I'm pretty sure I'm an "old man" here and I was less than a year old then
You and me both; I was born in September 1974, and reading some of the comments here I definitely feel old. So many people talking about college; I graduated from university 10 years ago this year...
Given that if it goes to court it'll be the blogger that's called before the bench, it's the blogger's location. The server's location only matters in so far as it may determine whether or not the ISP/hosting service respond to a take-down notice or request for customer information.
If you start posting illegal material, don't think that the fact that the machine your blog is on is hosted overseas is going to save you even if it's legal there. *You* are posting the material, *you* are liable if that material is illegal in the country you post it from.
There is nothing that a computer can do to protect itself from a determined user with the root password. If I want to install the latest BonziCometWeatherCursorBuddyBug crapware then my PC can't stop me, no matter how secure the OS is. Even if OSes and applications could be 100% hardened against remote exploits, there's nothing that can be done about trojans, other than educating the users and using anti-malware products.
To be honest, I expect better from Schneier - he of all people should know this. He discusses exactly this problem in Applied Cryptography in the context of encryption - no matter how strong your encryption, if someone wants your data bad enough they can always just put a gun to your head. Same thing applies here - no matter how tough your PC, there's still a human involved to be the weakest link.
Frameworks are what professionals use - the enforce well-formed code and design patterns.
Speaking as a programmer with 8 years professional experience, that's bullshit. Nothing can enforce well-formed code, except perhaps frequent code reviews by a competent, fascist reviewer (with the power to force people to rewrite stuff properly or replace them with people who will/can).
Frameworks have their uses, and can make some things much easier (and other things much harder or even impossible). I'd also strongly disagree that they are "usually... pointless for serious web development", just as I'd disagree with a similar blanket statement about using library code in more traditional applications programming. To say that they enforce well-formed code though is utterly ridiculous. No framework can do that, just as no language can. It is possible to write crap code whatever technologies you use.
But even giving us that won't answer horrors like the registry. How could you ever produce a CLI tool that could meaningfully control that.
One possibility would be to provide a text-based registry editor in the style of sql*plus or similar tool; you could even use a SQL-like syntax with selects, updates, inserts and deletes. Or failing that, something more like an LDAP interface, as the registry's hierarchical nature arguably mirrors that of an LDAP server more closely than an RDBMS.
Hell, if you really wanted you could write a text-editor style tool that understands the registry and exposes an interface to it that makes it look like a flat text file. Throw in some navigational controls (via keyboard shortcuts or vi-style commands, naturally) and it might just be workable. You could even have it able to collapse and expand sections like (eg) IE does with XML files, or have it navigate between nodes like info does.
I appreciate that you hate the registry (and I don't entirely blame you), but that doesn't mean that a cli-based management tool can't be written for it.
No, the Unix shell is a text interface, but there's no fundamental reason why it has to be that way. Don't get me wrong, it works, but having used it for more than 10 years now I can certainly appreciate its limitations as well as its strengths. It remains to be seen how effectively something like PowerShell addresses those limitations, and whether it diminishes or removes any of the strengths in the process.
tools that can be gotten with package managers that work and up and down the whole GNU toolchain into userland
Which of course is a feature of the distros, not of GNU/Linux, and if you step outside the sandbox of the distro-maintained packages then the situation is often every bit as bad as that for Windows and sometimes worse. I fail to see what that has to do with a discussion on the perceived short-comings of the commonly-available GNU/Linux shells though.
What kind of a justification is 'Freeware/Shareware'?
I'd imagine that it's probably (a misguided) part of an effort to prevent installation/use of unapproved software. Can't use it if you can't even download it...
I don't know about the DET, but I certainly know some corporations are that paranoid.
If they want to impress web developers (who are the catalyst for people moving away from IE)
You're fortunate to be in such a position. I work at a web agency and every single customer we've ever had have mandated IE support. Some of them now also mandate support for other browsers (mostly Firefox), but more have stated that they do not care about anything other than IE and will certainly not pay for any effort to ensure cross-browser compatibility.
