So let's see - as an author I'd get life-plus-70-years for anything I write... but then if I publish with O'Reilly he forces me into this restrictive contract that shortens my royalty stream by more than 70 years... and you praise the guy?
You will never get any normal human being to understand a computer system in which MyLetter, Myletter, and myletter are three different completely unrelated filenames. Make the filesystem case-blind and then we can start talking. (although admittedly this will make it difficult to have consistent file naming in Turkish).
How difficult would it be, exactly, to devise an environment that looked sufficiently like Windows for Windows device drivers to be able to run under it? At that low level Windows is still (relatively) un-bloated so it might not be such an epic task.
For the price of one (admittedly intricate) project, we'd get free drivers for all future devices for all Linux systems, forever. [Of course performance might be reduced and so Linux-specific drivers could still come in useful, but the main thing is everything will work in some fashion at least].
A century or so ago, the telephone system was growing so fast that, within 20 years, more than the entire female population was going to be needed as telephone operators.
But then the Strowger automatic exchange was invented.
The problem I have with broadband is that it all depends how many people you're sharing the pipe with. What starts off at 256kb/s will slow down when everyone else in the street gets it and is downloading things at the same time... and none of the major suppliers (that I know of) will give any kind of bandwidth guarantee. So if your broadband connection ends up running at 1kb/s, tough, it's still broadband, pay for it and be grateful...
Whereas at least I know that my old slow ISDN connection will only ever vary between 64kb/s and 64kb/s!
It all depends how they do it. The British Govt. wants to record, centrally, all the journeys made by everybody "for billing purposes" (just think how useful that would have been in Nazi Germany or any other totalitarian régime). Road pricing was thus being used as an excuse for controlling the people. [They are implementing the same policy, using roadside cameras rather than satellites, in London from next month].
I hope that Oregon realises that you can implement road pricing the other way round: tell the GPS box to count itself down (the way a taxi meter counts up) depending on where it finds itself. The trouble is that half the politicians won't understand the difference and the other half are itching to control us all anyway. "The innocent have nothing to fear". "This will be used for billing only". "This will help us catch terrorists and paedophiles".
What is truly important to people in 100 years' time is often what seems unimportant to people today. That is why a 16th-century 4-page pamphlet is more valuable than a 400-page leatherbound book of the same date.
Yes, it seems very reasonable for Apple to leave the possibility open and not block it. That way they don't deprive their expert users of a useful facility, but at the same time they don't have to document, explain, support... something that gives them no revenue and would be hell to support anyway because it involves non-Apple machines.
Half the time, when I click on a link on the main page to get to a story, Opera/Slashdot forgets who I am and I become Anonymous Coward. Especially irritating when I want to reply or moderate! Logging in again doesn't help: the login is accepted but ignored. I asked Opera but they don't know what is going on, and there doesn't seem to be any way of contacting/. to ask them; so I end up using Opera for most things but sometimes have to switch to IE when using Slashdot! I hope/. gets commission from MS for this...
These things are getting cheap enough that it's worth getting one simply to handle a single ebook (eg. ePocrates or Universalis) - and the cost of the machine plus the cost of the content is still less than the cost of a paper equivalent. Then you can have a completely separate device for use as a PDA, with backlight, slots, and anything else you need.
Is this the first virus that renders anti-virus software inoperative *even if you don't run the virus*?
I got sent Bugbear - NAV didn't detect it - so I updated the virus definitions and tried again:
xxxxx.doc.exe is infected - press OK to repair... I press OK. xxxxx.doc.exe - cannot open file, access denied... I press OK. xxxxx.doc.exe is infected - press OK to repair... I press OK. xxxxx.doc.exe - cannot open file, access denied... I press OK... and so ad infinitum.
In the end I had to use Ctrl+Alt+Del to crash Norton Anti-Virus, then I could delete the.doc.exe files by hand.
In other words: if I hadn't been running anti-virus software, Bugbear would have caused no harm (as long as I didn't run it). But because I *was* running anti-virus software, the entire machine was unusable.
Is this an accident, or is it the future of viruses? It would be rather good if it were: the virus writer could claim, legitimately, that it was the anti-virus software that was making the computer unusable!
Any modifications that Microsoft chooses to make to its EULA by threatening you with an insecure system unless you sign up simply do not apply in the United Kingdom - at least, if you are a consumer rather than a business. So you can click "Yes" and not lose anything. The Office of Fair Trading has a good, simple explanation: "An unfair term in a contract covered by the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contract Regulations (UTCCRs) is not binding on you... A term is unfair if... contrary to the requirement of good faith it causes a significant imbalance in the parties' rights and obligations under the contract, to the detriment of consumers... Although standard terms may be drafted to protect commercial needs, they must also take account of the your interests and rights by going no further than is necessary to protect those legitimate commercial interests". The onus is on the company to prove that a contract term is fair. None of this applies to contracts between businesses.
