2. Of course, Apples hardware and software divisions are 'in cahoots' (if I were a stockholder, I'd hope so, they work at the same freakin company).. they might not be 'in cahoots' to add this feature, drop that feature for driving each others sales. But it doesn't take a market analyst to understand that hardware people/rely/ on software people to push the latest and greatest to push hardware. It might not be a conspiracy, but the hardware camp leaning on the software camp to drive demand for various types of hardware, and vice versa is called 'business strategy'. Hell, its in the press releases. Thats the truely funny part about both conspiracy theorists and their naysayers who deny all intentions of said conspiracy. While the methods of using leverage across hard/soft-ware markets might not be as in the dark or 'cool' as the tinhats might like it to be, it still stands that tactics like this are used. It's kind of funny - it seems people are often more complacent of 'intent to conspire', so long as its done in plain view. I still dont think it excuses cases where that leverage is taking precendance over solid engineering design.
I think the difference between what I'm trying to say and what you're trying to say is this: you make it seem as though making software slower is the goal. I don't believe so. Yes, software drives hardware, and yes, newer software typically runs slower on older hardware. That's not because the developers set out to make the software run slow on old hardware. Instead, the idea is that as hardware advances, so can software. To give an example, let's look at Windows XP. The fancy new gui can be a bit of a resource hog. However, Microsoft has provided very granular controls to turn off the effects you don't want, or even switch back to the "Classic" style (which is actually native controls, not pixmaps that look like the old style). If the goal here was to slow XP down on old computers, those features would not have been provided. Instead, the goal was that as computer hardware advances, Windows can do some more cool presentational things. Don't like those, or your machine can't handle it? Turn them off. Windows XP runs just as well on an old p200 (with a liberal amount of RAM) as did Windows 2000. But if you have the hardware, why not take advantage and have a nicer looking display (if you don't like the Luna style, check out ThemeXP). Same goes for OS X. The goal was not to make the new OS slow on older G3s to drive G4 purchases. Instead, it was that the new hardware gives more processing power that can be used on trivial things like all the fancy alpha blending and scaling in OS X. The X.1 patch sped things up, not slowing them down to force people into buying dual 833 G4s (or whatever).
A business decision that consists of, "Let's make things slower so that people will upgrade their hardware," is a bad idea. Something more along the lines of, "Today's hardware is more powerful than that of two years ago, so let's use it. People will probably need to upgrade, but c'est la vie," is much more acceptable. Same end result (more or less), but the means are different.
Why not just use Mozilla instead, and they you don't need 3rd party software to kill extra windows??
Because I like Internet Explorer? Because it was a learning experience to develop a browser helper object? Because everybody keeps saying that Mozilla can do this and IE can't, while that's obviously not true? Because I wanted to? If I use Mozilla, then you're right, I don't need 3rd party software to kill extra windows. Instead, I just need 3rd party software to browse the web. All right, so I'm a lemming because I prefer IE, or because I don't know that mozilla is "better", or because I'm too stupid or lazy to download a 3rd party browser instead of using the built-in browser. Too bad, I don't care.
See, if you really think customer demand and usefulness doth an MS product make, you're just as bad as our conspiracy theorist. Of course it enters the equation. But if you think its the only factor, keep dreaming.
While I didn't explicitly say that customer demand and usefulness of a feature were all that go into making feature decisions, I can see how you would read that out of my post. I wasn't trying to make that point. Obviously other factors matter (say, feasability -- if the cost and time-to-market of implementing a customer-demanded and/or useful feature is too expensive, it probably won't get done until V.Next).
I dont believe that MS and Intel have an agreement to push hardware requirements, however, the possibility that execs and project managers 'suggest' things to eath other (hey, keep that feature in there, whats the damage, or hey, we're thinking of do this and that, what do you think) doesn't require a conspiracy to influence the design decisions. And if you think glib, ignorant purely business strategy speak doesnt influence decision decisions suggests that your no less niave than he is conspiracy theorist.
I think you'd be surprised at the amount of autonomy given to product groups, and even feature teams within product groups, at any company (not just Microsoft). Sure, the higher-ups will usually need to sign-off on the big-picture design, but do you really think BillG or Steve Balmer care whether or not IE still supports Gopher (using the current discussion as an example)? Maybe the feature team leads or the product group leads are in communication with hardware companies like Intel (probably only if their product is related in some way to that company), but in that case I would classify that business relationship as a "customer" relationship (some may call it a "partner" relationship, but that's essentially the same thing except that the "partner" has a little more direct control over feature suggestions).
