a couple of information storage and retrieval type projects (I can't say any more than that - I'm under NDA and besides, it's classified). I can assure you that they take their legal responsibilities extremely seriously, especially when it comes to controlling and monitoring access to the data and application we were working on. Around three-quarters of the development effort revolved around protective monitoring of the application - everything anyone does with it is logged, and those logs are searchable. Misuse of the application is a criminal offence, and will be prosecuted.
Now, that said I'm not saying that you're not right to be concerned about this sort of all-pervasive monitoring of the general population; you should be concerned. I'm also not saying that one day, we won't find ourselves in the situation you describe. I don't think we're very close to it now, though, and certainly not only 5 years away.
Vehicle tracking, on the other hand, is a different matter. The licence plate is a very easily processed (nominally) unique id. Given sufficient resources it would be a relatively simple matter to build up a log of all vehicle movements, at least to the detail of what camera was passed at what time in what direction (and at what speed). That I think we should be worried about now.
Besides, the easy way to watch DVDs on crippled OS's like Windows is to...put the disk in the drive, select the player you want to use and just watch it, just like you would under Linux or OS X.
Seriously, you can make it sound as bad as you want, but the truth is I've never had a single problem with watching DVDs on a PC and I don't know that any of my friends have, either.
While that may be true in a sense, most of the current Australians are actually descended from the guards; the prisoners didn't tend to reproduce very much.
No, *you* are a fool - or at least ignorant of the scheme the OP is talking about.
The laptop is his, bought through a scheme which means that he effectively gets it cheaper than retail by the rate he pays income tax at. Thus if he pays income tax at 25%, he gets a £2000 laptop for £1500.
The idea is that the company benefits because having a PC at home helps to increase the PC-literateness of its employees, and the government benefits because having a (more) PC-literate population potentially gives the economy a boost as more people move into (currently) higher-paid "knowledge economy" jobs. The guy's benefit is obvious - he gets a cheaper laptop.
I've had that in the past, when I used to use personal stereos with mechanical volume controls. At lower volume levels, it was quite easy to get the volume level imbalanced - just turn the wheel slowly and one ear would increase (or decrease) in volume a little, then the other (until they were balanced), and so on.
it might be overkill but its most certainly the fastest system, for everyday linux desktop usage
Might be overkill? That system has serious grunt power; there's no way it's warranted for "everyday... desktop usage" unless your idea of "desktop usage" is serious number crunching. Scientific work, rendering, large scale video editing, yes; "desktop usage", absolutely not.
Any objective analysis (which the ISPs are certain to do) would put Windows high on the list of vulnerable systems.
So what? With at least 90% of their customers running Windows, there would be absolutely no chance whatsoever of refusing access to PCs running Windows. At the very, very most they could refuse access to sufficiently old versions, but even that would risk them losing customers.
No matter how much Microsoft tries, it's always hard to configure a Windows system to be both secure and capable of easily running the software most users want to run without glitches.
Not if you know what you're doing - I run AV software, a third party firewall and keep up to date with patches. So far, the AV has caught precisely 1 virus that I might otherwise have fallen foul of (an infected jpeg). I only run the third party firewall because I want to be able to do egress filtering - if Windows firewall did that I wouldn't bother with it at all.
I suppose Outlook Express is the ideal name for an email client...as is Outlook.
Outlook is not an email client. It is a calendaring and groupware client; the calendaring aspect giving it its name "outlook", as in "looking to the future" - it tells you what you'll be doing over the next few days/weeks/months.
Outlook only handles email because:
1) it's useful to have a single application handling calendaring and email, so you can have discussions/anouncements relating to your appointments alongside them 2) it's as good a way as any of sending out the invitations and replies
Compared to every other email client I've used, however, Outlook's email support most definitely feels tacked-on (and I speak as a long-time Outlook user; it's practically mandated where I work)
Outlook Express is a cut-down version of Outlook that oddly removed the only useful parts of the app and kept the rest.
"Photoshop" sounds like an application for buying photographs.
Leaving aside the point that it's "shop" as in "workshop" that others have made, you seem to forget that "photoshopped" has entered the common vocabulary to mean "edited or touched up", as in "no way is that picture real, it must've been photoshopped".
I've always felt Visual Studio (at least with all the.Net stuff) was turning more into a Visual Basic type of dev platform.
I'm not entirely sure what that comment means - haven't you *always* been able to use VS as "a Visual Basic type of dev platform", with Visual C++ even ignoring Visual Basic itself? VS.NET does support Visual Basic.NET after all - is it really surprising that the drag and drop method of RAD is being further extended?