Sure, we can recommend that their site supports other browsers too, and always try to do so regardless of what is required of us, but at the end of the day if there's no budget for it then it isn't going to be a top priority.
As a designer/developer, I don't really give a damn about RSS improvements.
Nor do I, but then as developers that feature isn't aimed at us, it's aimed at the end users. MS have to balance their efforts; if all they did was implement full standards compliance and nothing else, end users would be wondering what on earth they'd spent all the time doing. All their sites would still work, they'd see no difference in the browser, so why bother to upgrade?
You and I may rejoice, but the vast majority of the population would be decidedly non-plussed.
Well, call me an old cynic if you like, but you only have yourselves to blame. What part of "We're going to increase CSS compatibility!" makes you think they mean "We're going to fully implement CSS compatibility according to the spec!"?
Going from 1% compatibility to 2% is an increase. Hell, it's better than an increase, they've doubled their level of compatibility!
I don't think that's the huge problem you think it is.
All they have to do is ship an adblocker built in and configured with an empty block list. If then their entire userbase decides to block Google's ads and Google go out of business, I don't see how that's MS's fault, they merely supplied the tools. How those tools are used is up to the users.
Now if they shipped it with a default blocklist that blocked Google, that would be a different matter, but while MS are arguably evil, they're not stupid. (Well, not *that* stupid anyway)
and the story-moderation censorship was (presumably) done by a now-disbanded and dishonoured editor (Michael Sims, 'Nazi Editor').
And yet, some of us still appear to be banned from moderation, presumably because of that thread. I don't remember modding it, and I don't remember commenting on it (although I may have), but I certainly read it.
I've not been able to moderate since. It was a good couple of years before I could even meta-mod; going to metamod.pl directly (I didn't get the link on the front page) gave me a curt "you're not allowed to do this" message.
It may just be a coincidence, but with a 5-digit UID account that hit the karma cap back when karma was a number rather than a textual description and stayed there I can't see what other crime I could have committed.
(And no, I've never bothered to ask; to be honest, I don't really care. I just thought I'd point out that while the editor responsible may well have been let go, the fallout still exists)
MSNBC has established draconian rules regarding the use of their coverage of the Presidential Primary Debates on the internet.
There you go.
Now if theirs is the only coverage that exists, then I humbly suggest that that is the real issue here. Important, planned events should be recorded by multiple independent parties; allowing anything else is just plain wrong.
Our politicians are powerless - they can't do a thing to change the plight of the average person on the street. They can raise taxes, lower taxes, pass all sorts of laws but they can't stop the dickheads burning people's bins or the fourteen year olds buying cider to vomit up on the street.
Of course they can. For those specific problems, for instance, they could make more money available to the police for recruitment and training and cut the amount of paperwork they have to do, targets they have to meet, etc, thus allowing them to actually get out on the beat again.
All that costs money, though, and very few people win elections by substantially raising taxes.
I want to fuck you like an animal I want to feel you from the inside I want to fuck you like an animal My whole existence is flawed You get me closer to God
If by that you mean that they have a large and dedicated following, most of whom will buy the CDs, DVDs, T-shirts, etc and attend the concerts, then yes, they "get it". (Although by "they" I assume you mean Trent - it is still essentially a one-man band, isn't it?)
Not all bands/stars are so blessed, even some of the big names are living essentially on hype and marketing saturation. We can argue relative worth until we're blue in the face (although I suspect I'd likely mostly agree with you), but not everyone can "get it" in this way, however much they may like to.
(Although again, I think we'd probably agree on how many actually *would* like to)
to everyone at the MPAA / RIAA: We are younger than you, you will die before us. After that, we will change the laws you purchased.
Why would they care? They can't spend their bonuses and corporate profits when they're dead.
Besides which, that assumes that they're not busily grooming their replacements right now, training them to carry on their work. I'll never be in a position to have much influence on that industry, given my preferred career - will you?
I don't care about angry MPAA fans and their mod points
Good - if you did, it would show that you take this site far too seriously. Mod points and karma are irrelevant, and I speak as someone who hit the karma-cap back when you could see how many points you actually have instead of this silly textual description.