A friend of mine (telemarketer) - good at his job - told me one simple thing. A good telemarketer is glad when you say No. Because the sooner he concludes that call, the sooner he can get onto the next call which may be a good prospect. Only an incompetent will hang on and try and convert a No into a Yes instead of going out hunting for the Yeses that are waiting for him out there somewhere. So I always (a) help the telemarketers in their job by politely making it clear, quickly, that I'm not a good prospect and (b) if they don't take that on board, tell them what competence in telemarketing is. (b) pisses them off no end but by then they've deserved it.
If you already have the card installed anyway then the cost per byte is zero.
If you have a spare video card that you're not using, then the cost per byte is zero.
If you have a choice between a card with more RAM and a card with less RAM, then the cost per byte may be small (positive), zero, or even negative, depending on the marketing strategies of the respective card manufacturers.
In the UK, the Unfair Contract Terms Act puts the onus on the company to prove that an apparently unfair contract term is in fact fair. If they can't prove it, the term doesn't apply. Threatening to force people to run insecure software unless they agree to allow arbitrary future modifications to their systems (or unless they agree to new unwanted restrictions on how they use those systems) sounds, prima facie, unfair. The Act applies to consumers, but I don't know whether it applies to business customers as well. But it's a start.
Last time I used IRC, I used Telnet as the client. Sure, it doesn't have a windowed interface, but my fingers quickly got used to typing/msg,/join, and the rest... Trojans are the penalty for laziness!
And that's why, as a software developer, I daren't target PocketPC. When I ported my application from PalmOS 3 to PalmOS 5 (the ARM one), I had to change ONE LINE of code (and the program remained backwards-compatible).
If you ask the users, the current installed base of PocketPC systems is as follows: PocketPC 2002 - 1% PocketPC 2000 - 0.5% PocketPC "I don't know what version" - 98.5%
We can target either of the first two quite easily, but the last operating system in the list has no programs that are compatible with it.
No need to go to Verisign or anyone else. Be your own certificate authority. Create a self-signed root certificate and use it to sign any site certificates that you want.
The root certificate won't be built in to IE, of course, so the first time the user clicks on the link, IE will ask him if he wants to accept it. To which the answer will be "Of course I do, dummy, or I wouldn't have clicked on that link! Honestly, IE missing out one of the Microsoft root certs: typical MS incompetence".
Or, more simply, "Help, a dlg box has popped up, which button do I press to get to the site?".
Either way, you can spend the rest of your life after that inventing ever more interesting spoof domain names...
Licences, like all contracts, are programs. The data come from people's actions, the programs are executed by the courts, and debugged by courts of appeal. If you don't expect a non-expert to be able to make sense of machine code when he reads it, why on earth should you expect him to be able to read a licence?
Every subscription that you sell reduces your advertising revenue. I don't know whether you've priced things so that the extra subscription balances the advertising lost: probably you don't either!
Try an experiment. For an initial period, charge $0 for subscriptions (ie.allow users to turn off the advertising, while explaining to them in great detail why it would help/. no end if they really did view the ads). You would lose no collective karma at all, your users would love you so much that none of them would turn off the ads, and you'd avoid the hell of subscription admin (people love to argue for ever over such tiny amounts).  And if it all failed and you had to start charging for subs, you would have a valuable additional data point to feed into your pricing model.
Alternatively, keep the current price but give a 100% introductory discount.
Pixel positioning may be a bigger problem for you than light response. At least you can calibrate for light response, but with scanners and printers you can't rely on where your pixels may be. 1200 pixels per inch does not mean that pixel no.3447 is 3447/1200" away from the origin. You'll see fixed variations in the X-axis (along the sensor array) but unpredictable ones in the Y-axis (along the direction of motion), and because these vary from one pass to the next, you can't calibrate the errors away.
Simple experiment: use a laser printer to print 0.01" squares 0.02" apart in both directions (ie.25% grey) on a sheet of acetate. Do it twice, superimpose the sheets, and try to get an even tone of grey. It's impossible, and there are no published specs on the accuracy of positioning.
At the very least, include a graticule in every scan if accurate measurement is important to you.
What makes you think it's dead?
