The main thing I'm excited about with Firefox 3 is the memory leak fixes. I'll use my laptop, hibernate, wake the system up, and keep FireFox 2 running the whole time. After a day or two, FireFox's memory usage climbs to 500MB or more. I do have a plugin that lets me restart Firefox without losing any tabs, but it can take a good 5 minutes for Firefox to shut itself down once it gets to 500MB+. I've switched my wife to Firefox and she notices the same thing on her computer. She'll complain about her computer being slow and the first thing I'll ask is "When's the last time you restarted Firefox?" Invariably, it will have been a week and a restart of Firefox speeds her system up. From what I've heard, Firefox 3 is a lot better when it comes to memory usage.
I also have an issue with a phantom toolbar that appears after waking up from hibernation and Flash doesn't seem to want to work right in Firefox 2 despite uninstalling and reinstalling both Firefox and Flash. I'm hoping that FireFox 3 will fix these issues also.
Which is how we tossed all of the Nigerian scam operators behind bars. And now that we're safe from that menace, I can conduct my business with helping Prince Immagonnascamya transfer his millions in peace.
They could send the decrypt code via e-mail... from an account they hacked into. Or they could send it via mail. Only first it would go to an "innocent" (in that they don't know what they are doing) relayer. The relayer gets a big envelope, opens it up and takes out a smaller envelope. The relayer buys stamps for that envelope (they are promised reimbursement from the "small overseas business" they think they are working for) and sends it out. Even if you trace it to the relayer, you'll be hard pressed to make it any further than that.
Putting aside foreign stuff for a second. I want all of the Dexter's Lab episodes and Courage the Cowardly Dog episodes on DVD or mp4. I can't get them in this fashion unless I get some burned bootleg DVD on eBay. Why? The series "Reboot" only offered the first and third seasons on DVD. How does that make ANY sense?
Well, the answer of course is that it is expensive to assemble the episodes, make a DVD run, create all of the packaging, and then see them sit on the shelves while only a handful are sold. However, there's no reason why they can't have an iTunes-style shop where you could buy individual episodes (or entire seasons) of shows and burn them onto DVD yourself. It would require basically zero overhead to put a show online. (Yes, hosting costs and all that, but averaged over the number of shows they could be putting online and it would be pennies a day.)
Oh, and I'd add Duckman to the list. Everyone's favorite duck detective with the twin sister of his dead wife, three sons in two bodies, and a comatose mother-in-law with so much gas that she's a fire hazard deserves a DVD release!
Apparently the CG child porn ban was in response to some child porn purveyors taking their images, running them through some Photoshop filters until they looked entirely CG, and then claiming they were entirely CG and didn't involve children. Assuming you only have access to the final image, how do you tell whether it was made from a non-CG image or by a talented CG artist?
I think it is actually worse than copyright violation. It is fraud. When I have an ad on my website, it is an indicator that I either a) really like the product/service the advertised company is providing, b) will profit from viewing/clicking the ad, or c) really think that the charity being advertised is worthwhile. Phorm ads wouldn't fit any of those categories and yet are purposefully being injected into pages to make it look like A, B, or C are true. It is giving the impression of me approving/profiting from an ad that I am not approving and profiting from. In addition, it is taking money out of my pocket (or a charity's pocket) to make Phorm money. That's fraudulent activity in my book.
Good point. Not only could a person's image be tainted by such a swap ("how dare you support that you sell-out!"), not only could you wind up losing money (no clicks on your real ads = no money), but someone could get injured/scammed based on your reputation ("Blogger X whom I trust is recommending Product Y. How bad can it be?"). Combine the two and you could even be sued ("You recommended Product Y and it injured me. I'll see you in court!"). Not that a lawsuit like that might have any merit, but it could still be a pain and cost you time and money.
This sounded awfully familiar to me and now I remember where I've heard all this before. Spyware. There are certain spyware programs that, when installed on your computer, would replace the ads that a site displayed with its own ads. Website owners were outraged by this. At least with the spyware, though, the user had to have the application installed on the computer and could remove it (sometimes with much difficulty). With Phorm, the "spyware" is installed on the ISP's systems. You, as a user, aren't aware that it is there and have no say as to whether it replaces ads or not. (Yes, they give you a chance to opt-out, but I can guarantee they'll hide the page for doing so as much as possible.)