Also, let me reiterate that I believe this applies to all companies, not just Microsoft. I'm sure Apple's software division isn't in cahoots with their hardware division to slow down OS X so people will ditch their G3s and go buy G4s (if so, then X.1 wouldn't have been released). AOL likely doesn't conspire with AMD or Intel to push hardware sales by writing a crappy, bloated walled-garden UI. And so on, and so on. It's just business, not tin-foil hat paranoid conspiracies.
Like keeping the **popular** gopher client alive and well?!?!
"Popular" here is relative. Of the "customers" that use IE, I'd guess that much less than 1% even know what gopher is, much less know that IE supports it and actually use the functionality. So in the broader scheme of things, is it really that important to keep functionality that only some couple thousand people would ever use vs. the security concerns for everybody? I'd choose the latter, just as Microsoft did. Prove there's a viable market that demands a gopher client, and I'm sure MS will happily provide that market with such a client. However, I don't think such a market exists in a large enough form to be anything but marginal.
Supporting many obscure protocols is one of the best way to justify bloat. Since Microsoft has arrangements with Intel (basically their software requirements must follow Moore's Law), I predict that the gopher code will return, or more simply that it will be turned off but remain in IE.
Right, so there's a big conspiracy for Microsoft to create bloated software to force hardware upgrades. Right. And that's why IE 5.x was slimmed down and much faster than the old IE4? Hrm, looks like that right there breaks your argument. But go ahead and continue believing in the conspiracy theory, because it's apparently a lot more interesting than believing that Microsoft will add and remove features based on real criteria, like customer demand and usefulness.
Just a small nitpick, since I think you're mostlty correct, but you're not quite right on this point. Competing projects are good, up to a certain point. They drive each other to be better. In that vein, it's not uncommon to see (or, "see", as this kind of thing is often internal within companies, and doesn't usually become public knowledge) several different projects doing nearly the same thing within larger companies. Very useful, but I think what you're trying to get at rather than not having competing projects at all is to know where that threshold is when you pick one or the other of the projects, and begin to merge the good ideas from the other into the one you picked, while still working on weeding out the bad ideas (some of which may be replaced by the ideas from the competing project(s)). Knowing when to declare a "winner" is very important. Otherwise, you end up with fragmentation.
BTW, that's not anti-competition, in that competition is the striving between two similar projects to force each other to become better. You still have that, it's just that you have only a single end-result. For the next version, sure, branch two (or more) projects off of the existing codebase and go to town again, merging together again near the end of the cycle.
Why is this so difficult for people to comprehend? Why do they continually whine about how much CEOs are paid. They are paid that because they are scarce. In general, they're the best business men in the world. Why is it shocking they're paid so much?
Simple -- envy. The average person has no concept of what kind of work goes into being a CEO. Most people have the notion that they could do just as good of a job, because all they ever see CEOs doing is giving speeches and making press appearances and so forth. They never realize the actual work that goes into managing a business. From the point of view of those who complain about CEO salaries, being a CEO looks like beer and circuses -- all fun and games, no work. To those people, I say send an e-mail to the CEO of your company (you do work for a company that has an "open door" policy about communicating with management, right?). Ask him or her for a brief overview of what he or she does. The request will probably get shunted to a secretary (yes, most CEOs are that busy), but most likely you'll get an answer that describes at least at a high level what kinds of responsibilities a CEO has, and that should give you a better idea of the amount of work that goes into it.
What you said is true. Good CEOs are very scarce. Potential CEOs are everywhere. Everybody wants to be one, but few would do a good job of it. And that's why those few get the big bucks.
Interesting... I will have to check up on this. I use rounded cables because with the internal configuration of my case and the way I want the devices to fit into the bays, it is literally impossible for the ribbon cables to work because they cannot be wired through each other and there's not enough length/space to wire around them. The ribbon cables slink right in there easily.
Right, that's another reason for rounding the cables -- ease of wiring. It's a pain in the rearend to get ribbon cables to route correctly in a cramped case. I guess if your case is small and lots of internal room is taken up by the ribbon cables, then it would have an effect on airflow, but otherwise not.
