However, if they're willing to have a second shuttle on standby, their excuse for not doing a Hubble servicing mission (too dangerous, can't go to ISS) is complete bullshit.
They're willing to have a shuttle ready to fly in 45 to 90 days. The astronauts have to get cosy in the ISS and use pretty much all of its rations while they wait for the shuttle to come rescue them. If they were in a Hubble orbit, they couldn't do this and by the time the rescue shuttle turned up 45 days later, the astronauts would all be dead.
I also think they made a dumb decision with not servicing Hubble. NASA's budget has a direct relationship to PR. Hubble (and having real people up there servicing Hubble) has always been great PR and a great justification for why we need manned spaceflight (robotic servicing mission, my foot). But their justification is internally consistent.
Ours has 512MB. While not oodles, RAM's not the problem. The painting performance is the issue. If we use none-painting-heavy parts of the app, all is (more or less) well. No star performer, but usable. If we use more paint-intensive parts of the app, everything slows to a crawl.
(And no, the paint performance is not being impacted by lack of RAM)
I'm only a Mac user insofar as I've spent the last day testing our Java app on a Mac Mini we bought for that purpose, but I can tell you that Java 1.5 (also, confusingly, formerly known as Tiger) will only be available for Tiger. 10.3 is stuck with Java 1.4.2.
Since the performance of our app (which is fine on Win32+Linux) sucks on 10.3's current 1.4.2, we're eager for the upgrade. It may not help, but there's little else we can do.
SCOX will be used again as soon as SCO do their filings. SCOXE just means Nasdaq have sent them a delisting notice due to delinquent paperwork requirements. If SCO manage to recover from that status, they're back to plain SCOX. Personally, I'm hoping for SCOXQ...
You also don't see "Fly with us! We'll cram you into a tiny seat, next to a fat guy, have former-prison-warder-host(esses) serve you luke-warm food at 3-hour intervals and play a film with anything even potentially offensive cut from it!" ads for airlines. You see wide, open spaces, people sleeping like babies and beautiful hostesses caring for people's every need.
It's common practice to advertise an image of something which bears no relation to reality.
Right - that was what I wanted to say. Sorry if I was unclear - I didn't want to imply the elevators were going to stop, or fall from the 18th floor in a screaming ball of death:-)
Traffic lights for example have failsafes in them to stop such things... anyway why does a traffic light care about the year? The day of the week/month maybe.
If it cares about the day of the week, (and it's working this out from the date, rather than using a 0-6 counter and a clock) it's going to need to know the correct year to work that out correctly. I agree that a lot of this was hype - even if the traffic light *did* think it was Sunday when it was Monday, nothing terrible's going to happen.
Similarly, elevators don't give a hoot what year it is.
I'm no elevator engineer, but as far as I recall, more complex elevators do know (for example) "It's 9am - when I'm doing nothing I'd be best served by going to the bottom of the building, since people are going to be arriving." This would presumably be achieved by a simple RTC, with (quite possibly) the full date*. If the RTC suddenly wraps over into an invalid state, that'd probably be a problem for the elevator. Again, we have stairs, the world will not end - but lots and lots of these kinds of problems *could* have caused a good degree of inconvience.
* A reply to this might be "Stupid elevator engineers! The elevator just needed a 24-hour clock!". A possible counter-point would be that the elevator engineer was forseeing an elevator that responded to different day-of-week usage patterns ("It's Friday, everybody goes home early, I'll go to the top floors earlier than I would otherwise do", "It's Sunday, I'll optimise for trips between street level and the tourist observation balcony", etc.).
This was one of the problems with Concorde - the amount of fuel it consumed limited its maximum flight. It could do LHR->JFK, CDG->JFK, etc. - the Atlantic crossings. But LAX->Sydney was out of its range - despite doubtless being an ideal route for it in other respects.
If you've not used Skype, it's credit card fraud. Call your card issuer, get your card locked and initiate a chargeback/Request-For-Information process on those two charges.
They're all over the place here in Germany, but their absence was quite noticeable on a recent trip to the US. Nonetheless, I did spot one whilst in Carmel, CA. Presumably, some people have been importing them before their official availability.
