However Mr De Raadt seems to forget that he is where he is because he is standing on the shoulders of giants. He quite litteraly has a 10 year head start in code quality.
Not sure I agree. From TFA -"De Raadt says his crack 60-person team of programmers, working in a tightly focused fashion and starting with a core of tried-and-true Unix, puts out better code than the slapdash Linux movement.
But if you only need to carry one device, you could carry a spare battery instead:)
Anyway, why don't you want a dishwasher that makes you dinner? It may be impossible to build, because the physical features of the two are significantly different, but if they could somehow build one that worked as well as the two separate devices, then I'd have one straight away. It would save space in my kitchen.
It really puzzles me when people are so dead set against convergent devices in principle. I can understand that you might not like any of the ones currently available, but that's an entirely different issue. If your phone could play music as well as an iPod, was as usable as an iPod and had good enough battery life, then what advantage would you have by carrying both?
Does anybody want the "MS Device" that plays music, takes pictures and makes phone calls, but is more difficult to use than all three together and does nothing well?
I've got an MS device (the Orange SPV 500) that does all three (and acts as a PDA).
As a phone, it's as good (and small) as any that I've seen, and a lot better than most.
As an MP3 player, it does a pretty good job, but doesn't have a great deal of storage (limited by memory card - I think they go up to 1GB). I also have a 60GB Creative Zen MP3 player, and which one I use depends on what I'm doing. If I'm off on a long treck, or fancy a bit of variety in my music, I use the Zen. If I'm only going for an hour or two and can't be bothered to lug the MP3 player around, I stick a couple of albums (or audio books) on the phone and take that.
As a camera, however, it sucks (but it's handy to have with me at all times).
And as a PDA, it's consigned my old iPaq to a drawer somewhere, as the phone does pretty much everything I'd need a PDA for.
In summary, I love having a single gadget that does most things that I need portable electronic devices for on a daily basis. It's perfectly usable (as usable as the dedicated devices, except for the camera), and a hell of a lot more convenient. I just wish I could get 60GB memory cards.
You're not the only one that's noticed it. I think the problem is caused (or at least made worse) when the CRT is not running at native resolution.
Even without this though, I hate it. I just turned ClearType back on on my laptop to see whether I got the colour bleed effect. I didn't, but I did start getting sore eyes very quickly, as if I was looking at a slightly unfocused screen, and had to turn it straight back off. I'm blaming you for the headache I've now got.
Mm, I disagree here. The class divides of times past were far more strict than today. People's backgrounds don't matter so much as how they act in the present.
It's true that it's now significantly easier for the poor to move up through society than it was 100 years ago, but it's still very difficult, and this is at least part of the problem.
100 years ago, you 'knew your place' and most poor people probably didn't have any realistic dreams of ever having a different life, whereas today there's expectations that anyone could 'make it' (whether through working hard, the lottery, or crime), but most poor people will end up with the same level of poverty that they started, and this creates an awful lot of frustration and resentment. As Charlie Brown said - "I don't mind the despair, it's the hope I can't take."
Privacy wise, what's the difference between people watching you do something live in the street, or on a tape from a CCTV camera?
Apart from being recorded, not a great deal. The issue is more between random passers-by accidentally overhearing snippets of your conversation and someone deliberately, actively eavesdropping on whatever you happen to be talking about.
I'd be annoyed if I was having a chat with a mate in the streets and a stranger stood right next to us to listen to the conversation (whatever I was talking about). Wouldn't you?
But then they'd probably do you for having equipment that could access the satellite (similar to the way that they used to monitor the direction that people's TV arials were pointing in East Germany to try to stop people viewing Western TV).
If you declare your DOCTYPE, than you better stick to what you say you are.
Or else what? If it works fine in IE, but fails in Firefox (or whatever), most people are going to blame the browser, not the site.
The point is that most people who create web pages only worry about whether it looks fine in their browser. They probably either assume that they are already using 100% standards compliant HTML, or just don't care. The issue at the moment is not telling them what tags to put on a page, it's providing a browser that can display their page correctly (and support 100% standards compliance at the same time).
If we ever get to a stage where 100% standard compliance is common across web sites, and the major browsers support it, then the people that don't follow standards may start to face problems, but until then lecturing them on standards isn't going to fix anything.