Anyway, the rounded cable issue is very much like the old shim issue. Shims were very useful for properly mounting a heatsink without trashing your Athlon, but a lot of people were under the misconception that they helped with thermal transfer (larger contact surface area, etc). That was certainly not the case (a proper shim would get nowhere near the CPU core, and without touching the CPU core, there's no way it could help transfer heat). However, just because a shim was no use as a cooling item didn't mean that the shim itself was useless. Just as with rounded cables, while they may not affect airflow and cooling, they still make your case look better and make it much easier to route cables where you want them. Good things to have, just for different reasons than most people believe.
(Another controversy with rounded cables was signal degradation, since you're rearranging the ordering of the wires. It was thought that there could be signal degradation or even signal loss, but no test ever confirmed that. To be safe, however, most machine-rounded cables use twisted pairs to cancel any signal interference. It's difficult to do this on your own without cutting off the connector, twisting the wires, and reattaching, but it really doesn't make much of a difference.)
6. If worried about airflow, remove those bulky IDE and floppy cables and get rounded cables. (About CAD$15-20 each.)
It has been shown time and time again (check out any reputable overclocker/gamer hardware review site) that rounded cables have a negligible affect on airflow (they obviously have some affect, but it's so small that it doesn't matter). No, rounded cables are most often used for looks. Who wants to go to the trouble of cutting a window in their case just to show off a big messy jumble of ribbon cables?
Anyway, if you have a steady hand, you can round your own cables for free (or very cheaply, if you want to get shrinkwrap for the cable, rather than just use twist ties). Old-style 40-pin IDE cables are easy. 80-pin IDE cables are harder (smaller wires). SCSI, depending on the type of cable, ranges from fairly easy to nearly impossible.
You didn't RTFA, did you? The article was all about the various cultural differences. For example, when translating for an Italian market, it was said that you should never just flat-out say what to do. Instead, suggest around it (apparently, Italians are stubborn and don't like being told what to do). Hungarians like instructions on how to fix things, some images and phrases that are benign in one culture are offensive in another, and so on.
Personally, I agree with you that a manual should be clear, concise, and just plain useful. And that's how most good manuals are in the States. That's not necessarily true around the world, and that was the whole point of the article.
Red herring. Until and unless Microsoft makes Passport Wallet an integral part of Passport itself, to the point where you have to actually put your information into a Passport Wallet in order to get a Passport account, the two scenarios are completely different.
And you just missed my point. Here it is again, this time in plain language so that you don't have to read between the lines or do any other form of thinking: Passport Wallet is not Passport. Meaning, you can very well have a Passport account (I have several) without EVER having a Passport Wallet account. Two separate, distinct services with the only related factor being that Passport Wallet uses Passport's authentication services (as do many other services). You villify Passport because of a partner that simply uses Passport's authentication. It doesn't matter that Passport Wallet uses Passport. It matters that Passport does not require the usage of Passport Wallet.
find it disturbing how companies seem to be rushing into Passport like systems that keep a large number of credit card #s and other sensitive data in a central repository,...
Passport is not such a system. Passport is simply a centralized authorization mechanism (you give passport an e-mail address and a password, passport gives a numerical ID to the member site or app from which you're logging in). Passport Wallet, on the other hand, is such a system, but don't let the "Passport" in its name fool you -- it's a completely separate service. You may feel Passport Wallet is a bad idea, and that's fine, but to dismiss Passport as a good or useful service because you don't like Passport Wallet is wrong.
Why do you need to decrypt the credit card number? Once you've encrypted it and stored it in your database, that should be it. It should never need decrypting (by you, anyway -- your financial partner will have a key for decrypting, and if you can't trust them then you have other problems). No actual person should ever see the unencrypted number, nor have access to that number (too much temptation there).
Of course, the very best thing to do is simply never store the credit card. Granted, your business model may not allow that, but it's still the safest option (crackers can't get what you don't have).
It's interesting to see Apple and how OS X uses an Open Source kernel (Darwin). Why shouldn't Microsoft be able to do the same thing?
One word: hardware. Apple can do this because their profits come from selling their hardware (Come on, $2500 for the low-end PowerBook? And it doesn't even do 1600x1200!). Microsoft obviously doesn't keep a hardware monopoly (thus enabling them to have a software monopoly, eh?). Microsoft's money-maker is their software, so don't expect them to start giving away their intellectual property because that's what pays their salaries.