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
I just fired up the command line prompt in my copy of Windows XP Professional and ran Cardbox-Plus on it. Bona fide 16-bit DOS program, copyright 1982-1990. Ran with no problems. DOS may be officially dead and buried, but XP seems to give quite a good imitation...
Come to that, I can still run Microsoft's 8080 assembler (bona fide 8-bit CP/M program, copyright 1980) on XP.
Write all the obituaries you like, DOS and CP/M never die!
Thanks for the insights: I'll have to look further into it!
By the way, this is genuine Win32, not MFC. Our policy is to include nothing from unreliable third parties in our systems. If a user says "it doesn't work", we can't reasonably pass the buck..... we have to fix it all ourselves.
Slashdot Mirror
So let's see - as an author I'd get life-plus-70-years for anything I write... but then if I publish with O'Reilly he forces me into this restrictive contract that shortens my royalty stream by more than 70 years... and you praise the guy?
You will never get any normal human being to understand a computer system in which MyLetter, Myletter, and myletter are three different completely unrelated filenames. Make the filesystem case-blind and then we can start talking.
(although admittedly this will make it difficult to have consistent file naming in Turkish).
How difficult would it be, exactly, to devise an environment that looked sufficiently like Windows for Windows device drivers to be able to run under it? At that low level Windows is still (relatively) un-bloated so it might not be such an epic task.
For the price of one (admittedly intricate) project, we'd get free drivers for all future devices for all Linux systems, forever. [Of course performance might be reduced and so Linux-specific drivers could still come in useful, but the main thing is everything will work in some fashion at least].
But then the Strowger automatic exchange was invented.
The problem I have with broadband is that it all depends how many people you're sharing the pipe with. What starts off at 256kb/s will slow down when everyone else in the street gets it and is downloading things at the same time... and none of the major suppliers (that I know of) will give any kind of bandwidth guarantee. So if your broadband connection ends up running at 1kb/s, tough, it's still broadband, pay for it and be grateful...
Whereas at least I know that my old slow ISDN connection will only ever vary between 64kb/s and 64kb/s!
I hope that Oregon realises that you can implement road pricing the other way round: tell the GPS box to count itself down (the way a taxi meter counts up) depending on where it finds itself. The trouble is that half the politicians won't understand the difference and the other half are itching to control us all anyway. "The innocent have nothing to fear". "This will be used for billing only". "This will help us catch terrorists and paedophiles".
What is truly important to people in 100 years' time is often what seems unimportant to people today. That is why a 16th-century 4-page pamphlet is more valuable than a 400-page leatherbound book of the same date.
Yes, it seems very reasonable for Apple to leave the possibility open and not block it. That way they don't deprive their expert users of a useful facility, but at the same time they don't have to document, explain, support... something that gives them no revenue and would be hell to support anyway because it involves non-Apple machines.
Or is it "Slashdot won't work with Opera?"
/. to ask them; so I end up using Opera for most things but sometimes have to switch to IE when using Slashdot! /. gets commission from MS for this...
Half the time, when I click on a link on the main page to get to a story, Opera/Slashdot forgets who I am and I become Anonymous Coward. Especially irritating when I want to reply or moderate! Logging in again doesn't help: the login is accepted but ignored.
I asked Opera but they don't know what is going on, and there doesn't seem to be any way of contacting
I hope
Often cracking the protection on the game is a lot more interesting than playing the game anyway!
These things are getting cheap enough that it's worth getting one simply to handle a single ebook (eg. ePocrates or Universalis) - and the cost of the machine plus the cost of the content is still less than the cost of a paper equivalent.
Then you can have a completely separate device for use as a PDA, with backlight, slots, and anything else you need.
Is this the first virus that renders anti-virus software inoperative *even if you don't run the virus*?
.doc.exe files by hand.
I got sent Bugbear - NAV didn't detect it - so I updated the virus definitions and tried again:
xxxxx.doc.exe is infected - press OK to repair...
I press OK.
xxxxx.doc.exe - cannot open file, access denied...
I press OK.
xxxxx.doc.exe is infected - press OK to repair...
I press OK.
xxxxx.doc.exe - cannot open file, access denied...
I press OK... and so ad infinitum.
In the end I had to use Ctrl+Alt+Del to crash Norton Anti-Virus, then I could delete the
In other words: if I hadn't been running anti-virus software, Bugbear would have caused no harm (as long as I didn't run it). But because I *was* running anti-virus software, the entire machine was unusable.
Is this an accident, or is it the future of viruses? It would be rather good if it were: the virus writer could claim, legitimately, that it was the anti-virus software that was making the computer unusable!
... because in porn (well, most porn) skin tones occupy a large area of the image, and are therefore well served by existing algorithms.