It's more for application development than actual (think CS rather than IT) programming.
Application development isn't actual programming? Theory is extremely important, and I'm the first to defend seeking knowledge for knowledge's sake, but to say that application development isn't real programming is to deny the entire point of programming - to automate processes and create applications in order to make tasks easier (or quicker) to perform, and to enable people to do things that previously they could not (eg edit video or audio).
Why do you say that? Because X% of 0 is 0? So what - you can easily tax free (as in beer or speech) software. A couple of ideas:
1) find the most popular commercial equivalent and take the cost of that as the nominal cost 2) tax at a flat, per seat rate (eg $10/year/application/person) 3) tax per type of app (eg development tools are $100 per year, office apps $50 per year) 4) tax per LOC
If the government really want to tax something, they'll find a way.
I have to see the State of Tennessee trying to hold on a court of law that linux is a product and not a service.
Linux is a product, not a service. Installing Linux is a service, configuring Linux is a service, admining/supporting/fixing Linux is a service, but Linux itself is a product. If I sell you a copy of Linux (whether source or binary), I'm not selling you a service, am I?
but if you keep it in My Documents (Vista security model treats this like the/home, so it's only you & admins who see it)
A couple of points:
1) I don't know about Vista, so perhaps the default behaviour is different to that in XP, but in XP your "My Documents" folder defaults to world-readable. You can set it to be "private" in the users control panel applet. If you do so, then (iirc) even Administrators don't automatically get access, although they can (if necessary) take ownership of the folder to gain access to it. (I don't remember if I configured the permissions on mine that way or not; it may be that admins do get access, unless you're as big a privacy freak as I am)
2) Similary, I've worked on a number of Linux systems that defaulted all dirs in/home to rwxr-x-rx. There's nothing particularly special about/home in that respect.
Finally, as I say I don't know Vista, but it may be that the meta-data indexing system runs as the local system account, in which case chances are it'll have access everywhere. In that case it'll be up to the interface to it to control access, in much the same way as slocate on a Linux system. (In fact, locate used to expose information in exactly this way - although you couldn't access files you shouldn't be able to, you could see that they existed. slocate was created to fix this)
OK, everyone knows Java's a nonstarter these days.
Quiet you fool! My employers and clients might hear you! Then what would I do for a job, eh?
Seriously, I have six years commercial experience of writing web apps in Java. Would I recomend it for absolutely every situation? No, of course not. Is it categorically a non-starter? No, of course not.
The right tool for the job; Java has its place, and to deny this with the blanket assertion that it's "a nonstarter these days" is to reveal a closed mind.
If the software can be installed without agreement, then the EULA can't be binding. If the EULA is binding, then Sony are in violation of the EULA. Either way, they're screwed.
Remember 9/11, dada? Ordinary people can attack us any day of the week.
So what's the point of imposing all these restrictions on foreign countries then? Sounds like it won't actually make you any safer and restricts your business opportunities, not to mention taking time, money and effort to enforce, so why bother?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes of course it is, but it's a noun - it's the plural of architect.
However, there is a (depressingly stupid, imho) trend at the moment to use nouns as verbs - hence people are "tasked" with doing things, rather than being assigned tasks, you "architect" a system rather than designing it, etc. In this case it's almost forgivable, as technical design is a distinct discipline from visual or graphic design, so it's nice to have a separate word, rather than having to use "technical design" and "graphic design", which are a little cumbersome.
That's funny, the last time I used Linux on a client project we spent a couple of thousand on it...
VISTA DOESN'T EXIST YET!
In contrast, nVidia drivers and composite work now.
True, you can't buy Vista yet - but you can not only download Beta 1 (if you're an MSDN subscriber), you can also download a tech preview of WPF ("Avalon", the new presentation layer).
In a very real way, for a number of people, Vista's compositing stuff works now, too. In fact, I'd not be at all surprised if there were comparable numbers of people running the Vista/WPF betas and XGL.
And what's the right thing? Rushing out an untested patch as fast as possible that either doesn't fix things or even makes them worse? Or is it taking your time to make sure that you get it right and don't end up making an even bigger mess of things?
I'd like to make a couple of points, as I have some experience in a tangentially-related area.
Firstly, the amount of storage space you're talking about for keeping all this stuff forever is huge. Hundreds of thousands of cameras (if not millions), all filming 24/7 - I can't be bothered to do the maths, but if you assume no audio, grey-scale and a crappy resolution (but still high enough to identify "everyone you talk to" and "everything you do") you're talking about hundreds of megabytes per camera per day, if not gigabytes.