This is actually one of the key reasons why I'm opposed to DMCA-like laws (and patenting of compression algorithms), since they create barriers to entry for free software. Free software authors can't pay the licencing fees.
Congratulations, you just defined why we have such a thing as patents. Patents protect an invention so that the inventor can enjoy a limited amount of time of exclusivity. If the author wants to let others use his invention for the cost of a license, great. If the poor free software developers can't afford the license, tough. The alternative of not having patents at all would seriously hinder the inventive process, and we'd see much less advancement (don't get me wrong, I think there are plenty of silly patents out there, but just because the system can be abused doesn't mean the original intent is wrong).
Morally the right thing to do...
Morally? By whose set of morals? Yours? What makes you so special that the morals you hold are the morals everyone else should hold as well? Morality has no place in business, politics, or education. Leave morality to religion. (note that "morals" != "ethics".)
As it stands now even watching DVDs on linux is illegal (afaik css is being automatically descrambled by a non-licenced program). Clearly some solution for this is needed.
Right. The solution is that someone (company, group of individuals) needs to pay for a license, develop a player, and distribute it legally (whether they charge for it or not is up to whoever builds the player). Then and only then will playing CSS-encoded DVDs on linux be legal. (Okay, so a legal alternative would be a complete clean-room reverse engineering of the CSS encryption, but that's likely not even a possibility anymore with the proliferation of the DeCSS code, not to mention the DMCA itself.)
...why do you need a CDRW for a TV system? I mean, if you're going to watch DVDs you don't need to do any writing, and if you're going to use it as a PVR then a CDRW will (a) hold negligible amounts and (b) be way too slow to stream to.
How about as a way to dump those PVR streams off of your hard drive? TiVO et al don't really have a satisfactory way to time shift permanently (a la VCR), and a CD-RW on this thing would fill that gap. Maybe it would be better to pick some sort of re-recordable DVD format for size reasons, but there is no standard format and the DVD-ROM you buy may not play them back anyway. Anyway, a CD-RW should be large enough to hold plenty of video at a resolution that would match VCRs (might need two disks, but that's okay because you're not burning as you record -- you don't have to be home to swap disks), and those slimline jewel cases are much easier to store than big bulky video cassettes.
Had you bothered to visit the site, you'd understand the reason I chose to limit my code to Win2K and XP. That says nothing about IE, only that I don't have access to any win9x machines (nor do I care enough to bother setting up VMWare), and so since I can't test on them, I do not support them. On top of that, I've chosen to do most string handling using UNICODE, support for which is marginal in win9x. I'm sure with the proper ability to test on win9x and the willingness to bother, I could make my code work just fine there. As it is, I don't care.
While I love developing for IE, and while we require it for support for all Internal apps, I still like Opera as a browser a lot more (from a feature standpoint).
I don't know anything about developing for Opera ("developing for" here meaning "writing extensions and plugins and such", not "writing HTML that targets a specific browser"), but IE has a very robust, very powerful extension model. You can write BHOs (Browser Helper Objects) that do anything from display a document inside the IE frame (Adobe's PDF plugin does this) to blocking pop-ups (Like this) to most anything else. You can add new toolbars (like Google's bar), new sidebars (like the vertical favorites bar, or you can make a horizontal bar), add items to the Tools menu, and more. I'm sure you can do all of this using Mozilla, too, but the beauty here is that you don't need the source for IE to be able to do all this.
And if you tire of extending IE, why not embed it? Want to add tabs? Write a new browser that just embeds IE and does that. Maybe you want a skinnable browser (there are several out there already, but you could make your own if you wanted). In fact, you could go so far as to write a nice little frame that would give you the option to embed either IE or Gecko (via the ActiveX interface to Gecko that mimics IE's interface). Maybe you don't even want to make a browser. Write yourself an IRC client using MSHTML to display everything nicely using stylesheets. Write an app that uses DHTML for the interface, rather than win32 controls (via native win32, MFC, WTL/ATL, or Windows Forms). I understand you can do all of this with Gecko too, but you get it "for free" with IE because it's guaranteed to be installed on any windows system (well, any that hasn't been obsoleted yet) and you don't need the source code to IE to use it.
You may use another version of IE than me, but the one I have 6.0 something is in comparison to opera Slow. And it doesn't even allow me to disable pop up.
There are many pop-up blockers for IE out there, including mine, NoPopIE.
