No, what's next is yet another slippery slope argument with no real basis in fact.
I guess you don't mind if the police just casually look around your flat everytime they're in the neighborhood just to make sure you're not doing anything wrong.
Sure they can - if they have a properly-obtained search warrant. Without one then no, they can't come in, and without reasonable cause to suspect me of wrong-doing, they won't get a warrant (which still has to be issued by a judge).
Before you say America is turning into the same thing, yes, and we're bitching about it here just as much. The AmeriNazi government under Shrub is destroying our rights without constitutional authority.
So go exercise your Second Ammendment rights - that's what people keep telling me they're for; protecting against a rogue government. If your government is truly "destroying [your] rights without constitutional authority", then stop them.
Until lawfully convicted, they did nothing. That is what "innocent until proven guilty" means - you lock suspects up to stop them from fleeing, not to mistreat them.
rights that have been revoked from British citizens
With the exception of the right to bear arms, could you provide some proof of my having lost those rights please?
He meant that the attack vector, of persuading the user to save the zip file, open it, and execute the contents, would work regardless of OS, because it's not exploiting a hole or bug in the OS.
Obviously *this exact one* wouldn't work - but you could easily write a Linux or OSX (or BSD, AmigaOS, etc) one using the same vector, and people would run it.
As you say, apples and oranges. Apache serves HTML pages and images, and nothing more, while ASP.NET serves all sorts of dynamic content.
Of course, you can use Apache to serve dynamic content with mod_perl, etc, but I've lost count of the number of times I've seen sites like that go down, and not because of bandwidth (k5, anyone?). Conversely, I've not seen a static IIS site go down, other than for lack of bandwidth.
I was searching for information on PUK codes a couple of months ago, and almost all the results on the first page were for sites selling mobile phone ringtones, wallpapers, etc. None of them actually contained the desired information.
I'm not going to argue the relative merits of the two, but to say that they avoided tying themselves to a graphics API seems a little strange...
Re:Trollish comment in the article
on
KDE 3.2.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
OK, so they are using Windows, most probably because it came preinstalled and optimized on their new Dell/Gateway or HP computer.
Some of us geeks actually chose to buy Windows XP, as at least some of the software we run only runs under Windows. Sure, some of it has Linux equivalents, but not all, and until it is all of it, we need Windows.
Yes, it's a catch-22 situation - no software means no users, means no software. One thing has to give before the other will, but I'm afraid that that thing won't be me.
That's why America is seen as nothing but hypocritical opportunists. It boggles the mind to watch you idiots get into a tizzy over Iraq but allow China to eradicate the Tibetans.
You people are scum and I'm glad we're not aligned with you anymore.
Governments are unlikely to approach the open source community to build such tools for them
But the *whole point* of OSS/Free Software is that they won't need to. They can just hire a bunch of programmers, who can take as much Free code as they need, make whatever modifications or additions as they need, and create the tools themselves.
There are a great number of applications, frameworks, toolkits and libraries available under open source-type licences. The goverments don't have to "approach the open source community", the open source community is supplying all the building blocks right now.
Don't get me wrong, I believe that it should be the user of the tool, and the use to which it is put, that is judged, not the maker of the tool (with obvious exceptions for extreme cases). I'm just pointing out that open source software can be used for this sort of thing just as easily, in part because of its principles of openness and freedom. Kind of ironic, really.
Most new motherboards have at least 4, or 6, USB ports.
I recently got a new Dell PC at work. It has 6 USB ports on the back and two on the front, and two on the keyboard. Okay, so the keyboard is effectively a hub, but that's still 8 on the machine itself. It's a relatively low-end machine too (in fact, we've demanded higher-specced machines for the programmers, so with luck I'll be getting a better one in a couple of weeks).
Not having it free software certainly didn't slow Microsoft down one bit from extending it without their approval.
Microsoft licenced Java from Sun in order to create their VM. I don't know whether or not they got access to the source, but that hardly matters. AIUI, in order to create a JVM, you must sign a licence with Sun. One of the terms of that licence is to teh effect that you cannot change the core API, nor add clases to it.