In the context of my statement, I'd define child porn as being sexually explicit material involving people not yet mature enough to give informed consent. That this "wooliness" is difficult to translate into law isn't a problem unique to child porn... (indeed, a good 90% of tax laws wouldn't be necessary if it was possible to define laws the way I define child porn:-)
I don't think the system's ever been tried - my anticipation would be that doing this would tend to get rid of traditional party structures, since there'd no longer be the ongoing power that the parties yearn for. I could be wrong - I still think it would be interesting to see how such a system worked out. It's unfortunate we won't get to (and unfortunate that there's no way to test it out without actually implementing it).
It bites having to choose between dumb and dumber, but you're not going to get away without any new legislation for 4 years. Lots of legislation is passed for a given time period (the budget, annual), or is passed with sunset clauses (see the furore about the assault weapons ban which is expiring). This stuff needs new legislation to follow it - otherwise, you get the federal government grinding to a halt. Better to have a muppet at the helm than suddenly losing all the functions (the useful ones as well as the useless ones) of the federal government.
My personal favoured modification would be: you can't be re-elected. You can be elected once each as a school inspector, state senator, congressman, senator, president, whatever - but only once.
Result: New candidates every 4/6 years, with new ideas and not working to stay in power, because it's legally not allowed. People who just want to do their bit for 4 years.
Granted, they'd have less experience, wouldn't know the ins and outs, but a lot of issues don't need a deep understanding and for other stuff, there's lobbyists, letters from your constituents, and so forth. Overall, I think the disadvantages easily outweigh the advantages.
Of course, it doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of actually happening, since to happen, the current lot would have to introduce and then approve it - thereby effectively sacking themselves.
The difficulty here is not that people want to choose whether to watch child porn or not, or that people want to allow others that choice. No mentally healthy person wants to watch child porn and nobody wants to give people the option.
The problem is that by compulsorily filtering against child porn, all current technical solutions also catch a whole bunch of other stuff. It's like the Tuna fishermen - they go out to fish out tuna, but they end up catching dolphins too. Nobody cares about the tuna, but lots of people don't want the dolphins killed.
If the child porn filters actually only filtered child porn, I'm sure they'd find very widespread acceptance. Since they don't, they have a chilling effect on other sorts of free speech, by blocking those sites in the mistaken belief that they're child porn.
(This same argument applies to normal porn filters, with the difference that quite a lot of people want their porn filter set to "on")
To restate your 1, 2 and 3 in a way that might be easier for people:
1. The output doesn't look like the input. (This is actually really, really easy. The easiest bit by far of the problem. Say you've got a 20-byte output - as soon as you've got a 21-byte input, Shannon's law pretty much guarantees that your output no longer looks like your input - you *have* to lose information. If you manage to produce a 20-byte hash algorithm from which it's possible to reconstruct 1Mb of input text, you're in line for a Nobel prize and a visit from angry physicists with pitchforks and torches who now need to revise their ideas about the second law of thermodynamics.)
2. Trying to find two inputs that produce the same output should ideally take at least 2^(N-1) steps. (It's necessarily easier to find two inputs with matching output than it is to find a matching input for a given output. Look up "Birthday paradox" on Google for why.)
3. Trying to produce a input that will hash to a given output should ideally take at least 2^N steps (where N is the bitsize of the hash)
Why? It's designed to look and work like a Linux terminal and it has a Penguin as a logo (which, to save you the effort of checking, is similar, but by no means copied from Tux).
Incidentally, you're the first person in the 4 years we've been selling the app to make this comment. Evidently, people aren't that confused:-)
It was a pretty obvious attempt to cash in on the Windows name, but in fairness to Lindows, their argument was that "Windows" shouldn't even be a trademark. It's only since 1985 that it's had a non-generic use. It's been used (and used in the windowing-environment sense) since before that - as such, I at least half-agree that the MS trademark grant was probably wrong.
