Minor nitpick, but I have a Physics background, so accurate units are important to me - do you really mean MW/h, or do you mean MWh? That's a *huge* difference in energy consumption, depending on which you choose and how long the thing is running...
(I'm assuming you meant MWh, as in "mega-watt-hours", of course)
In a nutshell, that's what happens when you start thinking that the language or libraries are a magic talisman
No, that's what happens when you employ clueless morons to write code for you. No language (that I'm aware of) can protect you from making those sort of fundamental errors. I guarantee that if the same team were to code in C/C++, the code would be full of buffer overflows *as well as* everything else you listed.
It also highlights one of the potential dangers of completely outsourcing a software project - unless you get constant access to the code during development, you're helpless to prevent this sort of thing from happening. You only find out about it at the end, when it's very much more expensive to put it right.
Anyway, I hope you got a fair chunk of your money back.
And what do you get when you apply those layers in the creation of a piece of software? A program that essentially contains tens of millions of lines of code. Even if they're mostly in libraries, they're still there.
Technically knowledgable yes, but that doesn't mean we're all aware of every last software product and framework. Sure, it doesn't take a lot of effort to google for it, but with the majority of servers going down under the load of a slashdotting, would it really hurt to put a summary in the summary? It's not like they were pressed for space...
To publicly lend it your support. To persuade people and businesses to take steps on their own, even if it won't be legislated for. To show everyone that no matter what the rest of the government thinks, *you* consider it important.
I could go on, but you get the idea; doomed to failure or not, sometimes it's worth standing up to be counted. That's if you believe in it, of course. If not, then no, of course you wouldn't sign.
It's an excuse to sit back and do nothing. So what if all countries aren't held to the same levels? Surely doing *something* is better than doing nothing at all.
So developed nations have to cut back more than developing nations? Well guess what - we pollute more than they do.
My bank issues two codes, a registration code and an id code. These are used together with your card number when logging in, and you're encouraged to change them on first log in.
So, essentially I have two passwords, but they're both required to log in. I've not heard of any UK bank that issues anything like the authentication device you describe.
Are you as paranoid about the huge patent portfolio held by IBM? Or is that okay, because they appear to have stopped being evil (at the moment) and now support Linux (at least for as long as it suits their business to do so)?
Not surprising, since this strategic direction was already outlined in a 1998 memo.
You're quoting a 6 year old memo; how about pointing to some actual instances of MS using their patents offensively?
But why would you want to? Telecommuting would seem to be a much more sensible solution all round, than travelling 800 miles every day to and from work.
What would you do - sink a few hundred million in building a supercomputer to crack some guy's PGP key, or kidnap him, hold a gun to his head and ask for the passphrase?
You'd build the computer if it was imperative that the guy not know you'd cracked his encryption, or if you wanted to do it on a large scale. If it's just one or two guys, and secrecy isn't necessarily an issue, there are other ways...
The radar is so powerful and the computers onboard so good that they identify every object on the ground.. I hear rumors that they can read newspapers lying on the ground
You expect me to believe that they can discern newsprint using radar?
You do yourself and your arguments no favours when you call it "Winblows"; it just makes you look petty and immature. Same goes for people referring to "Lunix" and "open sauce" or "open sores".
What a way to waste mod-points. Concentrate on moderating *up* good posts, people - no point moderating this down, that's what comment thresholds are for.
Compared to what? My PC cost ten times what I can buy XP Pro for. I've personally used software costing hundreds of thousands of pounds.
buggy
Show me a complex piece of software that doesn't suffer from bugs. Linux distributors and Apple also release buggy software (and no, pointing out that most of the software that comes with a Linux distro is written by third parties is not an excuse - the distributor has the source and chooses to include the app. They assume some responsibility for it)
insecure
Put it behind a firewall, keep it up to date with patches, and don't be an idiot about using it - just as you should be doing with any network-aware piece of software.
Hasn't everyone moved on to OS X and Linux?
Actuall, I've moved back to Windows having used Linux for a couple of years. No real complaints, it just doesn't run some software I need to use, and most of the things that bugged the shit out of me about Windows have been fixed. The right tool for the right job; in my case, that's currently Windows.
By charging $13 (in NZ) for a ticket and $3 for a poxy single-scoop ice cream!
That's the cinema's pricing, not the movie company's. The movie companies affect those prices by the amount they charge the cinema for the films, but they don't set the prices directly.
If you have a problem with the cost of the icecream, take it up with your local cinema.
The problem with that is that in the abcence of a war to get them killed in, you're taking the sickest people and teaching them how to kill effectively...
People are used to Windows because it's popular. Why do they want Windows? Because they are used to it.
You're forgetting one more point - all the software they use runs on Windows. Sure, most of it may well have an equivalent alternative for Linux, but in my case that's certainly not all.
