Without Gates Microsoft runs the risk of becoming a faceless super-corporation focusing on sales rather than developing the tech that could give the company an edge.
But, Doctor Evil, that already happened.
Microsoft has not made any fundamental improvements to Windows since Windows 2000, and I'd have to look back even further than that to find any major improvements to Office.
There have been a number of open source projects over the years that have been kept under the control of a single source (by dual licensing, for example), and others that have ignored, ridden down, and flagrantly broken standards. There's been at least two high profile projects that have deliberately used embrace-end-extend to knock competing software (including other open source projects) out of the ring. Open source is not the same as open standards... hell, the software that really started the whole open systems movement in the '70s didn't have a good open source implementation until the '90s.
Both open source and open standards are important, vitally important, but they are not the same thing and mixing up the two just muddies the water and hurts both movements.
A lot of people are sticking to IE6 because the daft Vista-inspired interface changes in IE7 make it downright unpleasant to use.
It's hardly fair to knock back a browser because it's actively annoying to upgrade, especially when there are so many better reasons to steer clear of IE.
I consider a lot of the stuff that anti-virus software does to be over the line into malware, and I consider game software that installs a rootkit to scan for cheats to be malware.
Japan has had a much wider variety of platforms, with much less of an IBM-PC/AT-derived hardware monopoly, until very recently. The NEC PC-98 was the dominant home computer for most of the '90s, and was a hardware standard: games treated it like a console (or like the Apple II or Commodore-64), with a game boot disk.
So the kind of software rot I'm talking about wasn't a real issue until after Windows-95 wiped the PC-98 out.
The Pelamis is based on the relative motion of fixed segments, this is based on the flow of water through a tube.
Actually, it's based on water spinning a turbine.
At that level the Pelamis is based on oil spinning a turbine (or something similar, they don't go into a great deal of detail on how their hydraulic motors work). The source of the energy is the important bit, not the working fluid or power convertor design.
In the 70s and 80s it was common for games to bypass the operating system and talk directly to the hardware, for copy protection, to prevent cheating, for performance, for all kinds of reasons. Many of them booted directly and completely ignored the OS. Over the years these games were the first to break when new software and hardware came out, and badly behaved games got a bad reputation. Other countries haven't been through the experience of having badly behaved software rot because it couldn't be updated for new systems... yet.
You don't need GPS to locate the phone. The phone continually handshakes with multiple cells to support handoff between cells, and the phone company can use that information to locate and track you.
After reading a previous message about KOffice being available for the Mac, I thought I'd give it a try. There's a bunch of packages to fetch, so I decide to pull in everything.
Three days to fetch 3 gigabytes of data over Torrent, OK, I figure, most of that must be unnecessary, it shouldn't need to install everything just for KOffice. But no, I go to do the install, and it says it's going to need 3.1 GB of free disk space to do the install. Yes, I've got that, but I'm not curious enough about KOffice to install 3.1 GB of software that is almost certainly going to shove itself into/usr somewhere and be a pain to winkle out just to see it. And if all of KDE really needs 3.1 GB, what in hell do they have in there?
Hell, if the Nokia's technically comparable, that's a really low "Apple tax". Typically the Apple label costs more like forty percent, not thirty bucks.
So long as IE is built around the idea that it's possible, even in theory, to create a sandbox that is both leaky and secure, the Microsoft HTML control will continue to be the biggest channel for malware in the world.
We (the security community) have been saying this for a decade, and Microsoft keeps saying "this time for sure".
Don't bet that this time is the last time they say it.
what is it in Excel or Word that people don't need?
Word: people don't need the appalling document structure of Word that fakes nested content by changing paragraph and next-paragraph types on the fly. Unfortunately you have to copy this to retain compatibility with Word. The result? Documents that can't be globally editd, lists that change format when you try to rearrange them, tables that magically merge when you try and nest them,...
I find that I'm better off maintaining my documents in raw HTML rather than Word or Wordalike (Open Office, Pages) formats. For a while I used DocBook instead, but there are fewer and fewer tools for it.
Word needs to be completely torn down and rebuilt from scratch, or we need an open document format that doesn't replicate all the mistakes of Word.
Google's Blog claims that they started taking steps to anonymize their logs a year ago, keeping "only" 18 months worth of identifiable data, to be implemented "within a year's time".
It seems likely that this wouldn't have been soon enough for any of this material to have been anonymized before Viacom's suit, since it was filed the same month they made this announcement.
It's not just "IP addresses", it's "IP addresses and user names", and user names *are* personally identifiable information, because they can be trivially cross-referenced with other public information to identify individuals.
