I know the technical reason why, I'm just curious why they implemented it that way. The way it is implemented now, yours will be just another one of many comments that will make no sense whatsoever the next time I change my.sig.
However - and this is big - how can Microsoft change the habits and behavior of many millions of users? Netscape has almost become synonymous with "web browser" in the hearts and minds of millions. Particularly among the folks under 20 (lots and lots of people in my life), the phrase "I looked it up on Netscape" is used maybe more than once a day. I like to use much of Netscape as it is - familiar, reliable (as much as I need it to be), and always extremely quick.
Can Internet Explorer become more important and more used than Netscape? I guess anything's possible, but I think time might tell us otherwise.
Not saying this is exactly the same situation, but it's worth remembering that even the biggest of giants can fall to a concerted effort if they become complacent.
That said, I think the article used the concepts of "better" and "more relevant" interchangeably, when they are very much not.
This story comes down to the fact that people are generally lazy, so given a choice, they'll try to accomplish their goal as easily as possible. What an amazing revelation!
What's amazing to me is that a newspaper reporter would have the gall to try to act like this is anything new or different at all.
You miss the point. He's being an exemplar of the point he is trying to make. How brilliant!
While I agree with your points, (and, to be honest, I hope the time comes in the near future that ALL internet traffic is encrypted by default) I feel obligated to point out that this is from the BBC, and therefore all of your "in the US" statements are completely irrelevant.
Our recovery isn't providing jobs for the entry-level people who have been having trouble getting in.
In my experience, reasonably talented entry level people have been having more luck than most people with 3-4 years of experience but no particularly marketable skill. The basic problem is that the software developer market got flooded with far too many people looking for a way to make a quick buck. It will probably take a few more years of hard to find jobs and college students listening to people like you to get all those people who were only in it for the quick buck to look somewhere else for work before things start to become reasonable again.
The real problem is, if somebody is asking "Should I major in X for good job opportunities?" the answer is always no, no matter what X is. No one should ever pick a major just because the money is good.
Hmm. In other words, you mean to say that the software industry is virtually the same in that respect to every other private sector industry these days?
Tell me one (non-government) job in any industry that is guaranteed to pay off a thrity year mortgage and I'll give you a free cookie.
That way neither company falls under the GPLv3, yet you sell a hardware/software combo that is locked by DRM
I don't really think this situation is even a minor threat. The thing is that "you" can't legally sell the hardware/software combo- no one can. Just because SoftCorp doesn't make the keys available, doesn't mean that anyone else who gets the source from them is relieved of that responsibility. If you distribute SoftCorp's software, you are under all of the same obligations they are. If you were to distribute their software bundled together with hardware that only works with digitally signed binaries, you are still obligated to provide the signing key, even though you don't have it. Hence, you have no ability to legally distribute said combo.
Essentially this man-in-the-middle attack is only possible with a hardware and software combination which must always be sold independently of each other and where the eventual end user must perform the actual installation himself. It's a complete non-starter...
Re:Great... just what space entrepreneurs need...
on
Golf in Space
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· Score: 1
As you pointed out, the ISS is traveling at 17,000 miles per hour. No amount of force that could be imparted by a person to a golf ball via a golf club would be able to put the golf ball into a meaningfully different orbit than that of the ISS. I did the math in an earlier comment. Even if the cosmonaut intentionally hit the golf ball perfectly perpendicular to the ISS' line of travel, at a speed of 250 mph, it's orbit would only be 0.8 degress off the orbit of the ISS. If he can get it within 30 degrees of the right direction, it's less than half that.
Can Tiger Woods hit a golf ball at 250 miles per hour? Didn't think so. Neither can a guy in a space suit.
I don't personally feel comfortable making forecasts of orbital mechanics based on the acceleration vector of a human golf swing.
According to a previous post, the ISS orbits the earth at a relative velocity of about 17k miles per hour. I don't know the speed that a golf ball typically travels at, but for the sake of argument, let's be generous and say it's something ridiculously high like 250 miles per hour. Even if the cosmonaut in question purposefully hit the golf ball as hard as he could perpendicular to the ISS direction of travel, the orbit of the golfball would be less than a degree off of the orbit of the ISS. (about 0.8 degree by my math) A minor hook/slice would probably take years to even be able to measure.