I think we need to call Phorm what it is: Spyware on a massive scale.
That "teachers don't work much" sentiment irritates me too. I'm not a teacher, but my wife was. I say "was" because she's currently a stay at home mom. Her pay was never that great and when our second child was on the way we crunched the numbers: Her salary minus extended day care for our older son minus daycare for our second child would have left her with $3,000 per year. Yes, only three grand per year! And that's not taking out gas costs or any other expenses she would incur. For the hours she was working, she literally could make more money flipping burgers at McDonald's than teaching.
And she would have gotten a lot less stress too. I can't count how often she had to stay late to help a student (sometimes only to have that student not show up) or how many times she had to deal with an irate parent. ("What do you mean my kid didn't get an A? I want my kid to get an A! It's your fault my kid didn't get an A.") She was in a private school and many of the parents seemed to think that, because they paid for school admission, they owned her and were entitled to have their kids on the honor roll. Yes, being on the honor roll was thought of as automatic by parents, not something students earned through hard work and good grades.
She got out just in time too. Apparently, a couple of teachers (good ones, mind you) have been let go because that same group of parents decided to organize to "get rid of" teachers they had a beef with. My wife, on a visit back to the school, overheard some parents discussing which teacher to go after next. When teachers face working conditions like you described, lousy pay, students who don't want to learn, and parents who could care less so long as the teacher gives their kids A's, of course the good teachers will wind up leaving. I'm really fearful about the kind of education that my kids will get. I can only hope that they either wind up with new teachers (who have not yet been beaten down by the system) or are lucky enough to get those rare "diamond" teachers who seem to stay great no matter what pressure the system heaps on them.
Except that I don't think I could point to a *single* act that would have led to Thompson's career as a lawyer being over. Insulting a judge would come very close, though.
How about a War On War? As long as we wage the War On War, the President needs to keep unlimited power. Only after there is no more War can we end our War and resume normal Presidential power levels.;-)
Back when I tried the Alpha version of Lotus Symphony, I really liked the UI and the fact that I could import WordPro documents (as we're standardized on *shudder* Lotus WordPro here at work). What I didn't like was that Symphony would change all OpenOffice.org file associations to itself when it was installed and every time it was run. There was no option to leave the file associations alone. (Much less an opt-in to change them in the first place.)
Since then, I've kept a wary eye on Symphony. Their latest release notes state: "It is now supported to change the file types to be associated with IBM Lotus Symphony during installation." In addition, the notes talk about a "File Type Associations panel." Hopefully, this means that they realized the error in the Alpha version and have made the file associations opt-in both on install and on program launch.
(If anyone knows for sure, I'd be happy to hear what the latest version does with file type associations.)
Now hands up who can actually remember the userid and password they use for their registrar? (ps feel free to mail them in ). Pretty much every time I need to do something with the registrar I have to request the password or, depending on the registrar, you can fax a request, on letterhead, through to them for action.
Has the author ever heard of any of the dozen password management tools? I use Password Safe to store my passwords. This way I can log into my registrar account without actively remembering the password. If I need to see the password, though, Password Safe lets me edit the entry and see the password. Considering that Password Safe is free (as are many of the other programs), it seems to be a no brainer. If you are having that much trouble remembering your registrar password then install a password management program and save yourself the hassle of requesting the password each time you go to your registrar's website.
Actually, these rulings against the RIAA seem to be getting more and more common. I think that word is getting around amongst the judges about these lawsuits and they are starting to get skeptical. We're not at the point yet where the RIAA will be forced to give up this tactic, they could probably tweak it a bit to get a few more years out of it, but it will likely get harder and harder for them to continue the lawsuits as they are today.
If someone's going to try and set off something that goes bang via radio, or other wireless means, it strikes me that they're going to go to considerable effort to keep such activities hidden. They certainly would not do so in a hugely-long border-crossing line, where there was absolutely no way to move anywhere but through the guard posts, in a minivan that stands out like a solar flare and has ham radio callsign plates to boot!