Apart from that, I more or less agree with you; the loss of any human life is a tragedy, but some certainly feel a whole lot less tragic than others.
It is akin to having Walmart employees come into your home and search it to determine if those things you have in your home are paid for given the fact that you visit their stores as a customer.
Explain how. I can't see much of a parallel between allowing a human being to search your home, going through your possessions, perhaps even damaging or losing things (accidents happen), and a software process having a quick snoop in your registry and reporting a status to its home server. Hell, even if it sends complete system details I don't see the parallel.
Because this is slashdot, and in case you haven't noticed the site in general is desperate for Vista to fail and takes every opportunity to rubbish it, whether the criticisms are valid or not.
Some people are like that - if they dislike something strongly enough they feel the need to denigrate it as often as possible. Me, I think it's childish and a waste of time and effort. If it's harmless, just ignore it.
Oh, and "misnomer" means a bad or misleading name, such as "friendly fire" (there's nothing friendly about it, it does just as much damage).
I'm guessing you've never heard of a SQuID (super-conducting quantum interference device) then? It relies on quantum-mechanical effects for its operation. No research into QM, no nifty little medical imaging device.
Besides which, if a bunch of people want to devote their lives to the acquisition of knowledge for knowledge's sake, so what? How do we know that knowing something is useless until we know it? (Even then we may simply not know enough to use it; the laser was sat around in research labs for years before anyone thought of something to do with it. Now I have 3 in my house.)
I'm sorry, but I completely fail to see the relevance of this. Apart from the opportunity to childishly point and laugh, what does it matter how many copies they sell? If anything matters at all, it's how many copies are actually in use, which I guarantee will end up being a far, far higher number. (Even that though I simply couldn't care less about)
Slashdot Mirror
Given that I saw exactly this behaviour on a Solaris 8 install at work a few months ago, no, I completely believe it.
Of course, *then* I was shocked...
I'm pretty sure I'm an "old man" here and I was less than a year old then
You and me both; I was born in September 1974, and reading some of the comments here I definitely feel old. So many people talking about college; I graduated from university 10 years ago this year...
Given that if it goes to court it'll be the blogger that's called before the bench, it's the blogger's location. The server's location only matters in so far as it may determine whether or not the ISP/hosting service respond to a take-down notice or request for customer information.
If you start posting illegal material, don't think that the fact that the machine your blog is on is hosted overseas is going to save you even if it's legal there. *You* are posting the material, *you* are liable if that material is illegal in the country you post it from.
That's exactly what I was thinking.
There is nothing that a computer can do to protect itself from a determined user with the root password. If I want to install the latest BonziCometWeatherCursorBuddyBug crapware then my PC can't stop me, no matter how secure the OS is. Even if OSes and applications could be 100% hardened against remote exploits, there's nothing that can be done about trojans, other than educating the users and using anti-malware products.
To be honest, I expect better from Schneier - he of all people should know this. He discusses exactly this problem in Applied Cryptography in the context of encryption - no matter how strong your encryption, if someone wants your data bad enough they can always just put a gun to your head. Same thing applies here - no matter how tough your PC, there's still a human involved to be the weakest link.
Frameworks are what professionals use - the enforce well-formed code and design patterns.
Speaking as a programmer with 8 years professional experience, that's bullshit. Nothing can enforce well-formed code, except perhaps frequent code reviews by a competent, fascist reviewer (with the power to force people to rewrite stuff properly or replace them with people who will/can).
Frameworks have their uses, and can make some things much easier (and other things much harder or even impossible). I'd also strongly disagree that they are "usually... pointless for serious web development", just as I'd disagree with a similar blanket statement about using library code in more traditional applications programming. To say that they enforce well-formed code though is utterly ridiculous. No framework can do that, just as no language can. It is possible to write crap code whatever technologies you use.
But even giving us that won't answer horrors like the registry. How could you ever produce a CLI tool that could meaningfully control that.