Regarding Froogles - I'd say "Froogles" has at least as many Google-infringing letters as Lindows does Windows-infringing letters:-) The name's also clearly based on the word Google (he started before Froogle, but after Google). I don't hold any strong opinion either way about who should have won, but I do think it would have been a hell of an amount easier/quieter for Google just to buy the guy out...
MS didn't win. It never got further than preliminary motions (I don't think they even started discovery) before MS paid $20m to have them change to Linspire. MS did get some kind of preliminary judgement in the Netherlands, but that was only preliminary. In the US, MS was well on the way to losing (judge agreeing that the use of Windows as a generic word at the time of their registration in 1985 could be examined, as opposed to its use today). In conclusion, Lindows/Linspire got:
a) Free publicity on pretty much every tech site b) Some sympathy c) $20 million
MS got:
a) -$20 million b) To not have their trademark examined (and posssibly anulled) by the court c) Lindows to change their name to Linspire
...and the reason that the general public is such a long way off is because it's not built into widely-used e-mail MUAs as a natural function. While there are certainly things to be said (though not all of those things are good) for simplicity and modularity with regard to security, until Outlook starts shipping with a standard "Encrypt this e-mail" checkbox, the general public isn't going to be using encrypted mails.
Regarding not all of the things being good - you can't encapsulate security. That's exactly the problem in this case - they've taken a provably secure method of using an assumed-secure algorithm and applied it in a (mildly) inappropriate way, with the effect that the result is no longer as secure as one might assume. They could have taken GPG and done exactly the same thing...
To be spam, it's got to be unsolicited. You signed up to the mailing list, it told you you were going to get the reminders, ergo, it's not unsolicited. I find them irritating too, but I wouldn't pretend they were spam.
Slashdot Mirror
However, if they're willing to have a second shuttle on standby, their excuse for not doing a Hubble servicing mission (too dangerous, can't go to ISS) is complete bullshit.
They're willing to have a shuttle ready to fly in 45 to 90 days. The astronauts have to get cosy in the ISS and use pretty much all of its rations while they wait for the shuttle to come rescue them. If they were in a Hubble orbit, they couldn't do this and by the time the rescue shuttle turned up 45 days later, the astronauts would all be dead.
I also think they made a dumb decision with not servicing Hubble. NASA's budget has a direct relationship to PR. Hubble (and having real people up there servicing Hubble) has always been great PR and a great justification for why we need manned spaceflight (robotic servicing mission, my foot). But their justification is internally consistent.
Ours has 512MB. While not oodles, RAM's not the problem. The painting performance is the issue. If we use none-painting-heavy parts of the app, all is (more or less) well. No star performer, but usable. If we use more paint-intensive parts of the app, everything slows to a crawl.
(And no, the paint performance is not being impacted by lack of RAM)
I'm only a Mac user insofar as I've spent the last day testing our Java app on a Mac Mini we bought for that purpose, but I can tell you that Java 1.5 (also, confusingly, formerly known as Tiger) will only be available for Tiger. 10.3 is stuck with Java 1.4.2.
Since the performance of our app (which is fine on Win32+Linux) sucks on 10.3's current 1.4.2, we're eager for the upgrade. It may not help, but there's little else we can do.
SCOX will be used again as soon as SCO do their filings. SCOXE just means Nasdaq have sent them a delisting notice due to delinquent paperwork requirements. If SCO manage to recover from that status, they're back to plain SCOX. Personally, I'm hoping for SCOXQ...
You also don't see "Fly with us! We'll cram you into a tiny seat, next to a fat guy, have former-prison-warder-host(esses) serve you luke-warm food at 3-hour intervals and play a film with anything even potentially offensive cut from it!" ads for airlines. You see wide, open spaces, people sleeping like babies and beautiful hostesses caring for people's every need.
It's common practice to advertise an image of something which bears no relation to reality.
Right - that was what I wanted to say. Sorry if I was unclear - I didn't want to imply the elevators were going to stop, or fall from the 18th floor in a screaming ball of death :-)
I probably shouldn't have mentioned stairs...
As long as the elevator doesn't fall down the shaft, everything will be okay.
Sure - as I said, none of this would be the end of the world.