Saying that a browser should not support full standards because people generally don't write standards compliant code is absurd.
Couple of things
1) I don't think he was saying that they should not, rather that they do not.
2)Do you think most people care more about their web browser conforming to standards or displaying most web pages properly? Yes, it would be good for browsers to have an option to provide a "full compliance" mode, but if that mode breaks a website, I suspect most people would just turn compliance off, not stop using the site.
And in Communist Russia (or China), political parties really were banned.
Huh? What do you think the Communist Party is then? Opposition parties are banned (or at least very strongly controlled). This is almost exactly the opposite from what's being talked about here. Mainstream political policy/thought/discussion in China is controlled by what the Communist Party leadership decide. In a system without parties, a group of individuals (who you vote for based on their individual policies) would be able to reach their own conclusions to each issue rather than being ordered by their party (on the promise of later rewards, or the threat of punishment) on how to vote. Or at least that would be the theory - I've seen it work at local level where our local council had been run pretty much entirely by Tories for many years, but has for the past 20 years been almost entirely run by independents - with a wide range of political views. Over this time, individual councilors have come and gone, but the people still regularly keep voting for independents over politically aligned candidates.
You're right, I guess. I think the problem was more the way it's splashed across the Slashdot main page which makes it looks like Apple are making a big deal out of there being 200+ new features.
The problem is that glancing through the list and seeing this kind of thing, all I think is "oh great, it's adding a load of features that every decent app has had for about 5 years".
Now, don't get me wrong - I've got a Mac, which I love, and I will probably be upgrading to Tiger at some point, but for non Mac fans, much of the list quite probably looks pretty underwhelming.
There looks like there will be some great new features in Tiger, but I think they are stretching it with things like "Import contacts into Address Book in a variety of formats, including tab-delimited and comma-separated text." and "Print a handy pocket address book to take with you anywhere."
By including this type of thing in the list it threatens to swallow all of the real new features like Dashboard and Spotlight.
When making decisions about your future actions, you should not take into consideration what you have already spent.
You might notice that the title of the article is "Free Software on a cheap computer". If it is purely about a computer you've aleady bought, why bother to mention that the computer is cheap?
Apologies if I've misunderstood you, but this sounds like you think this is a new idea that you've had.
I can't actually think of a pub in my home town that doesn't do this already. There used to be a bar at my local football club that had that day's sports pages there, though.
This kind of statement always puzzles me. I have two PCs permanently connected to the net, my wife has another, and so do both my parents and my sister in law (some of the most computer illiterate people that have actually managed to make it onto the net), and I've checked all of them for spyware on a reasonably regular basis over the past few years. The only one that's ever been infected with spyware (unless you are talking about things like cookies) was one of my PCs - and this was entirely my fault for installing some dodgy P2P software and not reading the Ts&Cs properly.
What spyware were you infected with? How did you detect it?
Well, seeing as Monopoly is basically nothing more than a rip-off of "The Landlord Game", I think suing someone for copying their version might be a bit cheeky.
I'm stuck with IE, because I installed (and then uninstalled) bluetooth drivers 2 weeks ago and FireFox no longer works (it starts, but there's no window visible).
As opposed to the current method of brand with the biggest lawyers wiping over everyone else's?
You can choose any relevant name you want for your web brand (as suggested, milka-chocolat.fr/milka-couture.fr), but people going to the website milka.fr looking for the site that loses the dispute will not have a clue where to go.
She's got a shop (or at least it looks like she has from the photos). She may well have printed business cards/adverts etc with her website/email address on it, so she does have some form of brand to defend, and if the brand, and internet presence, is so important to Kraft, why did they not get round to doing something about registering in France before 2002?
IANAL, but doesn't trademark only apply to a specific industry? It doesn't seem likely that someone going to Milka Couture is going to believe that they've gone to Milka chocolate's clothing site.
If www.milkacouture.fr is acceptable, why would milkachocolat.fr not have been acceptable for them instead.
Would the sensible option in this kind of case be to go for a shared page that had "If you are looking for Milka chocolate, click here. If you are looking for Milka couture, click here"?