If you read the article I linked to, he describes getting a positron emitter and apparently even verifying the characteristic gamma rays from annihilations, exposing a vial of water to it, and reasoning that this produced homeopathically significant quantities of positronium in the process.
Given that "homeopathically significant quantities" includes "none", he's not even wrong about that. Not that it's useful information, mind you.
I'm almost inspired to write up a hoax article about creating homeopathically active dyes by exposing water to laser light, then diluting it 6C or so... and including an image of a blank canvas to demonstrate the quality of the result.:)
And to demonstrate that there is nothing so weird that the quacks won't latch onto it, when I googled on Positronium I discovered that someone is claiming that they have a homeopathic remedy created from the decay of Positronium.
Such gems as Since positronium is made up of both particle and anti-particle, it assumes a position mid way between matter and anti-matter. When it decays, it is converted into a pulse of pure energy. This threefold state has been picked up by a number of provers for whom the number 3 was prevalent in dreams and waking experiences. It also provides a convenient way to arrange and "map" (to see the map, a visual representation of the remedy, click here) the symptoms and themes of the proving, as we shall see later.
Holy mother of Mendeleev, what a load of collywobbles.
Oh, I'm sure it can happen, but it's rare enough that after 15 years of spam to my server, with bursts of traffic that led me to block several countries at the router simply because I couldn't afford the extra traffic from the SMTP handshakes from spam attempts, I've only seen rare indications of dictionary attacks, and none recently.
Wil McCarthy insists that his Wellstone... an artificial state of matter (or something of that nature) involving a grid of pseudo-atoms... isn't entirely science fiction.
The Wellstone The Collapsium Lost in Transition To Crush the Moon
Warning: I haven't been able to bring myself to read the final book in this series, the previous books have set it up as a serious downer and I've already got enough stress in my life as it is.
I suspect that they mean some kind of artifact that behaves like an atom for certain useful purposes, but without explaining what that artifact is and what makes it behave like an atom they're not actually explaining anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Without Gates Microsoft runs the risk of becoming a faceless super-corporation focusing on sales rather than developing the tech that could give the company an edge.
But, Doctor Evil, that already happened.
Microsoft has not made any fundamental improvements to Windows since Windows 2000, and I'd have to look back even further than that to find any major improvements to Office.
There have been a number of open source projects over the years that have been kept under the control of a single source (by dual licensing, for example), and others that have ignored, ridden down, and flagrantly broken standards. There's been at least two high profile projects that have deliberately used embrace-end-extend to knock competing software (including other open source projects) out of the ring. Open source is not the same as open standards... hell, the software that really started the whole open systems movement in the '70s didn't have a good open source implementation until the '90s.
Both open source and open standards are important, vitally important, but they are not the same thing and mixing up the two just muddies the water and hurts both movements.
A lot of people are sticking to IE6 because the daft Vista-inspired interface changes in IE7 make it downright unpleasant to use.
It's hardly fair to knock back a browser because it's actively annoying to upgrade, especially when there are so many better reasons to steer clear of IE.
I consider a lot of the stuff that anti-virus software does to be over the line into malware, and I consider game software that installs a rootkit to scan for cheats to be malware.
Japan has had a much wider variety of platforms, with much less of an IBM-PC/AT-derived hardware monopoly, until very recently. The NEC PC-98 was the dominant home computer for most of the '90s, and was a hardware standard: games treated it like a console (or like the Apple II or Commodore-64), with a game boot disk.
So the kind of software rot I'm talking about wasn't a real issue until after Windows-95 wiped the PC-98 out.
At that level the Pelamis is based on oil spinning a turbine (or something similar, they don't go into a great deal of detail on how their hydraulic motors work). The source of the energy is the important bit, not the working fluid or power convertor design.
The Pelamis is based on the relative motion of fixed segments, this is based on the flow of water through a tube.
In the 70s and 80s it was common for games to bypass the operating system and talk directly to the hardware, for copy protection, to prevent cheating, for performance, for all kinds of reasons. Many of them booted directly and completely ignored the OS. Over the years these games were the first to break when new software and hardware came out, and badly behaved games got a bad reputation. Other countries haven't been through the experience of having badly behaved software rot because it couldn't be updated for new systems... yet.
It's a learning experience. They will learn.
You don't need GPS to locate the phone. The phone continually handshakes with multiple cells to support handoff between cells, and the phone company can use that information to locate and track you.
After reading a previous message about KOffice being available for the Mac, I thought I'd give it a try. There's a bunch of packages to fetch, so I decide to pull in everything.