Talking of smooth with a small mouse gesture I can duplicate window. far easier than crtl-N or clicking somewhere.
You could always use Sensiva, and get system-wide mouse gestures rather than just gesturing for a single application.
But maybe with smooth you mean something else ?
Well, I'm pretty sure he was using smooth in comparison to Mozilla (clunky and ugly, even the latest versions), or other Gecko-based browsers. Opera has always been fast, no argument there. Then again, he could have been referring to rendering speed. Just from personal usage (and probably somewhat of a personal bias), IE seems to render the quickest for me, and barring idiots like the slashdot page-widening trolls, usually looks good too.
No, that is a feature that groups common applications under one bar which KDE 2 had before XP even came out.
And BeOS had that feature long before KDE2. Waa. It's a fairly straightforward, obvious step for any WIMP-based GUI. I don't recall how KDE2 implemented this, but from what I remember of Be, all apps would always be grouped. XP can be smart about it. You can configure it (if you know the regkey, or use tweakui or another tweaker) to always group, or group when X amount of the same window exist, or to be "smart" and start grouping when you run out of taskbar space. Not a huge innovation, but it's an evolution of an already-existing design.
You can quite easily see the individual NEdit windows being mapped, bottom to top. The workstation is a Dual Xeon with 512MB main memory. A dual fucking Xeon and I have to watch my windows get mapped 1 by 1.
Have you considered the fact that it may be your video card, and not your window manager, CPU, or RAM? In fact, as far as refreshing a display goes, CPU and RAM are negligible. Since you didn't say what video card is in the machine, I can't say for sure, but I'd bet what's happening is that you're not using an accelerated driver for your video card (either one's not available, or you're using something like the kernel frame buffer rather than the proper card-specific driver).
Slashdot Mirror
I think the difference between what I'm trying to say and what you're trying to say is this: you make it seem as though making software slower is the goal. I don't believe so. Yes, software drives hardware, and yes, newer software typically runs slower on older hardware. That's not because the developers set out to make the software run slow on old hardware. Instead, the idea is that as hardware advances, so can software. To give an example, let's look at Windows XP. The fancy new gui can be a bit of a resource hog. However, Microsoft has provided very granular controls to turn off the effects you don't want, or even switch back to the "Classic" style (which is actually native controls, not pixmaps that look like the old style). If the goal here was to slow XP down on old computers, those features would not have been provided. Instead, the goal was that as computer hardware advances, Windows can do some more cool presentational things. Don't like those, or your machine can't handle it? Turn them off. Windows XP runs just as well on an old p200 (with a liberal amount of RAM) as did Windows 2000. But if you have the hardware, why not take advantage and have a nicer looking display (if you don't like the Luna style, check out ThemeXP). Same goes for OS X. The goal was not to make the new OS slow on older G3s to drive G4 purchases. Instead, it was that the new hardware gives more processing power that can be used on trivial things like all the fancy alpha blending and scaling in OS X. The X.1 patch sped things up, not slowing them down to force people into buying dual 833 G4s (or whatever).
A business decision that consists of, "Let's make things slower so that people will upgrade their hardware," is a bad idea. Something more along the lines of, "Today's hardware is more powerful than that of two years ago, so let's use it. People will probably need to upgrade, but c'est la vie," is much more acceptable. Same end result (more or less), but the means are different.
Because I like Internet Explorer? Because it was a learning experience to develop a browser helper object? Because everybody keeps saying that Mozilla can do this and IE can't, while that's obviously not true? Because I wanted to? If I use Mozilla, then you're right, I don't need 3rd party software to kill extra windows. Instead, I just need 3rd party software to browse the web. All right, so I'm a lemming because I prefer IE, or because I don't know that mozilla is "better", or because I'm too stupid or lazy to download a 3rd party browser instead of using the built-in browser. Too bad, I don't care.
While I didn't explicitly say that customer demand and usefulness of a feature were all that go into making feature decisions, I can see how you would read that out of my post. I wasn't trying to make that point. Obviously other factors matter (say, feasability -- if the cost and time-to-market of implementing a customer-demanded and/or useful feature is too expensive, it probably won't get done until V.Next).