Sure, that's not true of the average office worker, who really only needs email, web access, a word processor and maybe a spreadsheet, but that's the thing about averages; they don't apply to everyone...
aside from better looks and lighter weight the customer doesn't seem to benefit and will eventually realise that.
No; the ones that these phones aren't targetted at will realise that they're not the intended market and will stop buying them. The people who actually want/need the additional features will continue to buy the phones and be happy with them.
Seriously, and not to flame you, but I'm always amazed by the number of highly-moderated posts here everytime smart phones are mentioned, decrying them and yearning for a "normal" phone that just does one thing and one thing well. And yet the phones clearly still sell, as they're still being made and new models are still being designed and produced...
It all reminds me of the reaction to the iPod, and the iPod mini, and more recently the photo iPod. Despite all the expectations here, the neither the iPod nor the mini iPod flopped; quite the contrary in fact.
I think a lot of posters here need to stop before ripping in to a given piece of tech, and think about the market it's actually targetted at. If you are part of that market, and still think it's not a goer, then fine, rip away. If not, then perhaps it would be best to wait and see how the target market reacts before making such self-assured predictions of failure...
Not necessarily - given the choice between a man of average intelligence and religious views, or a man of extreme intelligence and extreme religious views, I know which I'd rather have as president of the US.
Users are not aware they are running WhenU because the company works hard to keep them ignorant.
Every screenshot form number 3 onwards has the phrase "powered by WhenU.com" in bold on the image on the left of the dialogue. Yes, the display of the EULA is appalling, but it's hardly true to say that the company is "working hard" to keep users ignorant of the fact that they're installing their software.
But even in vulnerable browsers, once you click on the link the true address is shown in the address bar. Doesn't strike me as being very effective - who checks the status bar (which is often changed with js onmouseover event handlers) but not the address bar?
That sounds an awful lot like what happens on dabs.com (a UK computer components & electronics supplier) in Mozilla. You get a table full of search results, then the images for each product load, and the bottom of the table goes zooming off the bottom of the window. You have to resize the window to fix it - you can't scroll down that far. Until I worked that out, I used to reload the page - sometimes that fixed it, sometimes it didn't...
Slashdot Mirror
Minor nitpick, but I have a Physics background, so accurate units are important to me - do you really mean MW/h, or do you mean MWh? That's a *huge* difference in energy consumption, depending on which you choose and how long the thing is running...
(I'm assuming you meant MWh, as in "mega-watt-hours", of course)
In a nutshell, that's what happens when you start thinking that the language or libraries are a magic talisman
No, that's what happens when you employ clueless morons to write code for you. No language (that I'm aware of) can protect you from making those sort of fundamental errors. I guarantee that if the same team were to code in C/C++, the code would be full of buffer overflows *as well as* everything else you listed.
It also highlights one of the potential dangers of completely outsourcing a software project - unless you get constant access to the code during development, you're helpless to prevent this sort of thing from happening. You only find out about it at the end, when it's very much more expensive to put it right.
Anyway, I hope you got a fair chunk of your money back.
And what do you get when you apply those layers in the creation of a piece of software? A program that essentially contains tens of millions of lines of code. Even if they're mostly in libraries, they're still there.
Technically knowledgable yes, but that doesn't mean we're all aware of every last software product and framework. Sure, it doesn't take a lot of effort to google for it, but with the majority of servers going down under the load of a slashdotting, would it really hurt to put a summary in the summary? It's not like they were pressed for space...
Why sign something you know won't be ratified?
To publicly lend it your support. To persuade people and businesses to take steps on their own, even if it won't be legislated for. To show everyone that no matter what the rest of the government thinks, *you* consider it important.
I could go on, but you get the idea; doomed to failure or not, sometimes it's worth standing up to be counted. That's if you believe in it, of course. If not, then no, of course you wouldn't sign.
It's an excuse to sit back and do nothing. So what if all countries aren't held to the same levels? Surely doing *something* is better than doing nothing at all.
So developed nations have to cut back more than developing nations? Well guess what - we pollute more than they do.
My bank issues two codes, a registration code and an id code. These are used together with your card number when logging in, and you're encouraged to change them on first log in.
So, essentially I have two passwords, but they're both required to log in. I've not heard of any UK bank that issues anything like the authentication device you describe.
Are you as paranoid about the huge patent portfolio held by IBM? Or is that okay, because they appear to have stopped being evil (at the moment) and now support Linux (at least for as long as it suits their business to do so)?
Not surprising, since this strategic direction was already outlined in a 1998 memo.
You're quoting a 6 year old memo; how about pointing to some actual instances of MS using their patents offensively?
But why would you want to? Telecommuting would seem to be a much more sensible solution all round, than travelling 800 miles every day to and from work.
Good point.