This reminds me of my favorite security theater stories. Photographers (professional or amateur) being harassed for taking photographs in a public place. Mostly, they are harassed by security guards with an overinflated sense of authority, but sometimes are harassed by actual police officers. The photographer is inevitably using a large DSLR camera and is accused of (or it is implied that he is) taking those photographs with some terrorist purposes in mind. As if a terrorist would use a large, highly visible DSLR camera and not a small, easily concealable point and shoot camera or an even smaller, even easier to conceal camera phone.
Combine that with airport security taking away water bottles and tiny screwdrivers and it becomes quite obvious that much of our "Homeland Security" is really just "Homeland Security Theater."
Statistically speaking there is a 1 in 375,000 chance the child will be abducted. The point is that the chance the child will be abducted is so low there doesn't really need to be ANY need for security. As a deterrent, or otherwise. So why waste money on security for soemthing that A) isn't really needed and B) probably isn't very secure? To ease the mind of the parents. Security, deterrent or otherwise, isn't the point.
(NOTE: I work in a hospital.) Probably because the lawsuit that would result if that 1 in 375,000 happened in your hospital and you had no security system in place would be really expensive both in terms of settlement and bad PR. In fact, the bad PR alone could cripple your maternity ward. Imagine if you and your spouse are expecting a child and the local news reports on a recent abduction from a hospital that had no security against infant abductions and still wasn't planning on getting one. You would likely not consider delivering at that hospital.
At the hospital I work in, the infant's RFID badge automatically sets off a "Code Stork" when the baby is moved past a certain point. Once a "Code Stork" is announced, designated staff members across the entire hospital leave their desks/posts and position themselves in predetermined spots, blocking every available exit. I take the Web Babies photos from maternity for posting on the web and happened to be near maternity one day when a Code Stork went off. As I walked back to my office, I had to pass through multiple staff members guarding against infant abduction. You can bet that, had I been carrying a baby, I wouldn't have gotten very far!
Even if the chance of child abduction is very low, I don't see a system like this as "security theater", but as both necessary and useful. (It's the type of system that you hope never has to be used, but you're happy that it is in place when it is needed.)
Maybe the eye candy was "extra bloat", but I do think it helped attract customers who would've stuck with ME otherwise. And that's a good enough goal in itself: the DOS branch was fundamentally less reliable and less secure than the NT branch. If a little bloat is what it took to get people off of the weaker branch, giving them a more solid OS and making developers' lives easier, then so be it.
Plus, you can turn off most of the "eye candy" in XP. Right-click on the taskbar->Choose Properties->Click on the Start Menu tab->Choose Classic Start Menu. Combine that with the Windows Classic theme in Display Properties and you have an OS that looks like more like Win2K did. It's the first thing I do with any Windows XP installation.
Of course, I don't exactly keep my XP system in "Classic Mode." I've installed LClock and Free Launch Bar. The former changes the look of the system clock and lets me change the Start Menu button to another image (a Windows logo that I mocked up). The latter changes my QuickLaunch bar to allow for submenus and other visual improvements.
The article estimates a 2010/2011 launch date. So we're at least 2 years off from an actual product. Meanwhile, I've heard many times of huge CD/DVD-style discs which would hold tremendous amounts of data. Inevitably, the company making the announcement either vanishes entirely or makes a few more announcements before postponing the release date and *then* vanishing entirely. I'd be happy to see a 1TB "DVD-R"-style disc, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
I'm far from an Apple fanboy. All of my systems run Windows XP. I haven't even used a Mac in years. When I consider alternative OSes for my own use (should Windows 7 be as big a flop as Vista), I look to Ubuntu Linux. Still, I recognize that Apple's systems represent a nice user-friendly alternative for the Windows environment and they stand to gain the most from a Win7 flop.
In Microsoft's defense, there's a thin line they have to walk here. People already aren't enthused about Vista. If they hype up Windows 7 too much then they lose Vista sales to people who would rather wait for Windows 7. Plus, they run the risk of having to cut features, thus bursting the hype bubble, disappointing those people who waited through Vista for Windows 7, and losing more customers to Apple (and possibly to Linux as well). If, however, they don't hype Windows 7 enough, then people will see Vista as Microsoft's only option and will seriously look at Apple (and possibly Linux as well) for their future upgrade paths. This scares Microsoft as it is harder to convince an "Apple convert" to come back to Windows than it will be to convince XP holdouts (like myself) to upgrade to Windows 7.