Any modifications that Microsoft chooses to make to its EULA by threatening you with an insecure system unless you sign up simply do not apply in the United Kingdom - at least, if you are a consumer rather than a business. So you can click "Yes" and not lose anything.
The Office of Fair Trading has a good, simple explanation: "An unfair term in a contract covered by the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contract Regulations (UTCCRs) is not binding on you... A term is unfair if... contrary to the requirement of good faith it causes a significant imbalance in the parties' rights and obligations under the contract, to the detriment of consumers... Although standard terms may be drafted to protect commercial needs, they must also take account of the your interests and rights by going no further than is necessary to protect those legitimate commercial interests".
The onus is on the company to prove that a contract term is fair.
None of this applies to contracts between businesses.
A friend of mine (telemarketer) - good at his job - told me one simple thing. A good telemarketer is glad when you say No.
Because the sooner he concludes that call, the sooner he can get onto the next call which may be a good prospect. Only an incompetent will hang on and try and convert a No into a Yes instead of going out hunting for the Yeses that are waiting for him out there somewhere.
So I always (a) help the telemarketers in their job by politely making it clear, quickly, that I'm not a good prospect and (b) if they don't take that on board, tell them what competence in telemarketing is.
(b) pisses them off no end but by then they've deserved it.
If you already have the card installed anyway then the cost per byte is zero.
If you have a spare video card that you're not using, then the cost per byte is zero.
If you have a choice between a card with more RAM and a card with less RAM, then the cost per byte may be small (positive), zero, or even negative, depending on the marketing strategies of the respective card manufacturers.
In the UK, the Unfair Contract Terms Act puts the onus on the company to prove that an apparently unfair contract term is in fact fair. If they can't prove it, the term doesn't apply. Threatening to force people to run insecure software unless they agree to allow arbitrary future modifications to their systems (or unless they agree to new unwanted restrictions on how they use those systems) sounds, prima facie, unfair.
The Act applies to consumers, but I don't know whether it applies to business customers as well. But it's a start.
Last time I used IRC, I used Telnet as the client. Sure, it doesn't have a windowed interface, but my fingers quickly got used to typing /msg, /join, and the rest...
Trojans are the penalty for laziness!
And that's why, as a software developer, I daren't target PocketPC. When I ported my application from PalmOS 3 to PalmOS 5 (the ARM one), I had to change ONE LINE of code (and the program remained backwards-compatible).
If you ask the users, the current installed base of PocketPC systems is as follows:
PocketPC 2002 - 1%
PocketPC 2000 - 0.5%
PocketPC "I don't know what version" - 98.5%
We can target either of the first two quite easily, but the last operating system in the list has no programs that are compatible with it.
The root certificate won't be built in to IE, of course, so the first time the user clicks on the link, IE will ask him if he wants to accept it. To which the answer will be "Of course I do, dummy, or I wouldn't have clicked on that link! Honestly, IE missing out one of the Microsoft root certs: typical MS incompetence".
Or, more simply, "Help, a dlg box has popped up, which button do I press to get to the site?".
Either way, you can spend the rest of your life after that inventing ever more interesting spoof domain names...
Licences, like all contracts, are programs. The data come from people's actions, the programs are executed by the courts, and debugged by courts of appeal.
If you don't expect a non-expert to be able to make sense of machine code when he reads it, why on earth should you expect him to be able to read a licence?
Try an experiment. For an initial period, charge $0 for subscriptions (ie.allow users to turn off the advertising, while explaining to them in great detail why it would help /. no end if they really did view the ads). You would lose no collective karma at all, your users would love you so much that none of them would turn off the ads, and you'd avoid the hell of subscription admin (people love to argue for ever over such tiny amounts).  And if it all failed and you had to start charging for subs, you would have a valuable additional data point to feed into your pricing model.
Alternatively, keep the current price but give a 100% introductory discount.
Simple experiment: use a laser printer to print 0.01" squares 0.02" apart in both directions (ie.25% grey) on a sheet of acetate. Do it twice, superimpose the sheets, and try to get an even tone of grey. It's impossible, and there are no published specs on the accuracy of positioning.
At the very least, include a graticule in every scan if accurate measurement is important to you.
Come to that, I can still run Microsoft's 8080 assembler (bona fide 8-bit CP/M program, copyright 1980) on XP.
Write all the obituaries you like, DOS and CP/M never die!
By the way, this is genuine Win32, not MFC. Our policy is to include nothing from unreliable third parties in our systems. If a user says "it doesn't work", we can't reasonably pass the buck..... we have to fix it all ourselves.