One possibility would be to provide a text-based registry editor in the style of sql*plus or similar tool; you could even use a SQL-like syntax with selects, updates, inserts and deletes. Or failing that, something more like an LDAP interface, as the registry's hierarchical nature arguably mirrors that of an LDAP server more closely than an RDBMS.
Hell, if you really wanted you could write a text-editor style tool that understands the registry and exposes an interface to it that makes it look like a flat text file. Throw in some navigational controls (via keyboard shortcuts or vi-style commands, naturally) and it might just be workable. You could even have it able to collapse and expand sections like (eg) IE does with XML files, or have it navigate between nodes like info does.
I appreciate that you hate the registry (and I don't entirely blame you), but that doesn't mean that a cli-based management tool can't be written for it.
The shell is a text interface
No, the Unix shell is a text interface, but there's no fundamental reason why it has to be that way. Don't get me wrong, it works, but having used it for more than 10 years now I can certainly appreciate its limitations as well as its strengths. It remains to be seen how effectively something like PowerShell addresses those limitations, and whether it diminishes or removes any of the strengths in the process.
tools that can be gotten with package managers that work and up and down the whole GNU toolchain into userland
Which of course is a feature of the distros, not of GNU/Linux, and if you step outside the sandbox of the distro-maintained packages then the situation is often every bit as bad as that for Windows and sometimes worse. I fail to see what that has to do with a discussion on the perceived short-comings of the commonly-available GNU/Linux shells though.
What kind of a justification is 'Freeware/Shareware'?
I'd imagine that it's probably (a misguided) part of an effort to prevent installation/use of unapproved software. Can't use it if you can't even download it...
I don't know about the DET, but I certainly know some corporations are that paranoid.
If they want to impress web developers (who are the catalyst for people moving away from IE)
You're fortunate to be in such a position. I work at a web agency and every single customer we've ever had have mandated IE support. Some of them now also mandate support for other browsers (mostly Firefox), but more have stated that they do not care about anything other than IE and will certainly not pay for any effort to ensure cross-browser compatibility.
Sure, we can recommend that their site supports other browsers too, and always try to do so regardless of what is required of us, but at the end of the day if there's no budget for it then it isn't going to be a top priority.
As a designer/developer, I don't really give a damn about RSS improvements.
Nor do I, but then as developers that feature isn't aimed at us, it's aimed at the end users. MS have to balance their efforts; if all they did was implement full standards compliance and nothing else, end users would be wondering what on earth they'd spent all the time doing. All their sites would still work, they'd see no difference in the browser, so why bother to upgrade?
You and I may rejoice, but the vast majority of the population would be decidedly non-plussed.
Well, call me an old cynic if you like, but you only have yourselves to blame. What part of "We're going to increase CSS compatibility!" makes you think they mean "We're going to fully implement CSS compatibility according to the spec!"?
Going from 1% compatibility to 2% is an increase. Hell, it's better than an increase, they've doubled their level of compatibility!
I don't think that's the huge problem you think it is.
All they have to do is ship an adblocker built in and configured with an empty block list. If then their entire userbase decides to block Google's ads and Google go out of business, I don't see how that's MS's fault, they merely supplied the tools. How those tools are used is up to the users.
Now if they shipped it with a default blocklist that blocked Google, that would be a different matter, but while MS are arguably evil, they're not stupid. (Well, not *that* stupid anyway)
and the story-moderation censorship was (presumably) done by a now-disbanded and dishonoured editor (Michael Sims, 'Nazi Editor').
And yet, some of us still appear to be banned from moderation, presumably because of that thread. I don't remember modding it, and I don't remember commenting on it (although I may have), but I certainly read it.
I've not been able to moderate since. It was a good couple of years before I could even meta-mod; going to metamod.pl directly (I didn't get the link on the front page) gave me a curt "you're not allowed to do this" message.
It may just be a coincidence, but with a 5-digit UID account that hit the karma cap back when karma was a number rather than a textual description and stayed there I can't see what other crime I could have committed.
(And no, I've never bothered to ask; to be honest, I don't really care. I just thought I'd point out that while the editor responsible may well have been let go, the fallout still exists)
Vote the wrong way and you'll pay.