I think you'd be surprised at the amount of autonomy given to product groups, and even feature teams within product groups, at any company (not just Microsoft). Sure, the higher-ups will usually need to sign-off on the big-picture design, but do you really think BillG or Steve Balmer care whether or not IE still supports Gopher (using the current discussion as an example)? Maybe the feature team leads or the product group leads are in communication with hardware companies like Intel (probably only if their product is related in some way to that company), but in that case I would classify that business relationship as a "customer" relationship (some may call it a "partner" relationship, but that's essentially the same thing except that the "partner" has a little more direct control over feature suggestions).
Also, let me reiterate that I believe this applies to all companies, not just Microsoft. I'm sure Apple's software division isn't in cahoots with their hardware division to slow down OS X so people will ditch their G3s and go buy G4s (if so, then X.1 wouldn't have been released). AOL likely doesn't conspire with AMD or Intel to push hardware sales by writing a crappy, bloated walled-garden UI. And so on, and so on. It's just business, not tin-foil hat paranoid conspiracies.
"Popular" here is relative. Of the "customers" that use IE, I'd guess that much less than 1% even know what gopher is, much less know that IE supports it and actually use the functionality. So in the broader scheme of things, is it really that important to keep functionality that only some couple thousand people would ever use vs. the security concerns for everybody? I'd choose the latter, just as Microsoft did. Prove there's a viable market that demands a gopher client, and I'm sure MS will happily provide that market with such a client. However, I don't think such a market exists in a large enough form to be anything but marginal.
(complete reposting, for the parent is an AC)
Right, so there's a big conspiracy for Microsoft to create bloated software to force hardware upgrades. Right. And that's why IE 5.x was slimmed down and much faster than the old IE4? Hrm, looks like that right there breaks your argument. But go ahead and continue believing in the conspiracy theory, because it's apparently a lot more interesting than believing that Microsoft will add and remove features based on real criteria, like customer demand and usefulness.
And to think I simply assumed you didn't know how to spell bourgeois. Boy, do I feel silly! I guess I really Learned My Lesson there. Woo!
Oh yeah, liberal use of <sarcasm/> tags here, for the humor impaired.
Just a small nitpick, since I think you're mostlty correct, but you're not quite right on this point. Competing projects are good, up to a certain point. They drive each other to be better. In that vein, it's not uncommon to see (or, "see", as this kind of thing is often internal within companies, and doesn't usually become public knowledge) several different projects doing nearly the same thing within larger companies. Very useful, but I think what you're trying to get at rather than not having competing projects at all is to know where that threshold is when you pick one or the other of the projects, and begin to merge the good ideas from the other into the one you picked, while still working on weeding out the bad ideas (some of which may be replaced by the ideas from the competing project(s)). Knowing when to declare a "winner" is very important. Otherwise, you end up with fragmentation.
BTW, that's not anti-competition, in that competition is the striving between two similar projects to force each other to become better. You still have that, it's just that you have only a single end-result. For the next version, sure, branch two (or more) projects off of the existing codebase and go to town again, merging together again near the end of the cycle.
Simple -- envy. The average person has no concept of what kind of work goes into being a CEO. Most people have the notion that they could do just as good of a job, because all they ever see CEOs doing is giving speeches and making press appearances and so forth. They never realize the actual work that goes into managing a business. From the point of view of those who complain about CEO salaries, being a CEO looks like beer and circuses -- all fun and games, no work. To those people, I say send an e-mail to the CEO of your company (you do work for a company that has an "open door" policy about communicating with management, right?). Ask him or her for a brief overview of what he or she does. The request will probably get shunted to a secretary (yes, most CEOs are that busy), but most likely you'll get an answer that describes at least at a high level what kinds of responsibilities a CEO has, and that should give you a better idea of the amount of work that goes into it.
What you said is true. Good CEOs are very scarce. Potential CEOs are everywhere. Everybody wants to be one, but few would do a good job of it. And that's why those few get the big bucks.
Next time you want to make a crack, please spell the term correctly. It's "bourgeois".
Right, that's another reason for rounding the cables -- ease of wiring. It's a pain in the rearend to get ribbon cables to route correctly in a cramped case. I guess if your case is small and lots of internal room is taken up by the ribbon cables, then it would have an effect on airflow, but otherwise not.