They could play terminology games to get past this, then. Don't call it a "virtual machine." Call it a "Backwards Compatibility Application Layer." Also, it wouldn't load up a second desktop with a second Start menu, etc, but would rather load each application as if that app were running natively. Sure, techies would know that they were running Old Application X in the equivalent of a VMWare session, but Joe User would only know that he bought Windows 7 and it works just fine running that old program that he needed to run.
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The main thing I'm excited about with Firefox 3 is the memory leak fixes. I'll use my laptop, hibernate, wake the system up, and keep FireFox 2 running the whole time. After a day or two, FireFox's memory usage climbs to 500MB or more. I do have a plugin that lets me restart Firefox without losing any tabs, but it can take a good 5 minutes for Firefox to shut itself down once it gets to 500MB+. I've switched my wife to Firefox and she notices the same thing on her computer. She'll complain about her computer being slow and the first thing I'll ask is "When's the last time you restarted Firefox?" Invariably, it will have been a week and a restart of Firefox speeds her system up. From what I've heard, Firefox 3 is a lot better when it comes to memory usage.
I also have an issue with a phantom toolbar that appears after waking up from hibernation and Flash doesn't seem to want to work right in Firefox 2 despite uninstalling and reinstalling both Firefox and Flash. I'm hoping that FireFox 3 will fix these issues also.
Not to nitpick or anything, but at $31,000 per minute, an hour outage would cost $1,860,000, not $31,000.
Which is how we tossed all of the Nigerian scam operators behind bars. And now that we're safe from that menace, I can conduct my business with helping Prince Immagonnascamya transfer his millions in peace.
Yes. They might get tracked down and placed in a nice cell in Guantanamo Bay. Right next to you since you were "sending money to terrorists."
They could send the decrypt code via e-mail... from an account they hacked into. Or they could send it via mail. Only first it would go to an "innocent" (in that they don't know what they are doing) relayer. The relayer gets a big envelope, opens it up and takes out a smaller envelope. The relayer buys stamps for that envelope (they are promised reimbursement from the "small overseas business" they think they are working for) and sends it out. Even if you trace it to the relayer, you'll be hard pressed to make it any further than that.
Well, the answer of course is that it is expensive to assemble the episodes, make a DVD run, create all of the packaging, and then see them sit on the shelves while only a handful are sold. However, there's no reason why they can't have an iTunes-style shop where you could buy individual episodes (or entire seasons) of shows and burn them onto DVD yourself. It would require basically zero overhead to put a show online. (Yes, hosting costs and all that, but averaged over the number of shows they could be putting online and it would be pennies a day.)
Oh, and I'd add Duckman to the list. Everyone's favorite duck detective with the twin sister of his dead wife, three sons in two bodies, and a comatose mother-in-law with so much gas that she's a fire hazard deserves a DVD release!
Apparently the CG child porn ban was in response to some child porn purveyors taking their images, running them through some Photoshop filters until they looked entirely CG, and then claiming they were entirely CG and didn't involve children. Assuming you only have access to the final image, how do you tell whether it was made from a non-CG image or by a talented CG artist?
I think it is actually worse than copyright violation. It is fraud. When I have an ad on my website, it is an indicator that I either a) really like the product/service the advertised company is providing, b) will profit from viewing/clicking the ad, or c) really think that the charity being advertised is worthwhile. Phorm ads wouldn't fit any of those categories and yet are purposefully being injected into pages to make it look like A, B, or C are true. It is giving the impression of me approving/profiting from an ad that I am not approving and profiting from. In addition, it is taking money out of my pocket (or a charity's pocket) to make Phorm money. That's fraudulent activity in my book.
Good point. Not only could a person's image be tainted by such a swap ("how dare you support that you sell-out!"), not only could you wind up losing money (no clicks on your real ads = no money), but someone could get injured/scammed based on your reputation ("Blogger X whom I trust is recommending Product Y. How bad can it be?"). Combine the two and you could even be sued ("You recommended Product Y and it injured me. I'll see you in court!"). Not that a lawsuit like that might have any merit, but it could still be a pain and cost you time and money.