Well, for a different statistically insignficiant sample, until this year, I'd had various forms of PDA (I think I've been through about 6 in that time, as new features/smaller size became available) for around 10 years now, and struggled to manage my life without one. My problem is that I have an appalingly bad memory when it comes to appointments and peoples' names, so the fact that I can carry my diary and address book comfortably in my pocket and have it automatically update whenever I dock it with my computer means that I've become pretty dependent on it (and don't find myself booking dinner parties on the day of an FA Cup replay, unlike one of my mates last week).
The only reason that I've no longer got one is that I've now got an Orange SPV phone, which has pretty much all of the PDA functionality that I require, only in a nice phone sized package.
No. I'm specifically talking about what we knew then. If you want an example try "In Shifting Sands", a film made by Scott Ritter, a former UN Chief Inspector In Iraq , which I saw before the war, so I'm reasonably sure Blair could have done. In it, he states that by 1995, both he and another former Chief Weapons inspector, Rolk Ekeus, believe Iraq was "Fundamentally Disarmed". There's plenty of other information available at the time that certainly gave strong cause for doubt at an absolute minimum, and there were plenty of people that had those doubts. However, Blair ignored all of this (or certainly made no reference to any of it) when making his dire warnings about the threat.
Well I hope you don't end up as a lawyer!
I'll be a voter instead.
There is a huge moral difference between being mistaken, and deliberately lying.
Have you ever read The Ethics of Belief by William K. Clifford? If you are mistaken because you refuse to read/take notice of/mention any evidence that might contradict your views, then in my view there isn't a great deal of difference. In one you are making a statement which you know to be false, and in the other you are making a statement that you should know (and have a responsibility to know) is false. To quote from the above article "he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him".
He is (or at least should be) in a position of trust, and when he makes statements like "What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons,", when quite clearly the evidence had not established this beyond doubt (and there was no mention anywhere in the dossier, or in any other statement that I've seen Blair make that this contradictory evidence even existed), then I struggle to see where the great moral difference is.
Personally, I don't consider it acceptable that a Prime Minister can take my country to war on the basis that he was too ignorant to understand the plentiful evidence available to him at the time that the WMD almost certainly did not exist in Iraq, and that Saddam offered no immediate threat to this country. If you do, then I guess we'll have to differ.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure I agree. From TFA -"De Raadt says his crack 60-person team of programmers, working in a tightly focused fashion and starting with a core of tried-and-true Unix, puts out better code than the slapdash Linux movement.
That is one of the many prices you pay when rewriting old code from scratch
and not having an automated regression test suite.
No. It's two of the three fellow students, surely.
I really can't believe I'm posting this. There must be some work that I should be doing...
But if you only need to carry one device, you could carry a spare battery instead :)
Anyway, why don't you want a dishwasher that makes you dinner? It may be impossible to build, because the physical features of the two are significantly different, but if they could somehow build one that worked as well as the two separate devices, then I'd have one straight away. It would save space in my kitchen.
It really puzzles me when people are so dead set against convergent devices in principle. I can understand that you might not like any of the ones currently available, but that's an entirely different issue. If your phone could play music as well as an iPod, was as usable as an iPod and had good enough battery life, then what advantage would you have by carrying both?
I've got an MS device (the Orange SPV 500) that does all three (and acts as a PDA).
As a phone, it's as good (and small) as any that I've seen, and a lot better than most.
As an MP3 player, it does a pretty good job, but doesn't have a great deal of storage (limited by memory card - I think they go up to 1GB). I also have a 60GB Creative Zen MP3 player, and which one I use depends on what I'm doing. If I'm off on a long treck, or fancy a bit of variety in my music, I use the Zen. If I'm only going for an hour or two and can't be bothered to lug the MP3 player around, I stick a couple of albums (or audio books) on the phone and take that.
As a camera, however, it sucks (but it's handy to have with me at all times).
And as a PDA, it's consigned my old iPaq to a drawer somewhere, as the phone does pretty much everything I'd need a PDA for.
In summary, I love having a single gadget that does most things that I need portable electronic devices for on a daily basis. It's perfectly usable (as usable as the dedicated devices, except for the camera), and a hell of a lot more convenient. I just wish I could get 60GB memory cards.
You're not the only one that's noticed it. I think the problem is caused (or at least made worse) when the CRT is not running at native resolution.