This golf ball will be in virtually the same orbit as the ISS for as long as it's up there.
It's a PR gag, that's all it is. Sales of HBHG will shoot upwards, they get back in everyone's minds, never mind the lost case.
Those were also my thoughts when I read the article. The last two sentences confirmed it.
FTFA: The legal action has seen The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail shoot up the Amazon.co.uk bestseller chart from number 173 at lunchtime, to 102 by 2.30pm and was at 53 late this afternoon.
The depressing part is that this is turning into a Microsoft vs. Sony fight. Choosing between those to companies doesn't sit well with me, given their track record on doing things good for the consumer.
Last I checked, there was an easy solution to that quandry: Don't support either one. Problem solved.
I don't understand why there are so many commments here to the tune of "Well, it depends on what your writing," "It depends on the skills of your team," "It depends on what the phase of the moon is when you start your project," etc. What a bunch of hogwash.
It's incredibly simple, and I'll tell you how. Go to Google. Search for "framework". Through a few keywords related to the product that you intend to write if you want, but it's not really necessary. Adding a preferred language to the search may help. (I prefer the Google defalt- English.) Print out the results- at least the first page, and if you want, add the second and third pages for completeness. Skim through the results and cross out any that are clearly not relevant to your search. Cut out the rest and put them in a hat / jar / bowl / whatever. Then...
Take the hat / jar / bowl / whatever to the paper shredder and run them all through one at a time. Now, get back to work and quit wasting time on such a stupid question.
Or maybe more appropriately was Ben Franklin's quote: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
I prefer Bruce Schnier: "Trying to make bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet."
Really, until we all watch movies and hear music via a Matrix-plug in the back of our neck, anything we see or hear can be copied. And even then I wouldn't rule it out entirely. Sooner or later the media cartels are going to have to learn and accept that fact, or they are going to die out.
> As far as I can tell, IE7's tab implementation is only useful for people who never > plan to use more than 2-3 tabs at a time. Or have a larger screen res. ...and use their web browser full screen. I use 4 different computers regularly with screen resolutions ranging from 1024x768 to 1600x1200, but I tend to keep my browser windows about 800-900 pixels wide on all of them. Most websites just don't look good to me with a browser window any larger than that, plus it leaves me room for other applications.
Ah, yes, I *remember* when I was stuck with a 17" monitor and used 640x480 or 800x600 to avoid the need for squinting. My condolences.
In some ways, I'd prefer to have my old 17" monitor at work back. I was running 1600x1200 on my 17" CRT, but it has since been replaced by a 17" LCD that only runs at 1024x768.:(
On the other hand, my current desk has a window behind it, so I'll take the reduced resultion as an acceptable tradeoff for the substantially reduced glare. (Can't see people sneaking up behind me in the reflection anymore, though.)
What do you mean they're "dependent on oil exports?" They're the ones who are exporting oil, which would mean they would already have plenty for their needs...
They are dependent on their oil exports. Without the money they make from exporting oil, their economy would collapse. Hence, anything that they can do to decrease the amount of oil they use, and thus increase the amount they can export, helps their economy.
we fielded a number of questions and even complaints from customers saying "When are you going to give us tabbed browsing in IE." Now we've done that; IE7 has a very, very good tab implementation.
He must be using a pretty significantly different version of IE7 than the Beta 2 preview that I am using, because the tab implementation on my version is pretty terrible. Because the tabs have to share space with 9 different buttons/menus, I can only have about 3-4 tab names become virtually indistinguishable. In a Firefox window of the same size, I can have at least 8 tabs showing before the titles begin to lose meaning. As far as I can tell, IE7's tab implementation is only useful for people who never plan to use more than 2-3 tabs at a time.
And who thought it was a good idea to hide the menu until I press the Alt key?
Actually, having observed a decent amount of domestic dog behaivor, I think the original poster may be at least somewhat right. While I don't know whether this applies to other social animals, the fact that we have a very strong memory for previous social interactions is different from how wolves or domestic dogs behave. Most of a dogs ability to identify friendly or aggressive unknowns is based off of the recognition of body language and other visual cues, and memory of previous interactions with a given animal plays a much less prominent role than it does for humans. This has some interesting consequenses. On one hand, dogs will respond to these visual cues from other animals as well, not just other dogs, so it is possible, for example, for a person to learn these signals, and calm (or provoke) a strange dog. On the other hand, a dog that has never learned or has forgotten these signals, for whatever reason, may act in a very violent manner both without provocation and without warning, even around dogs or other animals that it knows well.