Secondly, those cameras are fixed. They're not following you around, you move from camera to camera. In order to produce a file on any one person, you'd have to check through the logs of every single camera they passed and extract the relevant clip(s). To do that for any non-trivial period of time would be a very time-consuming process; image processing software isn't good enough (yet?) to do it automatically. You'd be sat trawling through hours of footage. I wouldn't do it for a "couple of cases of beer".
Finally, I've worked with the (UK) police on a couple of information storage and retrieval type projects (I can't say any more than that - I'm under NDA and besides, it's classified). I can assure you that they take their legal responsibilities extremely seriously, especially when it comes to controlling and monitoring access to the data and application we were working on. Around three-quarters of the development effort revolved around protective monitoring of the application - everything anyone does with it is logged, and those logs are searchable. Misuse of the application is a criminal offence, and will be prosecuted.
Now, that said I'm not saying that you're not right to be concerned about this sort of all-pervasive monitoring of the general population; you should be concerned. I'm also not saying that one day, we won't find ourselves in the situation you describe. I don't think we're very close to it now, though, and certainly not only 5 years away.
Vehicle tracking, on the other hand, is a different matter. The licence plate is a very easily processed (nominally) unique id. Given sufficient resources it would be a relatively simple matter to build up a log of all vehicle movements, at least to the detail of what camera was passed at what time in what direction (and at what speed). That I think we should be worried about now.
Don't blame us, blame the information architects, designers and (occasionally) clients that mandate their use.
Pop up windows, like modal dialogues, have legitmate uses, but again like modal dialogues, they're overused.
Besides, the easy way to watch DVDs on crippled OS's like Windows is to ...put the disk in the drive, select the player you want to use and just watch it, just like you would under Linux or OS X.
Seriously, you can make it sound as bad as you want, but the truth is I've never had a single problem with watching DVDs on a PC and I don't know that any of my friends have, either.
When I Googled to make sure this wasn't a dupe
Zonk, it's January the first, not April! Guess someone's still under the influence from last night's celebrations...
But on the boxes, it still says "Pentium"; they're just the code names, in the same way that Longhorn will be shipping with "Vista" on the box.
While that may be true in a sense, most of the current Australians are actually descended from the guards; the prisoners didn't tend to reproduce very much.
No, *you* are a fool - or at least ignorant of the scheme the OP is talking about.
The laptop is his, bought through a scheme which means that he effectively gets it cheaper than retail by the rate he pays income tax at. Thus if he pays income tax at 25%, he gets a £2000 laptop for £1500.
The idea is that the company benefits because having a PC at home helps to increase the PC-literateness of its employees, and the government benefits because having a (more) PC-literate population potentially gives the economy a boost as more people move into (currently) higher-paid "knowledge economy" jobs. The guy's benefit is obvious - he gets a cheaper laptop.
Lost wages from taking days off of work to go to court?
Well, I don't know about you, but my company pays me while I'm on holiday, and I don't get to have the money instead if I don't use the days...
I've had that in the past, when I used to use personal stereos with mechanical volume controls. At lower volume levels, it was quite easy to get the volume level imbalanced - just turn the wheel slowly and one ear would increase (or decrease) in volume a little, then the other (until they were balanced), and so on.
it might be overkill but its most certainly the fastest system, for everyday linux desktop usage
Might be overkill? That system has serious grunt power; there's no way it's warranted for "everyday... desktop usage" unless your idea of "desktop usage" is serious number crunching. Scientific work, rendering, large scale video editing, yes; "desktop usage", absolutely not.
Any objective analysis (which the ISPs are certain to do) would put Windows high on the list of vulnerable systems.
So what? With at least 90% of their customers running Windows, there would be absolutely no chance whatsoever of refusing access to PCs running Windows. At the very, very most they could refuse access to sufficiently old versions, but even that would risk them losing customers.
No matter how much Microsoft tries, it's always hard to configure a Windows system to be both secure and capable of easily running the software most users want to run without glitches.
Not if you know what you're doing - I run AV software, a third party firewall and keep up to date with patches. So far, the AV has caught precisely 1 virus that I might otherwise have fallen foul of (an infected jpeg). I only run the third party firewall because I want to be able to do egress filtering - if Windows firewall did that I wouldn't bother with it at all.
I suppose Outlook Express is the ideal name for an email client...as is Outlook.