That is what MS did - they added their own extensions in java.* packages, breaking the terms of the licence agreement. If they'd just put them in com.microsoft.*, there wouldn't have been a problem.
In fact, the result was a freshly-designed competitor (C#/.Net).
C# and.NET are MS's answer to losing the court case that Sun brought against them for the above-mentioned licence infringement. Now that they have been forced to ship only a "standards-compliant" VM, they've effectively said "fine, well, we don't want to play with you anymore, we'll do our own thing". Fair enough - C# and.NET are actually pretty good, from the somewhat limited experience I have of them. It's a shame that "native" Java support under Windows is now effectively frozen at 1.1.4 (the last compliant VM they shipped), but with highspeed, unmetred connections becoming more common, it's not really a big problem.
Well, personally, any machine I use for anything beyond email and surfing is going to have to have a much faster proc than 1GHz, but I mostly play games and do Java & a bit of.NET development....
The gig of RAM figure is pure bullshit though; you don't need anything like that much just for KDE or GNOME. They should be perfectly happy with 256meg of RAM. That may sound like a lot, but it's entry level for a modern machine, and very cheap to buy to upgrade an older machine with if necessary. I'd be rather suspicious of the 1GHz spec for the proc too, personally, but these days that's well below entry level.
Re:let's see sun invents java, ibm, makes a tool .
on
Sun and Eclipse Squabble
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I quite like JBuilder, but then
a) my company pays for it b) my company also bought me a 2.6GHz P4 box with a gig of RAM
I have tried Eclipse and netbeans (and AnyJ), but didn't really get on with them. That was probably mostly due to being used to JBuilder, though, rather than through any real failing of the alternatives.
Here in the UK, there are a few models of mobile phone that don't do much but enable you to make calls.
I don't know anyone that owns one.
Most of the people I know that are looking to upgrade their phone in the next couple of months, are after something that does everything - camera, pda, calls, games, etc. No, they don't expect it to be perfect at everything, but it's *one* thing to carry around with them, rather than 4 or 5. If there's a special occasion they know they're going to go to and want decent photos of, they'll take a real camera. If not, and something happens to happen that they feel like taking a quick photo or two of and they're not bothered about the quality - well, their phone goes everywhere with them. Same with the rest of the functions.
Dedicated devices are always going to be superior, but personally, I only have so many pockets...
I have never had to run simulation work on that sort of machine.
Back when I was an Physics undergrad, in '96-'97, I was doing my fourth year project on the simulation of a non-interacting classical gas of hard spheres (ie a "perfect gas"). Even then, for that relatively untaxing simulation, it was running overnight on the computer lab's Alphas. Sure, I *could* have run it on the PCs, but it would've been slow as a dog.
In '97-'99, I was studying for a Phd. I didn't complete it (long story), but while I was still doing it, I was running simulations of laser-plasma interactions. That I actually did try running on my PC at home, and for anything other than the most trivial (and so pointless) of runs it just spat out a bunch of NaNs as results. Again, on the Alphas in the lab, it ran just fine.
As other posters have pointed out, you simply cannot perform serious numerical simulations on that sort of hardware. At most, you'd use it as a telnet client to work on the real machines.
Well, if I was the one in charge of this sort of thing at MS, I'd be wanting some pretty convincing arguments from Intel for supporting yet another 64 bit x86 binary format.
Each different version that MS has to support, is another version that has to be maintained and tested, have bug and security fixes applied to, support provided for, etc. Not to mention that writing optimal code requires more than just using a good compiler - some of the code is just plain going to be different for each architecture, adding even more to the overall headache.
Or, they can refuse to support it, and most likely condemn it to a quick death. There aren't enough Linux and BSD, etc, users out there buying hardware often enough to keep a chip & associated chipset, motherboards, etc alive, unless there's a damn good reason. Being "just another 64bit x86 chip" isn't good enough, when AMD's chips are (probably) going to perform comparably, for less money, and people round here tend to favour AMD as a company anyway.
No, Intel has to make the x86-64 extensions compatible, or throw a good chunk of cash at MS (and possibly the major system builders) to convince them to support it, or it'll fail.