Traffic lights for example have failsafes in them to stop such things... anyway why does a traffic light care about the year? The day of the week/month maybe.
If it cares about the day of the week, (and it's working this out from the date, rather than using a 0-6 counter and a clock) it's going to need to know the correct year to work that out correctly. I agree that a lot of this was hype - even if the traffic light *did* think it was Sunday when it was Monday, nothing terrible's going to happen.
Similarly, elevators don't give a hoot what year it is.
I'm no elevator engineer, but as far as I recall, more complex elevators do know (for example) "It's 9am - when I'm doing nothing I'd be best served by going to the bottom of the building, since people are going to be arriving." This would presumably be achieved by a simple RTC, with (quite possibly) the full date*. If the RTC suddenly wraps over into an invalid state, that'd probably be a problem for the elevator. Again, we have stairs, the world will not end - but lots and lots of these kinds of problems *could* have caused a good degree of inconvience.
* A reply to this might be "Stupid elevator engineers! The elevator just needed a 24-hour clock!". A possible counter-point would be that the elevator engineer was forseeing an elevator that responded to different day-of-week usage patterns ("It's Friday, everybody goes home early, I'll go to the top floors earlier than I would otherwise do", "It's Sunday, I'll optimise for trips between street level and the tourist observation balcony", etc.).
This was one of the problems with Concorde - the amount of fuel it consumed limited its maximum flight. It could do LHR->JFK, CDG->JFK, etc. - the Atlantic crossings. But LAX->Sydney was out of its range - despite doubtless being an ideal route for it in other respects.
If you've not used Skype, it's credit card fraud. Call your card issuer, get your card locked and initiate a chargeback/Request-For-Information process on those two charges.
They're all over the place here in Germany, but their absence was quite noticeable on a recent trip to the US. Nonetheless, I did spot one whilst in Carmel, CA. Presumably, some people have been importing them before their official availability.
If they're hugging trees, surely they'll be pretty much the only people who manage to stay down here?
In the context of my statement, I'd define child porn as being sexually explicit material involving people not yet mature enough to give informed consent. That this "wooliness" is difficult to translate into law isn't a problem unique to child porn... (indeed, a good 90% of tax laws wouldn't be necessary if it was possible to define laws the way I define child porn :-)
I don't think the system's ever been tried - my anticipation would be that doing this would tend to get rid of traditional party structures, since there'd no longer be the ongoing power that the parties yearn for. I could be wrong - I still think it would be interesting to see how such a system worked out. It's unfortunate we won't get to (and unfortunate that there's no way to test it out without actually implementing it).
It bites having to choose between dumb and dumber, but you're not going to get away without any new legislation for 4 years. Lots of legislation is passed for a given time period (the budget, annual), or is passed with sunset clauses (see the furore about the assault weapons ban which is expiring). This stuff needs new legislation to follow it - otherwise, you get the federal government grinding to a halt. Better to have a muppet at the helm than suddenly losing all the functions (the useful ones as well as the useless ones) of the federal government.
My personal favoured modification would be: you can't be re-elected. You can be elected once each as a school inspector, state senator, congressman, senator, president, whatever - but only once.
Result: New candidates every 4/6 years, with new ideas and not working to stay in power, because it's legally not allowed. People who just want to do their bit for 4 years.
Granted, they'd have less experience, wouldn't know the ins and outs, but a lot of issues don't need a deep understanding and for other stuff, there's lobbyists, letters from your constituents, and so forth. Overall, I think the disadvantages easily outweigh the advantages.
Of course, it doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of actually happening, since to happen, the current lot would have to introduce and then approve it - thereby effectively sacking themselves.
(aside: BT have tried blocking at an ISP level)
The difficulty here is not that people want to choose whether to watch child porn or not, or that people want to allow others that choice. No mentally healthy person wants to watch child porn and nobody wants to give people the option.
The problem is that by compulsorily filtering against child porn, all current technical solutions also catch a whole bunch of other stuff. It's like the Tuna fishermen - they go out to fish out tuna, but they end up catching dolphins too. Nobody cares about the tuna, but lots of people don't want the dolphins killed.