While you are right that the capacity to violence is not limited to humans, I suspect that we are at least somewhat unique in the extent that we hold grudges and are capable of premiditated violence in response to remembered actions. Violence between dogs is almost always in response to immediate circumstances, and (in my experience, at least) rarely due to something that happened in a previous encounter.
While most modern cultures have some concept of burial, I don't think this was true of many older civilizations, when it might have actually made a difference. I know at least some of the ancient cliff dwelling Native American societies, (Mesa Verde, for example), merely threw the dead bodies out of the caves down to the valley floor, along with their trash, at least in the winter.
If you want to argue that a candidate cannot send you an email once a day (or once an hour) then I think you are wrong. If you want to argue that a candidate cannot send you 1000 emails per hour shutting down your inbox, then I think you are right. You really do have to go to extremes to find cases where restricting political speech is justified and constitutional.
Actually, I don't really care how oeften they send emails to me. As far as I am concerned, there should be two restrictions.
a) Since I didn't provide my email address when I registered, I think they should be required to disclose where they got the address from, and, for elections that cover a specific region, how they know (or think they know) that I am registered in that region.
b) If I ask them to stop sending me emails, either because I am no longer of a resident of the district in which they are campaigning, or just because I am not interested, they should be required to stop.
That's it. They can send a hundred emails a day if they want, but if I ask them to stop, then they should stop. (and even if it's not legally required, they should have the common sense to know that harassing somebody into voting for you isn't likely to work.)
It's not just a matter of cost. 72% of the energy content of gasoline => 72% of the distance that you can drive on a tank of gas. Sometimes that can be a big deal...
And tell me, would you buy a new car that you knew you wouldn't be able to get fuel for outside of the state you lived in? Especially if you lived in Iowa or Nebraska?
A console doesn't have the margins to be viable independently... You can say that the they should sell them at a price point where they are viable... but I'd suggest such a price point likely doesn't exist!
This is a commonly repeated myth. The XBOX was only the second console that was not able to turn a per unit profit. Sony would still make plenty of money off the PS2 even if everyone who owned it used it only as a DVD player- In fact I suspect that would do better than most dvd player manufacturers these days. Microsoft took a gamble with both XBOXes that no other console manufacturer was ever willing to take, save Sega (and look how well that worked out for them...), because they were willing to throw away giant buckets of cash in an attempt to corner the market.
To say that political speech does not belong in email is just unamerican (and I use that phrase intentionally).
I never claimed that political speech does not belong in email. I get plenty of emails that are political in nature. Some I read and some I don't. I merely claimed that not all methods of sending political email messages are protected as free speech, just as not all methods of going door to door to talk to your (potential) constituents are protected. The example I gave was an example of a method that is not allowed. I never claimed that there weren't plenty of methods that were allowed. As far as I am concerned the same should be true of email.
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I know the technical reason why, I'm just curious why they implemented it that way. The way it is implemented now, yours will be just another one of many comments that will make no sense whatsoever the next time I change my .sig.
.sigs when you reply to them...
Always quote
However - and this is big - how can Microsoft change the habits and behavior of many millions of users? Netscape has almost become synonymous with "web browser" in the hearts and minds of millions. Particularly among the folks under 20 (lots and lots of people in my life), the phrase "I looked it up on Netscape" is used maybe more than once a day. I like to use much of Netscape as it is - familiar, reliable (as much as I need it to be), and always extremely quick.
Can Internet Explorer become more important and more used than Netscape? I guess anything's possible, but I think time might tell us otherwise.
Not saying this is exactly the same situation, but it's worth remembering that even the biggest of giants can fall to a concerted effort if they become complacent.
That said, I think the article used the concepts of "better" and "more relevant" interchangeably, when they are very much not.
This story comes down to the fact that people are generally lazy, so given a choice, they'll try to accomplish their goal as easily as possible. What an amazing revelation!
What's amazing to me is that a newspaper reporter would have the gall to try to act like this is anything new or different at all.
You miss the point. He's being an exemplar of the point he is trying to make. How brilliant!