As you imply, it's not really IE that's embeddable, but IE's rendering engine, the MSHTML control. In that respect, it's really no different to gecko or KHTML.
The differences are that while Linux (of course) has a number of competing HTML rendering engines, Windows comes with one as standard, and you can't just swap in another one (as far as I know). That makes bugs and potential exploits more serious.
Kind of off topic, but I remember a few years ago using SQL Server's Enterprise Manager tool, and being prompted if I would accept a cookie. I realised that it was using IE/IE's rendering engine to render one of the displays (I forget which one, or which version it was; perhaps 7). MSHTML is used in all sorts of places that you wouldn't necessarily expect it to be.
I doubt that it's very much cheaper at all. Last year, I bought an OEM copy of Windows XP Pro. It cost me about 110. A month or so earlier, I'd bought my gf a PC (2.6GHz P4, 512MB of RAM, CD burner, etc), which cost 1000GBP (850GBP because of a special offer, but retail was 1000).
That means that XP cost me about 11% of the price of a whole new system. *However*, I'm not buying XP in anything like the sort of numbers that Dell would be buying it in. I very much doubt that they pay a fraction of that per licence. Add to that the fact that they probably don't take the whole cost of the licence off the price, and you're probably not looking at a particularly large saving. Of course, if you were just going to wipe the drive and install something else, then even if it's only a couple of percent, it's better to not have to pay it at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people would buy it from overseas
And almost certainly fall foul of a clause in the EULA that specifies that the software can only be used in the EU or by its citizens (if overseas).
Would that be legal? I don't know; but would you care to be the one to find out the hard way?
No, what's next is yet another slippery slope argument with no real basis in fact.
I guess you don't mind if the police just casually look around your flat everytime they're in the neighborhood just to make sure you're not doing anything wrong.
Sure they can - if they have a properly-obtained search warrant. Without one then no, they can't come in, and without reasonable cause to suspect me of wrong-doing, they won't get a warrant (which still has to be issued by a judge).
Before you say America is turning into the same thing, yes, and we're bitching about it here just as much. The AmeriNazi government under Shrub is destroying our rights without constitutional authority.
So go exercise your Second Ammendment rights - that's what people keep telling me they're for; protecting against a rogue government. If your government is truly "destroying [your] rights without constitutional authority", then stop them.
Please don't forget what these people did.
Until lawfully convicted, they did nothing. That is what "innocent until proven guilty" means - you lock suspects up to stop them from fleeing, not to mistreat them.
rights that have been revoked from British citizens
With the exception of the right to bear arms, could you provide some proof of my having lost those rights please?
He meant that the attack vector, of persuading the user to save the zip file, open it, and execute the contents, would work regardless of OS, because it's not exploiting a hole or bug in the OS.
Obviously *this exact one* wouldn't work - but you could easily write a Linux or OSX (or BSD, AmigaOS, etc) one using the same vector, and people would run it.
As you say, apples and oranges. Apache serves HTML pages and images, and nothing more, while ASP.NET serves all sorts of dynamic content.
Of course, you can use Apache to serve dynamic content with mod_perl, etc, but I've lost count of the number of times I've seen sites like that go down, and not because of bandwidth (k5, anyone?). Conversely, I've not seen a static IIS site go down, other than for lack of bandwidth.
Perhaps it's time that computer science curriculums start teaching assembly language first.
Maybe it would be better if some of the curricula started teaching basic English instead...
I was searching for information on PUK codes a couple of months ago, and almost all the results on the first page were for sites selling mobile phone ringtones, wallpapers, etc. None of them actually contained the desired information.
Generally though, I agree - google's excellent.
I don't remember Linux ones, but there were some for Solaris a couple of weeks ago. The benchmarks themselves were pretty widely slated here, though.
You mean by tying themselves to OpenGL instead?
I'm not going to argue the relative merits of the two, but to say that they avoided tying themselves to a graphics API seems a little strange...
OK, so they are using Windows, most probably because it came preinstalled and optimized on their new Dell/Gateway or HP computer.