Even without this though, I hate it. I just turned ClearType back on on my laptop to see whether I got the colour bleed effect. I didn't, but I did start getting sore eyes very quickly, as if I was looking at a slightly unfocused screen, and had to turn it straight back off. I'm blaming you for the headache I've now got.
It's true that it's now significantly easier for the poor to move up through society than it was 100 years ago, but it's still very difficult, and this is at least part of the problem.
100 years ago, you 'knew your place' and most poor people probably didn't have any realistic dreams of ever having a different life, whereas today there's expectations that anyone could 'make it' (whether through working hard, the lottery, or crime), but most poor people will end up with the same level of poverty that they started, and this creates an awful lot of frustration and resentment. As Charlie Brown said - "I don't mind the despair, it's the hope I can't take."
Privacy wise, what's the difference between people watching you do something live in the street, or on a tape from a CCTV camera?
Apart from being recorded, not a great deal. The issue is more between random passers-by accidentally overhearing snippets of your conversation and someone deliberately, actively eavesdropping on whatever you happen to be talking about.
I'd be annoyed if I was having a chat with a mate in the streets and a stranger stood right next to us to listen to the conversation (whatever I was talking about). Wouldn't you?
But then they'd probably do you for having equipment that could access the satellite (similar to the way that they used to monitor the direction that people's TV arials were pointing in East Germany to try to stop people viewing Western TV).
No. It's the BRITISH Broadcasting Corporation, broadcast and produced from all parts of Britain (of which England is only a part). Get it?
If you declare your DOCTYPE, than you better stick to what you say you are.
Or else what? If it works fine in IE, but fails in Firefox (or whatever), most people are going to blame the browser, not the site.
The point is that most people who create web pages only worry about whether it looks fine in their browser. They probably either assume that they are already using 100% standards compliant HTML, or just don't care. The issue at the moment is not telling them what tags to put on a page, it's providing a browser that can display their page correctly (and support 100% standards compliance at the same time).
If we ever get to a stage where 100% standard compliance is common across web sites, and the major browsers support it, then the people that don't follow standards may start to face problems, but until then lecturing them on standards isn't going to fix anything.
Couple of things
1) I don't think he was saying that they should not, rather that they do not.
2)Do you think most people care more about their web browser conforming to standards or displaying most web pages properly? Yes, it would be good for browsers to have an option to provide a "full compliance" mode, but if that mode breaks a website, I suspect most people would just turn compliance off, not stop using the site.
Huh? What do you think the Communist Party is then? Opposition parties are banned (or at least very strongly controlled). This is almost exactly the opposite from what's being talked about here. Mainstream political policy/thought/discussion in China is controlled by what the Communist Party leadership decide. In a system without parties, a group of individuals (who you vote for based on their individual policies) would be able to reach their own conclusions to each issue rather than being ordered by their party (on the promise of later rewards, or the threat of punishment) on how to vote. Or at least that would be the theory - I've seen it work at local level where our local council had been run pretty much entirely by Tories for many years, but has for the past 20 years been almost entirely run by independents - with a wide range of political views. Over this time, individual councilors have come and gone, but the people still regularly keep voting for independents over politically aligned candidates.
You're right, I guess. I think the problem was more the way it's splashed across the Slashdot main page which makes it looks like Apple are making a big deal out of there being 200+ new features.
The problem is that glancing through the list and seeing this kind of thing, all I think is "oh great, it's adding a load of features that every decent app has had for about 5 years".
Now, don't get me wrong - I've got a Mac, which I love, and I will probably be upgrading to Tiger at some point, but for non Mac fans, much of the list quite probably looks pretty underwhelming.
There looks like there will be some great new features in Tiger, but I think they are stretching it with things like "Import contacts into Address Book in a variety of formats, including tab-delimited and comma-separated text." and "Print a handy pocket address book to take with you anywhere."
By including this type of thing in the list it threatens to swallow all of the real new features like Dashboard and Spotlight.
Moore's Law didn't make anything possible. This is like claiming that Newton made gravity possible.
You might notice that the title of the article is "Free Software on a cheap computer". If it is purely about a computer you've aleady bought, why bother to mention that the computer is cheap?