Three days to fetch 3 gigabytes of data over Torrent, OK, I figure, most of that must be unnecessary, it shouldn't need to install everything just for KOffice. But no, I go to do the install, and it says it's going to need 3.1 GB of free disk space to do the install. Yes, I've got that, but I'm not curious enough about KOffice to install 3.1 GB of software that is almost certainly going to shove itself into /usr somewhere and be a pain to winkle out just to see it. And if all of KDE really needs 3.1 GB, what in hell do they have in there?
Hell, if the Nokia's technically comparable, that's a really low "Apple tax". Typically the Apple label costs more like forty percent, not thirty bucks.
So long as IE is built around the idea that it's possible, even in theory, to create a sandbox that is both leaky and secure, the Microsoft HTML control will continue to be the biggest channel for malware in the world.
We (the security community) have been saying this for a decade, and Microsoft keeps saying "this time for sure".
Don't bet that this time is the last time they say it.
Not only that, but it might be illegal to do so.
Indeed, that is the point: it is unlikely that they implemented this before Viacom's lawsuit blocked them from putting it into production.
And with AVG, I'm becoming a little less paranoid with websites
That is, you're reducing your security because you believe AVG is providing you valid information about the reliability of websites.
what is it in Excel or Word that people don't need?
Word: people don't need the appalling document structure of Word that fakes nested content by changing paragraph and next-paragraph types on the fly. Unfortunately you have to copy this to retain compatibility with Word. The result? Documents that can't be globally editd, lists that change format when you try to rearrange them, tables that magically merge when you try and nest them, ...
I find that I'm better off maintaining my documents in raw HTML rather than Word or Wordalike (Open Office, Pages) formats. For a while I used DocBook instead, but there are fewer and fewer tools for it.
Word needs to be completely torn down and rebuilt from scratch, or we need an open document format that doesn't replicate all the mistakes of Word.
How much do you trust Microsoft?
Enough to keep your information in a program you can't use without paying Microsoft an annual fee?
Google's Blog claims that they started taking steps to anonymize their logs a year ago, keeping "only" 18 months worth of identifiable data, to be implemented "within a year's time".
It seems likely that this wouldn't have been soon enough for any of this material to have been anonymized before Viacom's suit, since it was filed the same month they made this announcement.
It's not just "IP addresses", it's "IP addresses and user names", and user names *are* personally identifiable information, because they can be trivially cross-referenced with other public information to identify individuals.
If you read the article I linked to, he describes getting a positron emitter and apparently even verifying the characteristic gamma rays from annihilations, exposing a vial of water to it, and reasoning that this produced homeopathically significant quantities of positronium in the process.
Given that "homeopathically significant quantities" includes "none", he's not even wrong about that. Not that it's useful information, mind you.
I'm almost inspired to write up a hoax article about creating homeopathically active dyes by exposing water to laser light, then diluting it 6C or so... and including an image of a blank canvas to demonstrate the quality of the result. :)
Almost.
Ah, now it makes more sense.
And now for something completely different...
And to demonstrate that there is nothing so weird that the quacks won't latch onto it, when I googled on Positronium I discovered that someone is claiming that they have a homeopathic remedy created from the decay of Positronium.
http://www.hominf.org/posi/posifr.htm
Such gems as Since positronium is made up of both particle and anti-particle, it assumes a position mid way between matter and anti-matter. When it decays, it is converted into a pulse of pure energy. This threefold state has been picked up by a number of provers for whom the number 3 was prevalent in dreams and waking experiences. It also provides a convenient way to arrange and "map" (to see the map, a visual representation of the remedy, click here) the symptoms and themes of the proving, as we shall see later.
Holy mother of Mendeleev, what a load of collywobbles.
So what does "a synthetic atom with an unknown proton/neutron character" mean?
Oh, I'm sure it can happen, but it's rare enough that after 15 years of spam to my server, with bursts of traffic that led me to block several countries at the router simply because I couldn't afford the extra traffic from the SMTP handshakes from spam attempts, I've only seen rare indications of dictionary attacks, and none recently.
Wil McCarthy insists that his Wellstone... an artificial state of matter (or something of that nature) involving a grid of pseudo-atoms... isn't entirely science fiction.
The Wellstone
The Collapsium
Lost in Transition
To Crush the Moon
Warning: I haven't been able to bring myself to read the final book in this series, the previous books have set it up as a serious downer and I've already got enough stress in my life as it is.
Tracking this problem with Adium here.
I suspect that they mean some kind of artifact that behaves like an atom for certain useful purposes, but without explaining what that artifact is and what makes it behave like an atom they're not actually explaining anything.