Outlook is not an email client. It is a calendaring and groupware client; the calendaring aspect giving it its name "outlook", as in "looking to the future" - it tells you what you'll be doing over the next few days/weeks/months.
Outlook only handles email because:
1) it's useful to have a single application handling calendaring and email, so you can have discussions/anouncements relating to your appointments alongside them
2) it's as good a way as any of sending out the invitations and replies
Compared to every other email client I've used, however, Outlook's email support most definitely feels tacked-on (and I speak as a long-time Outlook user; it's practically mandated where I work)
Outlook Express is a cut-down version of Outlook that oddly removed the only useful parts of the app and kept the rest.
"Photoshop" sounds like an application for buying photographs.
Leaving aside the point that it's "shop" as in "workshop" that others have made, you seem to forget that "photoshopped" has entered the common vocabulary to mean "edited or touched up", as in "no way is that picture real, it must've been photoshopped".
I've always felt Visual Studio (at least with all the .Net stuff) was turning more into a Visual Basic type of dev platform.
.NET after all - is it really surprising that the drag and drop method of RAD is being further extended?
I'm not entirely sure what that comment means - haven't you *always* been able to use VS as "a Visual Basic type of dev platform", with Visual C++ even ignoring Visual Basic itself? VS.NET does support Visual Basic
It's more for application development than actual (think CS rather than IT) programming.
Application development isn't actual programming? Theory is extremely important, and I'm the first to defend seeking knowledge for knowledge's sake, but to say that application development isn't real programming is to deny the entire point of programming - to automate processes and create applications in order to make tasks easier (or quicker) to perform, and to enable people to do things that previously they could not (eg edit video or audio).
Because it is impossible to tax Open Source!
Why do you say that? Because X% of 0 is 0? So what - you can easily tax free (as in beer or speech) software. A couple of ideas:
1) find the most popular commercial equivalent and take the cost of that as the nominal cost
2) tax at a flat, per seat rate (eg $10/year/application/person)
3) tax per type of app (eg development tools are $100 per year, office apps $50 per year)
4) tax per LOC
If the government really want to tax something, they'll find a way.
I have to see the State of Tennessee trying to hold on a court of law that linux is a product and not a service.
Linux is a product, not a service. Installing Linux is a service, configuring Linux is a service, admining/supporting/fixing Linux is a service, but Linux itself is a product. If I sell you a copy of Linux (whether source or binary), I'm not selling you a service, am I?
Is the grammatical error in your sig intentional?
but if you keep it in My Documents (Vista security model treats this like the /home, so it's only you & admins who see it)
/home to rwxr-x-rx. There's nothing particularly special about /home in that respect.
A couple of points:
1) I don't know about Vista, so perhaps the default behaviour is different to that in XP, but in XP your "My Documents" folder defaults to world-readable. You can set it to be "private" in the users control panel applet. If you do so, then (iirc) even Administrators don't automatically get access, although they can (if necessary) take ownership of the folder to gain access to it. (I don't remember if I configured the permissions on mine that way or not; it may be that admins do get access, unless you're as big a privacy freak as I am)
2) Similary, I've worked on a number of Linux systems that defaulted all dirs in
Finally, as I say I don't know Vista, but it may be that the meta-data indexing system runs as the local system account, in which case chances are it'll have access everywhere. In that case it'll be up to the interface to it to control access, in much the same way as slocate on a Linux system. (In fact, locate used to expose information in exactly this way - although you couldn't access files you shouldn't be able to, you could see that they existed. slocate was created to fix this)
So is 199. If the guy meant 3, he should've said "less than 10".
If you say "less than 200", it's reasonable to assume that it's of the order of 200, ie 3 figures.
OK, everyone knows Java's a nonstarter these days.
Quiet you fool! My employers and clients might hear you! Then what would I do for a job, eh?
Seriously, I have six years commercial experience of writing web apps in Java. Would I recomend it for absolutely every situation? No, of course not. Is it categorically a non-starter? No, of course not.
The right tool for the job; Java has its place, and to deny this with the blanket assertion that it's "a nonstarter these days" is to reveal a closed mind.
How does that make sense?
If the software can be installed without agreement, then the EULA can't be binding. If the EULA is binding, then Sony are in violation of the EULA. Either way, they're screwed.
(Disclaimer: IANAL, etc)
Remember 9/11, dada? Ordinary people can attack us any day of the week.
So what's the point of imposing all these restrictions on foreign countries then? Sounds like it won't actually make you any safer and restricts your business opportunities, not to mention taking time, money and effort to enforce, so why bother?