Apologies if I've misunderstood you, but this sounds like you think this is a new idea that you've had.
I can't actually think of a pub in my home town that doesn't do this already. There used to be a bar at my local football club that had that day's sports pages there, though.
This kind of statement always puzzles me. I have two PCs permanently connected to the net, my wife has another, and so do both my parents and my sister in law (some of the most computer illiterate people that have actually managed to make it onto the net), and I've checked all of them for spyware on a reasonably regular basis over the past few years. The only one that's ever been infected with spyware (unless you are talking about things like cookies) was one of my PCs - and this was entirely my fault for installing some dodgy P2P software and not reading the Ts&Cs properly.
What spyware were you infected with? How did you detect it?
Well, seeing as Monopoly is basically nothing more than a rip-off of "The Landlord Game", I think suing someone for copying their version might be a bit cheeky.
I'm stuck with IE, because I installed (and then uninstalled) bluetooth drivers 2 weeks ago and FireFox no longer works (it starts, but there's no window visible).
As opposed to the current method of brand with the biggest lawyers wiping over everyone else's?
You can choose any relevant name you want for your web brand (as suggested, milka-chocolat.fr/milka-couture.fr), but people going to the website milka.fr looking for the site that loses the dispute will not have a clue where to go.
She's got a shop (or at least it looks like she has from the photos). She may well have printed business cards/adverts etc with her website/email address on it, so she does have some form of brand to defend, and if the brand, and internet presence, is so important to Kraft, why did they not get round to doing something about registering in France before 2002?
IANAL, but doesn't trademark only apply to a specific industry? It doesn't seem likely that someone going to Milka Couture is going to believe that they've gone to Milka chocolate's clothing site.
If www.milkacouture.fr is acceptable, why would milkachocolat.fr not have been acceptable for them instead.
Would the sensible option in this kind of case be to go for a shared page that had "If you are looking for Milka chocolate, click here. If you are looking for Milka couture, click here"?
Well, for a different statistically insignficiant sample, until this year, I'd had various forms of PDA (I think I've been through about 6 in that time, as new features/smaller size became available) for around 10 years now, and struggled to manage my life without one. My problem is that I have an appalingly bad memory when it comes to appointments and peoples' names, so the fact that I can carry my diary and address book comfortably in my pocket and have it automatically update whenever I dock it with my computer means that I've become pretty dependent on it (and don't find myself booking dinner parties on the day of an FA Cup replay, unlike one of my mates last week).
The only reason that I've no longer got one is that I've now got an Orange SPV phone, which has pretty much all of the PDA functionality that I require, only in a nice phone sized package.
No. I'm specifically talking about what we knew then. If you want an example try "In Shifting Sands", a film made by Scott Ritter, a former UN Chief Inspector In Iraq , which I saw before the war, so I'm reasonably sure Blair could have done. In it, he states that by 1995, both he and another former Chief Weapons inspector, Rolk Ekeus, believe Iraq was "Fundamentally Disarmed". There's plenty of other information available at the time that certainly gave strong cause for doubt at an absolute minimum, and there were plenty of people that had those doubts. However, Blair ignored all of this (or certainly made no reference to any of it) when making his dire warnings about the threat.
Well I hope you don't end up as a lawyer!
I'll be a voter instead.
There is a huge moral difference between being mistaken, and deliberately lying.
Have you ever read The Ethics of Belief by William K. Clifford? If you are mistaken because you refuse to read/take notice of/mention any evidence that might contradict your views, then in my view there isn't a great deal of difference. In one you are making a statement which you know to be false, and in the other you are making a statement that you should know (and have a responsibility to know) is false. To quote from the above article "he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him".
He is (or at least should be) in a position of trust, and when he makes statements like "What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons,", when quite clearly the evidence had not established this beyond doubt (and there was no mention anywhere in the dossier, or in any other statement that I've seen Blair make that this contradictory evidence even existed), then I struggle to see where the great moral difference is.
Personally, I don't consider it acceptable that a Prime Minister can take my country to war on the basis that he was too ignorant to understand the plentiful evidence available to him at the time that the WMD almost certainly did not exist in Iraq, and that Saddam offered no immediate threat to this country. If you do, then I guess we'll have to differ.