That is an urban legend easily dispelled if you think for two seconds what a large DEC would have done to a tiny Microsoft back in the day if it was real.
Have you read "Showstopper" - the story of NT? Much of it started life in the mind of Dave Cutler, the chief architect of VMS who, frustrated at DEC's inability to develop its replacement, upped and went to MS where he was allowed to head the NT team and bring most of his ideas with him.
It's not directly 'the next version' - it didn't (to my knowledge) use any of the VMS source code, for example, but large portions of it were certainly originally intended to form the basis of what VMS was supposed to become.
I say no - Mario 64, while obviously playable by kids, was certainly not only for kids.
Showing that some round bubbly characters with lots of primary colours are aimed solely at children doesn't mean that all are - that's bad logic. It's like saying that because Lego is made up of colourful bricks that you can put together in different patterns and is aimed at Children, then Tetris must be a "kiddie game".
Speaking of which, maybe the Japanese ought to be trying to forecast seismic phenomena 30 years out instead of weather?
I'm guessing by the statement "The machine tracks global sea temperatures, rainfall and crustal movement to predict natural disasters over the next centuries." that they are already doing this.
Why would I trust it as a starting point if I can't trust it as a source?
A specific example from last night. I was having a discussion on a different forum about Israel and their occupation of the Golan Heights. As part of the discussion, I went to the Wikipedia article about the Golan Heights and found a reference to UN Security Council Resolution 497. Based on that, I was able to lookup the actual resolution text to verify what had been written in Wikipedia.
I wouldn't have trusted Wikipedia's word alone (certainly not on something as contraversial as that), but it's a good place to get information which you can then verify through other sources.
But none of that addresses the key problem that for mail client-mail client encryption, you need to have either exchanged keys in advance (through some route that a hacker is unlikely to have intercepted) or you need both clients to be online, and communicating, simultaneously.
If you want to go down the former route, that's perfectly possible with current technology.
When I connet to an SSL server, do I need to go to a third-party site and download a certificate, manually install it, etc?
That involves both a real-time two way conversation between the browser and the server (with the browser passing down some random data and the server using that random data in its encryption) - without this, the encryption is pretty pointless (anyone requesting the key to decrypt the message would be given exactly the same one). This is not practical in email (certainly client to client encryption), which is asynchronous by nature - what happens if your email client and their email client aren't online at the same time?
It also requires that, as your browser has no way of knowing whether the site is trustworthy, the token has been signed by an signing authority that it does already trust, such as Verisign. If you want to set up an SSL connection to a server that has its own generated keys, then you do need to manually load the certificate.
And where would it get it from? If the information about where to get the certificate from is in the message, then anyone intercepting the message can also request it.
The problem is that to encrypt the 99.9% (and if you're talking about all internet traffic, it's going to be much higher than that) of traffic that's not important, you are using up vast amounts of processor power at every server to support this.
If you're just talking about your own traffic, all you are doing is making an even bigger red light flash that you might be doing something suspicious. If I send one message encrypted, the chances are that it'll go unnoticed by anyone. If I have encryption on everything, then anyone who ever looks at any of my traffic will notice and flag me as someone who looks like they might have something to hide.
The problem with doing it client side is that you need the certificate of anyone that's going to send you an email before you can read it. Once you have exchanged certificates, it is perfectly possible to encrypt every message. We use Entrust at work to do precisely that.
At least partly because, as I've mentioned, decent encryption is not free. For you, decrypting your single "Hello" message it's not an issue, but for the mail server encrypting all of the messages that it's sending is a different matter (in particular the negotiation of certificates for each different connection). Our mainframes and web servers have separate encryption cards for this reason.
Overkill, as in development effort spent delivering functionality that virtually no-one needs. And as for 'my computer working harder than it should' - if the message needs to be passed between MSN and Yahoo's networks, it's going to need to be decrypted in the middle to be converted between message formats. The processor cost of managing that many SSL connections at MS or Yahoo would be huge.
95% of your software no longer works (yes there are free alternatives to most things, but you already paid for a lot of expensive software so why can't you use it?)
How many don't run under WINE?
A few of your favourite websites (including your net banking) no longer work because of ActiveX, Flash 8 or severe rendering bugs.
I've rarely found a site that doesn't work OK on Firefox/Linux (or at least one that I'd want to visit). My bank's site works fine, and if it didn't I'd probably be changing banks.
If you are using a free operating system, you may have trouble installing software covered by patent laws (mp3 players for example).
I suppose I'm running a slight risk that I'm breaking the law by installing an MP3 or DVD player on my Linux server, but I'm not expecting to get raided by the cops for it any time soon.