Some of us geeks actually chose to buy Windows XP, as at least some of the software we run only runs under Windows. Sure, some of it has Linux equivalents, but not all, and until it is all of it, we need Windows.
Yes, it's a catch-22 situation - no software means no users, means no software. One thing has to give before the other will, but I'm afraid that that thing won't be me.
So what? That somehow prevents me from typing "http://search.msn.com" into the address bar of my browser?
That's why America is seen as nothing but hypocritical opportunists. It boggles the mind to watch you idiots get into a tizzy over Iraq but allow China to eradicate the Tibetans.
You people are scum and I'm glad we're not aligned with you anymore.
See how easy it is to spout crap?
Governments are unlikely to approach the open source community to build such tools for them
But the *whole point* of OSS/Free Software is that they won't need to. They can just hire a bunch of programmers, who can take as much Free code as they need, make whatever modifications or additions as they need, and create the tools themselves.
There are a great number of applications, frameworks, toolkits and libraries available under open source-type licences. The goverments don't have to "approach the open source community", the open source community is supplying all the building blocks right now.
Don't get me wrong, I believe that it should be the user of the tool, and the use to which it is put, that is judged, not the maker of the tool (with obvious exceptions for extreme cases). I'm just pointing out that open source software can be used for this sort of thing just as easily, in part because of its principles of openness and freedom. Kind of ironic, really.
What, you mean due to the damage to their reputation for not being able to protect their servers against a DDoS attack that they had warning of?
For the record, Sun still uses no MS products internally. (other than a few laptops with XP here and there.)
Make your mind up. Either they use no MS products, or there are a few laptops running XP. The two are mutually exclusive.
If it's the former (or hell, even the latter), then I'd love to hear how Sun develops and tests the Windows version of the JVM.
Given that I don't believe your comment about an MS-free Sun, I don't believe your comments about MS using Sun kit either.
Most new motherboards have at least 4, or 6, USB ports.
I recently got a new Dell PC at work. It has 6 USB ports on the back and two on the front, and two on the keyboard. Okay, so the keyboard is effectively a hub, but that's still 8 on the machine itself. It's a relatively low-end machine too (in fact, we've demanded higher-specced machines for the programmers, so with luck I'll be getting a better one in a couple of weeks).
Not having it free software certainly didn't slow Microsoft down one bit from extending it without their approval.
.NET are MS's answer to losing the court case that Sun brought against them for the above-mentioned licence infringement. Now that they have been forced to ship only a "standards-compliant" VM, they've effectively said "fine, well, we don't want to play with you anymore, we'll do our own thing". Fair enough - C# and .NET are actually pretty good, from the somewhat limited experience I have of them. It's a shame that "native" Java support under Windows is now effectively frozen at 1.1.4 (the last compliant VM they shipped), but with highspeed, unmetred connections becoming more common, it's not really a big problem.
Microsoft licenced Java from Sun in order to create their VM. I don't know whether or not they got access to the source, but that hardly matters. AIUI, in order to create a JVM, you must sign a licence with Sun. One of the terms of that licence is to teh effect that you cannot change the core API, nor add clases to it.
That is what MS did - they added their own extensions in java.* packages, breaking the terms of the licence agreement. If they'd just put them in com.microsoft.*, there wouldn't have been a problem.
In fact, the result was a freshly-designed competitor (C#/.Net).
C# and
Well, personally, any machine I use for anything beyond email and surfing is going to have to have a much faster proc than 1GHz, but I mostly play games and do Java & a bit of .NET development....
The gig of RAM figure is pure bullshit though; you don't need anything like that much just for KDE or GNOME. They should be perfectly happy with 256meg of RAM. That may sound like a lot, but it's entry level for a modern machine, and very cheap to buy to upgrade an older machine with if necessary. I'd be rather suspicious of the 1GHz spec for the proc too, personally, but these days that's well below entry level.
I quite like JBuilder, but then
a) my company pays for it
b) my company also bought me a 2.6GHz P4 box with a gig of RAM
I have tried Eclipse and netbeans (and AnyJ), but didn't really get on with them. That was probably mostly due to being used to JBuilder, though, rather than through any real failing of the alternatives.