This sounded awfully familiar to me and now I remember where I've heard all this before. Spyware. There are certain spyware programs that, when installed on your computer, would replace the ads that a site displayed with its own ads. Website owners were outraged by this. At least with the spyware, though, the user had to have the application installed on the computer and could remove it (sometimes with much difficulty). With Phorm, the "spyware" is installed on the ISP's systems. You, as a user, aren't aware that it is there and have no say as to whether it replaces ads or not. (Yes, they give you a chance to opt-out, but I can guarantee they'll hide the page for doing so as much as possible.)
I think we need to call Phorm what it is: Spyware on a massive scale.
That "teachers don't work much" sentiment irritates me too. I'm not a teacher, but my wife was. I say "was" because she's currently a stay at home mom. Her pay was never that great and when our second child was on the way we crunched the numbers: Her salary minus extended day care for our older son minus daycare for our second child would have left her with $3,000 per year. Yes, only three grand per year! And that's not taking out gas costs or any other expenses she would incur. For the hours she was working, she literally could make more money flipping burgers at McDonald's than teaching.
And she would have gotten a lot less stress too. I can't count how often she had to stay late to help a student (sometimes only to have that student not show up) or how many times she had to deal with an irate parent. ("What do you mean my kid didn't get an A? I want my kid to get an A! It's your fault my kid didn't get an A.") She was in a private school and many of the parents seemed to think that, because they paid for school admission, they owned her and were entitled to have their kids on the honor roll. Yes, being on the honor roll was thought of as automatic by parents, not something students earned through hard work and good grades.
She got out just in time too. Apparently, a couple of teachers (good ones, mind you) have been let go because that same group of parents decided to organize to "get rid of" teachers they had a beef with. My wife, on a visit back to the school, overheard some parents discussing which teacher to go after next. When teachers face working conditions like you described, lousy pay, students who don't want to learn, and parents who could care less so long as the teacher gives their kids A's, of course the good teachers will wind up leaving. I'm really fearful about the kind of education that my kids will get. I can only hope that they either wind up with new teachers (who have not yet been beaten down by the system) or are lucky enough to get those rare "diamond" teachers who seem to stay great no matter what pressure the system heaps on them.
I prefer "spitzering himself".
Except that I don't think I could point to a *single* act that would have led to Thompson's career as a lawyer being over. Insulting a judge would come very close, though.
How about a War On War? As long as we wage the War On War, the President needs to keep unlimited power. Only after there is no more War can we end our War and resume normal Presidential power levels. ;-)
You forgot a candidate:
Rudy Guiliani: 9-11!
Back when I tried the Alpha version of Lotus Symphony, I really liked the UI and the fact that I could import WordPro documents (as we're standardized on *shudder* Lotus WordPro here at work). What I didn't like was that Symphony would change all OpenOffice.org file associations to itself when it was installed and every time it was run. There was no option to leave the file associations alone. (Much less an opt-in to change them in the first place.)
Since then, I've kept a wary eye on Symphony. Their latest release notes state: "It is now supported to change the file types to be associated with IBM Lotus Symphony during installation." In addition, the notes talk about a "File Type Associations panel." Hopefully, this means that they realized the error in the Alpha version and have made the file associations opt-in both on install and on program launch.
(If anyone knows for sure, I'd be happy to hear what the latest version does with file type associations.)
Has the author ever heard of any of the dozen password management tools? I use Password Safe to store my passwords. This way I can log into my registrar account without actively remembering the password. If I need to see the password, though, Password Safe lets me edit the entry and see the password. Considering that Password Safe is free (as are many of the other programs), it seems to be a no brainer. If you are having that much trouble remembering your registrar password then install a password management program and save yourself the hassle of requesting the password each time you go to your registrar's website.
Only the Soylent Green ones.
Actually, these rulings against the RIAA seem to be getting more and more common. I think that word is getting around amongst the judges about these lawsuits and they are starting to get skeptical. We're not at the point yet where the RIAA will be forced to give up this tactic, they could probably tweak it a bit to get a few more years out of it, but it will likely get harder and harder for them to continue the lawsuits as they are today.
That's ok, I thought it was referring to the Mozilla Labs application named Prism.