Anyway, the rounded cable issue is very much like the old shim issue. Shims were very useful for properly mounting a heatsink without trashing your Athlon, but a lot of people were under the misconception that they helped with thermal transfer (larger contact surface area, etc). That was certainly not the case (a proper shim would get nowhere near the CPU core, and without touching the CPU core, there's no way it could help transfer heat). However, just because a shim was no use as a cooling item didn't mean that the shim itself was useless. Just as with rounded cables, while they may not affect airflow and cooling, they still make your case look better and make it much easier to route cables where you want them. Good things to have, just for different reasons than most people believe.
(Another controversy with rounded cables was signal degradation, since you're rearranging the ordering of the wires. It was thought that there could be signal degradation or even signal loss, but no test ever confirmed that. To be safe, however, most machine-rounded cables use twisted pairs to cancel any signal interference. It's difficult to do this on your own without cutting off the connector, twisting the wires, and reattaching, but it really doesn't make much of a difference.)
It has been shown time and time again (check out any reputable overclocker/gamer hardware review site) that rounded cables have a negligible affect on airflow (they obviously have some affect, but it's so small that it doesn't matter). No, rounded cables are most often used for looks. Who wants to go to the trouble of cutting a window in their case just to show off a big messy jumble of ribbon cables?
Anyway, if you have a steady hand, you can round your own cables for free (or very cheaply, if you want to get shrinkwrap for the cable, rather than just use twist ties). Old-style 40-pin IDE cables are easy. 80-pin IDE cables are harder (smaller wires). SCSI, depending on the type of cable, ranges from fairly easy to nearly impossible.
Champagne bought with what money from their free, open source browser?
You didn't RTFA, did you? The article was all about the various cultural differences. For example, when translating for an Italian market, it was said that you should never just flat-out say what to do. Instead, suggest around it (apparently, Italians are stubborn and don't like being told what to do). Hungarians like instructions on how to fix things, some images and phrases that are benign in one culture are offensive in another, and so on.
Personally, I agree with you that a manual should be clear, concise, and just plain useful. And that's how most good manuals are in the States. That's not necessarily true around the world, and that was the whole point of the article.
Red herring. Until and unless Microsoft makes Passport Wallet an integral part of Passport itself, to the point where you have to actually put your information into a Passport Wallet in order to get a Passport account, the two scenarios are completely different.
And you just missed my point. Here it is again, this time in plain language so that you don't have to read between the lines or do any other form of thinking: Passport Wallet is not Passport. Meaning, you can very well have a Passport account (I have several) without EVER having a Passport Wallet account. Two separate, distinct services with the only related factor being that Passport Wallet uses Passport's authentication services (as do many other services). You villify Passport because of a partner that simply uses Passport's authentication. It doesn't matter that Passport Wallet uses Passport. It matters that Passport does not require the usage of Passport Wallet.
Passport is not such a system. Passport is simply a centralized authorization mechanism (you give passport an e-mail address and a password, passport gives a numerical ID to the member site or app from which you're logging in). Passport Wallet, on the other hand, is such a system, but don't let the "Passport" in its name fool you -- it's a completely separate service. You may feel Passport Wallet is a bad idea, and that's fine, but to dismiss Passport as a good or useful service because you don't like Passport Wallet is wrong.
Why do you need to decrypt the credit card number? Once you've encrypted it and stored it in your database, that should be it. It should never need decrypting (by you, anyway -- your financial partner will have a key for decrypting, and if you can't trust them then you have other problems). No actual person should ever see the unencrypted number, nor have access to that number (too much temptation there).
Of course, the very best thing to do is simply never store the credit card. Granted, your business model may not allow that, but it's still the safest option (crackers can't get what you don't have).
One word: hardware. Apple can do this because their profits come from selling their hardware (Come on, $2500 for the low-end PowerBook? And it doesn't even do 1600x1200!). Microsoft obviously doesn't keep a hardware monopoly (thus enabling them to have a software monopoly, eh?). Microsoft's money-maker is their software, so don't expect them to start giving away their intellectual property because that's what pays their salaries.
Congratulations, you just defined why we have such a thing as patents. Patents protect an invention so that the inventor can enjoy a limited amount of time of exclusivity. If the author wants to let others use his invention for the cost of a license, great. If the poor free software developers can't afford the license, tough. The alternative of not having patents at all would seriously hinder the inventive process, and we'd see much less advancement (don't get me wrong, I think there are plenty of silly patents out there, but just because the system can be abused doesn't mean the original intent is wrong).