If the child porn filters actually only filtered child porn, I'm sure they'd find very widespread acceptance. Since they don't, they have a chilling effect on other sorts of free speech, by blocking those sites in the mistaken belief that they're child porn.
(This same argument applies to normal porn filters, with the difference that quite a lot of people want their porn filter set to "on")
Apache isn't GPLed, but it is GPL-compatible.
To restate your 1, 2 and 3 in a way that might be easier for people:
1. The output doesn't look like the input. (This is actually really, really easy. The easiest bit by far of the problem. Say you've got a 20-byte output - as soon as you've got a 21-byte input, Shannon's law pretty much guarantees that your output no longer looks like your input - you *have* to lose information. If you manage to produce a 20-byte hash algorithm from which it's possible to reconstruct 1Mb of input text, you're in line for a Nobel prize and a visit from angry physicists with pitchforks and torches who now need to revise their ideas about the second law of thermodynamics.)
2. Trying to find two inputs that produce the same output should ideally take at least 2^(N-1) steps. (It's necessarily easier to find two inputs with matching output than it is to find a matching input for a given output. Look up "Birthday paradox" on Google for why.)
3. Trying to produce a input that will hash to a given output should ideally take at least 2^N steps (where N is the bitsize of the hash)
Why? It's designed to look and work like a Linux terminal and it has a Penguin as a logo (which, to save you the effort of checking, is similar, but by no means copied from Tux).
:-)
Incidentally, you're the first person in the 4 years we've been selling the app to make this comment. Evidently, people aren't that confused
There was also an article on The Register. I presume there were other articles on other sites - it probably all got too much for Penguin.
The Amiga had plenty of viruses. DR-DOS was, I believe, just as susceptible to boot-block viruses as was MS-DOS. Macs have viruses.
Windows viruses are certainly the most common at the moment, but to say that 99.9...% of all viruses are on Windows is inaccurate.
It was a pretty obvious attempt to cash in on the Windows name, but in fairness to Lindows, their argument was that "Windows" shouldn't even be a trademark. It's only since 1985 that it's had a non-generic use. It's been used (and used in the windowing-environment sense) since before that - as such, I at least half-agree that the MS trademark grant was probably wrong.
:-) The name's also clearly based on the word Google (he started before Froogle, but after Google). I don't hold any strong opinion either way about who should have won, but I do think it would have been a hell of an amount easier/quieter for Google just to buy the guy out...
Regarding Froogles - I'd say "Froogles" has at least as many Google-infringing letters as Lindows does Windows-infringing letters
MS didn't win. It never got further than preliminary motions (I don't think they even started discovery) before MS paid $20m to have them change to Linspire. MS did get some kind of preliminary judgement in the Netherlands, but that was only preliminary. In the US, MS was well on the way to losing (judge agreeing that the use of Windows as a generic word at the time of their registration in 1985 could be examined, as opposed to its use today). In conclusion, Lindows/Linspire got:
a) Free publicity on pretty much every tech site
b) Some sympathy
c) $20 million
MS got:
a) -$20 million
b) To not have their trademark examined (and posssibly anulled) by the court
c) Lindows to change their name to Linspire
Overall, I'd say Lin[dows|spire] won.
...and the reason that the general public is such a long way off is because it's not built into widely-used e-mail MUAs as a natural function. While there are certainly things to be said (though not all of those things are good) for simplicity and modularity with regard to security, until Outlook starts shipping with a standard "Encrypt this e-mail" checkbox, the general public isn't going to be using encrypted mails.
Regarding not all of the things being good - you can't encapsulate security. That's exactly the problem in this case - they've taken a provably secure method of using an assumed-secure algorithm and applied it in a (mildly) inappropriate way, with the effect that the result is no longer as secure as one might assume. They could have taken GPG and done exactly the same thing...
To be spam, it's got to be unsolicited. You signed up to the mailing list, it told you you were going to get the reminders, ergo, it's not unsolicited. I find them irritating too, but I wouldn't pretend they were spam.