This reminds me of my favorite security theater stories. Photographers (professional or amateur) being harassed for taking photographs in a public place. Mostly, they are harassed by security guards with an overinflated sense of authority, but sometimes are harassed by actual police officers. The photographer is inevitably using a large DSLR camera and is accused of (or it is implied that he is) taking those photographs with some terrorist purposes in mind. As if a terrorist would use a large, highly visible DSLR camera and not a small, easily concealable point and shoot camera or an even smaller, even easier to conceal camera phone.
Combine that with airport security taking away water bottles and tiny screwdrivers and it becomes quite obvious that much of our "Homeland Security" is really just "Homeland Security Theater."
(NOTE: I work in a hospital.) Probably because the lawsuit that would result if that 1 in 375,000 happened in your hospital and you had no security system in place would be really expensive both in terms of settlement and bad PR. In fact, the bad PR alone could cripple your maternity ward. Imagine if you and your spouse are expecting a child and the local news reports on a recent abduction from a hospital that had no security against infant abductions and still wasn't planning on getting one. You would likely not consider delivering at that hospital.
At the hospital I work in, the infant's RFID badge automatically sets off a "Code Stork" when the baby is moved past a certain point. Once a "Code Stork" is announced, designated staff members across the entire hospital leave their desks/posts and position themselves in predetermined spots, blocking every available exit. I take the Web Babies photos from maternity for posting on the web and happened to be near maternity one day when a Code Stork went off. As I walked back to my office, I had to pass through multiple staff members guarding against infant abduction. You can bet that, had I been carrying a baby, I wouldn't have gotten very far!
Even if the chance of child abduction is very low, I don't see a system like this as "security theater", but as both necessary and useful. (It's the type of system that you hope never has to be used, but you're happy that it is in place when it is needed.)
Plus, you can turn off most of the "eye candy" in XP. Right-click on the taskbar->Choose Properties->Click on the Start Menu tab->Choose Classic Start Menu. Combine that with the Windows Classic theme in Display Properties and you have an OS that looks like more like Win2K did. It's the first thing I do with any Windows XP installation.
Of course, I don't exactly keep my XP system in "Classic Mode." I've installed LClock and Free Launch Bar. The former changes the look of the system clock and lets me change the Start Menu button to another image (a Windows logo that I mocked up). The latter changes my QuickLaunch bar to allow for submenus and other visual improvements.
The article estimates a 2010/2011 launch date. So we're at least 2 years off from an actual product. Meanwhile, I've heard many times of huge CD/DVD-style discs which would hold tremendous amounts of data. Inevitably, the company making the announcement either vanishes entirely or makes a few more announcements before postponing the release date and *then* vanishing entirely. I'd be happy to see a 1TB "DVD-R"-style disc, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
I'm far from an Apple fanboy. All of my systems run Windows XP. I haven't even used a Mac in years. When I consider alternative OSes for my own use (should Windows 7 be as big a flop as Vista), I look to Ubuntu Linux. Still, I recognize that Apple's systems represent a nice user-friendly alternative for the Windows environment and they stand to gain the most from a Win7 flop.
In Microsoft's defense, there's a thin line they have to walk here. People already aren't enthused about Vista. If they hype up Windows 7 too much then they lose Vista sales to people who would rather wait for Windows 7. Plus, they run the risk of having to cut features, thus bursting the hype bubble, disappointing those people who waited through Vista for Windows 7, and losing more customers to Apple (and possibly to Linux as well). If, however, they don't hype Windows 7 enough, then people will see Vista as Microsoft's only option and will seriously look at Apple (and possibly Linux as well) for their future upgrade paths. This scares Microsoft as it is harder to convince an "Apple convert" to come back to Windows than it will be to convince XP holdouts (like myself) to upgrade to Windows 7.
They could play terminology games to get past this, then. Don't call it a "virtual machine." Call it a "Backwards Compatibility Application Layer." Also, it wouldn't load up a second desktop with a second Start menu, etc, but would rather load each application as if that app were running natively. Sure, techies would know that they were running Old Application X in the equivalent of a VMWare session, but Joe User would only know that he bought Windows 7 and it works just fine running that old program that he needed to run.