Morally? By whose set of morals? Yours? What makes you so special that the morals you hold are the morals everyone else should hold as well? Morality has no place in business, politics, or education. Leave morality to religion. (note that "morals" != "ethics".)
Right. The solution is that someone (company, group of individuals) needs to pay for a license, develop a player, and distribute it legally (whether they charge for it or not is up to whoever builds the player). Then and only then will playing CSS-encoded DVDs on linux be legal. (Okay, so a legal alternative would be a complete clean-room reverse engineering of the CSS encryption, but that's likely not even a possibility anymore with the proliferation of the DeCSS code, not to mention the DMCA itself.)
How about as a way to dump those PVR streams off of your hard drive? TiVO et al don't really have a satisfactory way to time shift permanently (a la VCR), and a CD-RW on this thing would fill that gap. Maybe it would be better to pick some sort of re-recordable DVD format for size reasons, but there is no standard format and the DVD-ROM you buy may not play them back anyway. Anyway, a CD-RW should be large enough to hold plenty of video at a resolution that would match VCRs (might need two disks, but that's okay because you're not burning as you record -- you don't have to be home to swap disks), and those slimline jewel cases are much easier to store than big bulky video cassettes.
Had you bothered to visit the site, you'd understand the reason I chose to limit my code to Win2K and XP. That says nothing about IE, only that I don't have access to any win9x machines (nor do I care enough to bother setting up VMWare), and so since I can't test on them, I do not support them. On top of that, I've chosen to do most string handling using UNICODE, support for which is marginal in win9x. I'm sure with the proper ability to test on win9x and the willingness to bother, I could make my code work just fine there. As it is, I don't care.
I don't know anything about developing for Opera ("developing for" here meaning "writing extensions and plugins and such", not "writing HTML that targets a specific browser"), but IE has a very robust, very powerful extension model. You can write BHOs (Browser Helper Objects) that do anything from display a document inside the IE frame (Adobe's PDF plugin does this) to blocking pop-ups (Like this) to most anything else. You can add new toolbars (like Google's bar), new sidebars (like the vertical favorites bar, or you can make a horizontal bar), add items to the Tools menu, and more. I'm sure you can do all of this using Mozilla, too, but the beauty here is that you don't need the source for IE to be able to do all this.
And if you tire of extending IE, why not embed it? Want to add tabs? Write a new browser that just embeds IE and does that. Maybe you want a skinnable browser (there are several out there already, but you could make your own if you wanted). In fact, you could go so far as to write a nice little frame that would give you the option to embed either IE or Gecko (via the ActiveX interface to Gecko that mimics IE's interface). Maybe you don't even want to make a browser. Write yourself an IRC client using MSHTML to display everything nicely using stylesheets. Write an app that uses DHTML for the interface, rather than win32 controls (via native win32, MFC, WTL/ATL, or Windows Forms). I understand you can do all of this with Gecko too, but you get it "for free" with IE because it's guaranteed to be installed on any windows system (well, any that hasn't been obsoleted yet) and you don't need the source code to IE to use it.
There are many pop-up blockers for IE out there, including mine, NoPopIE.
You could always use Sensiva, and get system-wide mouse gestures rather than just gesturing for a single application.
Well, I'm pretty sure he was using smooth in comparison to Mozilla (clunky and ugly, even the latest versions), or other Gecko-based browsers. Opera has always been fast, no argument there. Then again, he could have been referring to rendering speed. Just from personal usage (and probably somewhat of a personal bias), IE seems to render the quickest for me, and barring idiots like the slashdot page-widening trolls, usually looks good too.
And BeOS had that feature long before KDE2. Waa. It's a fairly straightforward, obvious step for any WIMP-based GUI. I don't recall how KDE2 implemented this, but from what I remember of Be, all apps would always be grouped. XP can be smart about it. You can configure it (if you know the regkey, or use tweakui or another tweaker) to always group, or group when X amount of the same window exist, or to be "smart" and start grouping when you run out of taskbar space. Not a huge innovation, but it's an evolution of an already-existing design.
Have you considered the fact that it may be your video card, and not your window manager, CPU, or RAM? In fact, as far as refreshing a display goes, CPU and RAM are negligible. Since you didn't say what video card is in the machine, I can't say for sure, but I'd bet what's happening is that you're not using an accelerated driver for your video card (either one's not available, or you're using something like the kernel frame buffer rather than the proper card-specific driver).