What would you do - sink a few hundred million in building a supercomputer to crack some guy's PGP key, or kidnap him, hold a gun to his head and ask for the passphrase?
You'd build the computer if it was imperative that the guy not know you'd cracked his encryption, or if you wanted to do it on a large scale. If it's just one or two guys, and secrecy isn't necessarily an issue, there are other ways...
The radar is so powerful and the computers onboard so good that they identify every object on the ground.. I hear rumors that they can read newspapers lying on the ground
You expect me to believe that they can discern newsprint using radar?
You do yourself and your arguments no favours when you call it "Winblows"; it just makes you look petty and immature. Same goes for people referring to "Lunix" and "open sauce" or "open sores".
What a way to waste mod-points. Concentrate on moderating *up* good posts, people - no point moderating this down, that's what comment thresholds are for.
Expensive
Compared to what? My PC cost ten times what I can buy XP Pro for. I've personally used software costing hundreds of thousands of pounds.
buggy
Show me a complex piece of software that doesn't suffer from bugs. Linux distributors and Apple also release buggy software (and no, pointing out that most of the software that comes with a Linux distro is written by third parties is not an excuse - the distributor has the source and chooses to include the app. They assume some responsibility for it)
insecure
Put it behind a firewall, keep it up to date with patches, and don't be an idiot about using it - just as you should be doing with any network-aware piece of software.
Hasn't everyone moved on to OS X and Linux?
Actuall, I've moved back to Windows having used Linux for a couple of years. No real complaints, it just doesn't run some software I need to use, and most of the things that bugged the shit out of me about Windows have been fixed. The right tool for the right job; in my case, that's currently Windows.
By charging $13 (in NZ) for a ticket and $3 for a poxy single-scoop ice cream!
That's the cinema's pricing, not the movie company's. The movie companies affect those prices by the amount they charge the cinema for the films, but they don't set the prices directly.
If you have a problem with the cost of the icecream, take it up with your local cinema.
The problem with that is that in the abcence of a war to get them killed in, you're taking the sickest people and teaching them how to kill effectively...
People are used to Windows because it's popular. Why do they want Windows? Because they are used to it.
You're forgetting one more point - all the software they use runs on Windows. Sure, most of it may well have an equivalent alternative for Linux, but in my case that's certainly not all.
Sure, that's not true of the average office worker, who really only needs email, web access, a word processor and maybe a spreadsheet, but that's the thing about averages; they don't apply to everyone...
In Windows, as the browser window will presumably still have focus, alt-f4 will close it.
aside from better looks and lighter weight the customer doesn't seem to benefit and will eventually realise that.
No; the ones that these phones aren't targetted at will realise that they're not the intended market and will stop buying them. The people who actually want/need the additional features will continue to buy the phones and be happy with them.
Seriously, and not to flame you, but I'm always amazed by the number of highly-moderated posts here everytime smart phones are mentioned, decrying them and yearning for a "normal" phone that just does one thing and one thing well. And yet the phones clearly still sell, as they're still being made and new models are still being designed and produced...
It all reminds me of the reaction to the iPod, and the iPod mini, and more recently the photo iPod. Despite all the expectations here, the neither the iPod nor the mini iPod flopped; quite the contrary in fact.
I think a lot of posters here need to stop before ripping in to a given piece of tech, and think about the market it's actually targetted at. If you are part of that market, and still think it's not a goer, then fine, rip away. If not, then perhaps it would be best to wait and see how the target market reacts before making such self-assured predictions of failure...
Not necessarily - given the choice between a man of average intelligence and religious views, or a man of extreme intelligence and extreme religious views, I know which I'd rather have as president of the US.
Users are not aware they are running WhenU because the company works hard to keep them ignorant.
Every screenshot form number 3 onwards has the phrase "powered by WhenU.com" in bold on the image on the left of the dialogue. Yes, the display of the EULA is appalling, but it's hardly true to say that the company is "working hard" to keep users ignorant of the fact that they're installing their software.
one is left with the job of explaining precisely why God needed to create a beetle which shoots corrosive chemicals from its abdomen.
Easy geeky answer - God's a geek, and just had to scratch that itch...
Two things:
1) like wambaugh said, physicists contribute towards the improvement of medical care as it is
2) simply throwing more money and people at a problem doesn't necessarily get it solved any quicker; 9 women can't have a baby in one month
But even in vulnerable browsers, once you click on the link the true address is shown in the address bar. Doesn't strike me as being very effective - who checks the status bar (which is often changed with js onmouseover event handlers) but not the address bar?
That sounds an awful lot like what happens on dabs.com (a UK computer components & electronics supplier) in Mozilla. You get a table full of search results, then the images for each product load, and the bottom of the table goes zooming off the bottom of the window. You have to resize the window to fix it - you can't scroll down that far. Until I worked that out, I used to reload the page - sometimes that fixed it, sometimes it didn't...