Here in the UK, there are a few models of mobile phone that don't do much but enable you to make calls.
I don't know anyone that owns one.
Most of the people I know that are looking to upgrade their phone in the next couple of months, are after something that does everything - camera, pda, calls, games, etc. No, they don't expect it to be perfect at everything, but it's *one* thing to carry around with them, rather than 4 or 5. If there's a special occasion they know they're going to go to and want decent photos of, they'll take a real camera. If not, and something happens to happen that they feel like taking a quick photo or two of and they're not bothered about the quality - well, their phone goes everywhere with them. Same with the rest of the functions.
Dedicated devices are always going to be superior, but personally, I only have so many pockets...
The simplest solution to me would be to not allow multiple charsets to be displayed in the URL bar making this not possible.
But if it's Unicode, surely it's a single character set - isn't that the entire point?
I have never had to run simulation work on that sort of machine.
Back when I was an Physics undergrad, in '96-'97, I was doing my fourth year project on the simulation of a non-interacting classical gas of hard spheres (ie a "perfect gas"). Even then, for that relatively untaxing simulation, it was running overnight on the computer lab's Alphas. Sure, I *could* have run it on the PCs, but it would've been slow as a dog.
In '97-'99, I was studying for a Phd. I didn't complete it (long story), but while I was still doing it, I was running simulations of laser-plasma interactions. That I actually did try running on my PC at home, and for anything other than the most trivial (and so pointless) of runs it just spat out a bunch of NaNs as results. Again, on the Alphas in the lab, it ran just fine.
As other posters have pointed out, you simply cannot perform serious numerical simulations on that sort of hardware. At most, you'd use it as a telnet client to work on the real machines.
Well, if I was the one in charge of this sort of thing at MS, I'd be wanting some pretty convincing arguments from Intel for supporting yet another 64 bit x86 binary format.
Each different version that MS has to support, is another version that has to be maintained and tested, have bug and security fixes applied to, support provided for, etc. Not to mention that writing optimal code requires more than just using a good compiler - some of the code is just plain going to be different for each architecture, adding even more to the overall headache.
Or, they can refuse to support it, and most likely condemn it to a quick death. There aren't enough Linux and BSD, etc, users out there buying hardware often enough to keep a chip & associated chipset, motherboards, etc alive, unless there's a damn good reason. Being "just another 64bit x86 chip" isn't good enough, when AMD's chips are (probably) going to perform comparably, for less money, and people round here tend to favour AMD as a company anyway.
No, Intel has to make the x86-64 extensions compatible, or throw a good chunk of cash at MS (and possibly the major system builders) to convince them to support it, or it'll fail.
As you imply, it's not really IE that's embeddable, but IE's rendering engine, the MSHTML control. In that respect, it's really no different to gecko or KHTML.
The differences are that while Linux (of course) has a number of competing HTML rendering engines, Windows comes with one as standard, and you can't just swap in another one (as far as I know). That makes bugs and potential exploits more serious.
Kind of off topic, but I remember a few years ago using SQL Server's Enterprise Manager tool, and being prompted if I would accept a cookie. I realised that it was using IE/IE's rendering engine to render one of the displays (I forget which one, or which version it was; perhaps 7). MSHTML is used in all sorts of places that you wouldn't necessarily expect it to be.
I doubt that it's very much cheaper at all. Last year, I bought an OEM copy of Windows XP Pro. It cost me about 110. A month or so earlier, I'd bought my gf a PC (2.6GHz P4, 512MB of RAM, CD burner, etc), which cost 1000GBP (850GBP because of a special offer, but retail was 1000).
That means that XP cost me about 11% of the price of a whole new system. *However*, I'm not buying XP in anything like the sort of numbers that Dell would be buying it in. I very much doubt that they pay a fraction of that per licence. Add to that the fact that they probably don't take the whole cost of the licence off the price, and you're probably not looking at a particularly large saving. Of course, if you were just going to wipe the drive and install something else, then even if it's only a couple of percent, it's better to not have to pay it at all.