You can no longer watch the games/videos/greetings your family emails you as executable files (although this is arguably an advantage).
Again, WINE - if you REALLY want to run executables that claim to have come from a member of your family.
Several pieces of your expensive hardware only has Windows drivers and now you can't use it.
That is a pain (although becoming a much more uncommon occurance for me), but by the same token, several of the accessories for my baby's pram wouldn't work on anyone else's pram, but I don't feel that the manufacturer is in any way monopolistic.
These days, for the average user who wants to surf the web, send/read emails, do a bit of word processing and maybe manage their music or photo collections there's virtually nothing that should keep them on Windows. Games, I'll agree, are more of a problem. But for most of the casual users that I know, this isn't really a major issue. I often end up supporting a collection of my wife's friends who know virtually nothing about PCs, and I'm getting to the stage where the next major problem that they get will result in me replacing their Windows installs with Linux, and I doubt many of them will even notice.
How often do you need encryption on your IM conversations? Personally, I'm rarely bothered about anyone eavesdropping on me asking my sister how she is.
It may occasionally be useful as an option, but it seems like overkill for the other 99.9% of conversations.
There was an incident in the UK recently where the Mayor of London accused a journalist of being like a Nazi. There almost certainly would have been no scandal if it hadn't been for the fact that the journalist was Jewish. However, he was and as a result of the uproar that followed, the Mayor was suspended from office for 4 weeks.
I mean, "downloading a movie", I have never been able to download (as in, completely download, burn and view at a later time) legally
But they aren't advertising that you can download, burn and view at a later time are they?
Here in the UK, if you are a Sky Movies subscriber you can download loads of movies, and view them at a later time (although I don't think you can burn them).
Chinese has two different dialects that are almost considered two separate languages
Two? There's at least 10 different major dialect groups, and most of these contain several sub-dialects. These days, most (but not all) of these use a common written form ('Simplified Chinese', a major overhaul of standard characters introduced in the 1980s - making GPs comment about Asian written languages being static even more funny), but with words often being pronounced totally differently. To some extent, Chinese words are more like western numerals than words (for instance, an Englishman seeing '2' reads the word 'two', whereas a Frenchman would read 'deux'). The different dialects also have different collections of 'tones' - most having 4, but some having 3.
Even without these dialect complications, Chinese is by far the hardest language either myself or my wife have ever tried to learn, and the almost total separation between the written and the spoken was a major part of that. My wife speaks several languages, including Korean (she worked out there for a year) pretty fluently, but with a whole year of nightschool Chinese, the most complex conversation we managed to put together while we were in China was "Hello. May I have 2 pink excercise books and a People's Daily, please".
If you are talking to a member of the public, you have to assume that they will use the everyday definition of a word, not the tech one.
But you should also be able to assume that even the average member of the public knows that the cardboard box that the computer arrived in is unlikely to be "the main part of the computer".
You complained about punctuation (actually you complained about spelling when his error was actually punctuation, but I'll skip over that), yet you started your sentence with a lower case letter and it wasn't even a full sentence (unless the first its was meant to be an abreviation of "It is", in which case you should have had an apostrophe in it). What you should have written was You should have used "its", not "it's".
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It's not directly 'the next version' - it didn't (to my knowledge) use any of the VMS source code, for example, but large portions of it were certainly originally intended to form the basis of what VMS was supposed to become.
I say no - Mario 64, while obviously playable by kids, was certainly not only for kids.
Showing that some round bubbly characters with lots of primary colours are aimed solely at children doesn't mean that all are - that's bad logic. It's like saying that because Lego is made up of colourful bricks that you can put together in different patterns and is aimed at Children, then Tetris must be a "kiddie game".
I've always been under the impression that the majority of MS's revenue from Windows comes via the bundling of it with virtually every PC sold.
I'm guessing by the statement "The machine tracks global sea temperatures, rainfall and crustal movement to predict natural disasters over the next centuries." that they are already doing this.
A specific example from last night. I was having a discussion on a different forum about Israel and their occupation of the Golan Heights. As part of the discussion, I went to the Wikipedia article about the Golan Heights and found a reference to UN Security Council Resolution 497. Based on that, I was able to lookup the actual resolution text to verify what had been written in Wikipedia.
I wouldn't have trusted Wikipedia's word alone (certainly not on something as contraversial as that), but it's a good place to get information which you can then verify through other sources.
But none of that addresses the key problem that for mail client-mail client encryption, you need to have either exchanged keys in advance (through some route that a hacker is unlikely to have intercepted) or you need both clients to be online, and communicating, simultaneously.
If you want to go down the former route, that's perfectly possible with current technology.