Not forgetting vote buying, of course - vote the right way and we'll pay.
MSNBC has established draconian rules regarding the use of their coverage of the Presidential Primary Debates on the internet.
There you go.
Now if theirs is the only coverage that exists, then I humbly suggest that that is the real issue here. Important, planned events should be recorded by multiple independent parties; allowing anything else is just plain wrong.
Our politicians are powerless - they can't do a thing to change the plight of the average person on the street. They can raise taxes, lower taxes, pass all sorts of laws but they can't stop the dickheads burning people's bins or the fourteen year olds buying cider to vomit up on the street.
Of course they can. For those specific problems, for instance, they could make more money available to the police for recruitment and training and cut the amount of paperwork they have to do, targets they have to meet, etc, thus allowing them to actually get out on the beat again.
All that costs money, though, and very few people win elections by substantially raising taxes.
No, he's talking about "Closer" - the chorus is:
I want to fuck you like an animal
I want to feel you from the inside
I want to fuck you like an animal
My whole existence is flawed
You get me closer to God
They are a band that 'gets it' so to speak.
If by that you mean that they have a large and dedicated following, most of whom will buy the CDs, DVDs, T-shirts, etc and attend the concerts, then yes, they "get it". (Although by "they" I assume you mean Trent - it is still essentially a one-man band, isn't it?)
Not all bands/stars are so blessed, even some of the big names are living essentially on hype and marketing saturation. We can argue relative worth until we're blue in the face (although I suspect I'd likely mostly agree with you), but not everyone can "get it" in this way, however much they may like to.
(Although again, I think we'd probably agree on how many actually *would* like to)
to everyone at the MPAA / RIAA: We are younger than you, you will die before us. After that, we will change the laws you purchased.
Why would they care? They can't spend their bonuses and corporate profits when they're dead.
Besides which, that assumes that they're not busily grooming their replacements right now, training them to carry on their work. I'll never be in a position to have much influence on that industry, given my preferred career - will you?
I don't care about angry MPAA fans and their mod points
Good - if you did, it would show that you take this site far too seriously. Mod points and karma are irrelevant, and I speak as someone who hit the karma-cap back when you could see how many points you actually have instead of this silly textual description.
Apart from that, I more or less agree with you; the loss of any human life is a tragedy, but some certainly feel a whole lot less tragic than others.
It is akin to having Walmart employees come into your home and search it to determine if those things you have in your home are paid for given the fact that you visit their stores as a customer.
Explain how. I can't see much of a parallel between allowing a human being to search your home, going through your possessions, perhaps even damaging or losing things (accidents happen), and a software process having a quick snoop in your registry and reporting a status to its home server. Hell, even if it sends complete system details I don't see the parallel.
Because this is slashdot, and in case you haven't noticed the site in general is desperate for Vista to fail and takes every opportunity to rubbish it, whether the criticisms are valid or not.
Some people are like that - if they dislike something strongly enough they feel the need to denigrate it as often as possible. Me, I think it's childish and a waste of time and effort. If it's harmless, just ignore it.
Oh, and "misnomer" means a bad or misleading name, such as "friendly fire" (there's nothing friendly about it, it does just as much damage).
I'm guessing you've never heard of a SQuID (super-conducting quantum interference device) then? It relies on quantum-mechanical effects for its operation. No research into QM, no nifty little medical imaging device.
Besides which, if a bunch of people want to devote their lives to the acquisition of knowledge for knowledge's sake, so what? How do we know that knowing something is useless until we know it? (Even then we may simply not know enough to use it; the laser was sat around in research labs for years before anyone thought of something to do with it. Now I have 3 in my house.)
If I were a pedant, I'd probably point out that generally speaking an energy weapon is going to be firing a coherent beam of radiation.
But no, these shields are hardly in the same league as your average sci-fi story shields.
I'm sorry, but I completely fail to see the relevance of this. Apart from the opportunity to childishly point and laugh, what does it matter how many copies they sell? If anything matters at all, it's how many copies are actually in use, which I guarantee will end up being a far, far higher number. (Even that though I simply couldn't care less about)