That involves both a real-time two way conversation between the browser and the server (with the browser passing down some random data and the server using that random data in its encryption) - without this, the encryption is pretty pointless (anyone requesting the key to decrypt the message would be given exactly the same one). This is not practical in email (certainly client to client encryption), which is asynchronous by nature - what happens if your email client and their email client aren't online at the same time?
It also requires that, as your browser has no way of knowing whether the site is trustworthy, the token has been signed by an signing authority that it does already trust, such as Verisign. If you want to set up an SSL connection to a server that has its own generated keys, then you do need to manually load the certificate.
And where would it get it from? If the information about where to get the certificate from is in the message, then anyone intercepting the message can also request it.
The problem is that to encrypt the 99.9% (and if you're talking about all internet traffic, it's going to be much higher than that) of traffic that's not important, you are using up vast amounts of processor power at every server to support this.
If you're just talking about your own traffic, all you are doing is making an even bigger red light flash that you might be doing something suspicious. If I send one message encrypted, the chances are that it'll go unnoticed by anyone. If I have encryption on everything, then anyone who ever looks at any of my traffic will notice and flag me as someone who looks like they might have something to hide.
The problem with doing it client side is that you need the certificate of anyone that's going to send you an email before you can read it. Once you have exchanged certificates, it is perfectly possible to encrypt every message. We use Entrust at work to do precisely that.
At least partly because, as I've mentioned, decent encryption is not free. For you, decrypting your single "Hello" message it's not an issue, but for the mail server encrypting all of the messages that it's sending is a different matter (in particular the negotiation of certificates for each different connection). Our mainframes and web servers have separate encryption cards for this reason.
Overkill, as in development effort spent delivering functionality that virtually no-one needs. And as for 'my computer working harder than it should' - if the message needs to be passed between MSN and Yahoo's networks, it's going to need to be decrypted in the middle to be converted between message formats. The processor cost of managing that many SSL connections at MS or Yahoo would be huge.
She didn't say the same about you.
I've rarely found a site that doesn't work OK on Firefox/Linux (or at least one that I'd want to visit). My bank's site works fine, and if it didn't I'd probably be changing banks.
I suppose I'm running a slight risk that I'm breaking the law by installing an MP3 or DVD player on my Linux server, but I'm not expecting to get raided by the cops for it any time soon.
Again, WINE - if you REALLY want to run executables that claim to have come from a member of your family.
That is a pain (although becoming a much more uncommon occurance for me), but by the same token, several of the accessories for my baby's pram wouldn't work on anyone else's pram, but I don't feel that the manufacturer is in any way monopolistic.
These days, for the average user who wants to surf the web, send/read emails, do a bit of word processing and maybe manage their music or photo collections there's virtually nothing that should keep them on Windows. Games, I'll agree, are more of a problem. But for most of the casual users that I know, this isn't really a major issue. I often end up supporting a collection of my wife's friends who know virtually nothing about PCs, and I'm getting to the stage where the next major problem that they get will result in me replacing their Windows installs with Linux, and I doubt many of them will even notice.
How often do you need encryption on your IM conversations? Personally, I'm rarely bothered about anyone eavesdropping on me asking my sister how she is.
It may occasionally be useful as an option, but it seems like overkill for the other 99.9% of conversations.
Here in the UK, if you are a Sky Movies subscriber you can download loads of movies, and view them at a later time (although I don't think you can burn them).
Erm, no.
Texting, as in "I am texting" is simply a continuous tense (in this case, present continuous) of the verb "to text".
"I was running" and "I was texting" are both past continuous tense.
On Sunday, Bush warned Americans that "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." I'll leave it up to you to decide whether Bush really does want a Christian war in the Middle East or whether he's just stupid and ignorant.
Even without these dialect complications, Chinese is by far the hardest language either myself or my wife have ever tried to learn, and the almost total separation between the written and the spoken was a major part of that. My wife speaks several languages, including Korean (she worked out there for a year) pretty fluently, but with a whole year of nightschool Chinese, the most complex conversation we managed to put together while we were in China was "Hello. May I have 2 pink excercise books and a People's Daily, please".
Sorry. Didn't notice that. I'll let you off.
Crime is stupid behavior, based on the belief that one won't get caught.
Only if you do get caught (and the punishment is sufficient once you are).
There's enough people out there living the good life on the proceeds from crime to suggest that it can be a worthwhile career choice.
its not it's.
You complained about punctuation (actually you complained about spelling when his error was actually punctuation, but I'll skip over that), yet you started your sentence with a lower case letter and it wasn't even a full sentence (unless the first its was meant to be an abreviation of "It is", in which case you should have had an apostrophe in it). What you should have written was You should have used "its", not "it's".
I really should get back to work...