While I agree with your points, (and, to be honest, I hope the time comes in the near future that ALL internet traffic is encrypted by default) I feel obligated to point out that this is from the BBC, and therefore all of your "in the US" statements are completely irrelevant.
Our recovery isn't providing jobs for the entry-level people who have been having trouble getting in.
In my experience, reasonably talented entry level people have been having more luck than most people with 3-4 years of experience but no particularly marketable skill. The basic problem is that the software developer market got flooded with far too many people looking for a way to make a quick buck. It will probably take a few more years of hard to find jobs and college students listening to people like you to get all those people who were only in it for the quick buck to look somewhere else for work before things start to become reasonable again.
The real problem is, if somebody is asking "Should I major in X for good job opportunities?" the answer is always no, no matter what X is. No one should ever pick a major just because the money is good.
Hmm. In other words, you mean to say that the software industry is virtually the same in that respect to every other private sector industry these days?
Tell me one (non-government) job in any industry that is guaranteed to pay off a thrity year mortgage and I'll give you a free cookie.
That way neither company falls under the GPLv3, yet you sell a hardware/software combo that is locked by DRM
I don't really think this situation is even a minor threat. The thing is that "you" can't legally sell the hardware/software combo- no one can. Just because SoftCorp doesn't make the keys available, doesn't mean that anyone else who gets the source from them is relieved of that responsibility. If you distribute SoftCorp's software, you are under all of the same obligations they are. If you were to distribute their software bundled together with hardware that only works with digitally signed binaries, you are still obligated to provide the signing key, even though you don't have it. Hence, you have no ability to legally distribute said combo.
Essentially this man-in-the-middle attack is only possible with a hardware and software combination which must always be sold independently of each other and where the eventual end user must perform the actual installation himself. It's a complete non-starter...
As you pointed out, the ISS is traveling at 17,000 miles per hour. No amount of force that could be imparted by a person to a golf ball via a golf club would be able to put the golf ball into a meaningfully different orbit than that of the ISS. I did the math in an earlier comment. Even if the cosmonaut intentionally hit the golf ball perfectly perpendicular to the ISS' line of travel, at a speed of 250 mph, it's orbit would only be 0.8 degress off the orbit of the ISS. If he can get it within 30 degrees of the right direction, it's less than half that.
Can Tiger Woods hit a golf ball at 250 miles per hour?
Didn't think so. Neither can a guy in a space suit.
I don't personally feel comfortable making forecasts of orbital mechanics based on the acceleration vector of a human golf swing.
According to a previous post, the ISS orbits the earth at a relative velocity of about 17k miles per hour. I don't know the speed that a golf ball typically travels at, but for the sake of argument, let's be generous and say it's something ridiculously high like 250 miles per hour. Even if the cosmonaut in question purposefully hit the golf ball as hard as he could perpendicular to the ISS direction of travel, the orbit of the golfball would be less than a degree off of the orbit of the ISS. (about 0.8 degree by my math) A minor hook/slice would probably take years to even be able to measure.
This golf ball will be in virtually the same orbit as the ISS for as long as it's up there.
It's a PR gag, that's all it is. Sales of HBHG will shoot upwards, they get back in everyone's minds, never mind the lost case.
Those were also my thoughts when I read the article. The last two sentences confirmed it.
FTFA:
The legal action has seen The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail shoot up the Amazon.co.uk bestseller chart from number 173 at lunchtime, to 102 by 2.30pm and was at 53 late this afternoon.
The case is expected to last two weeks.
The depressing part is that this is turning into a Microsoft vs. Sony fight. Choosing between those to companies doesn't sit well with me, given their track record on doing things good for the consumer.
Last I checked, there was an easy solution to that quandry: Don't support either one. Problem solved.
If it really comes down to that, do you think the XBox 360 won't bundle hd-dvd?
News Flash: The XBOX 360 is already out, and it doesn't bundle HD-DVD.
things aren't invented until they actually work.
Try explaining that to the patent office...
I don't understand why there are so many commments here to the tune of "Well, it depends on what your writing," "It depends on the skills of your team," "It depends on what the phase of the moon is when you start your project," etc. What a bunch of hogwash.
It's incredibly simple, and I'll tell you how. Go to Google. Search for "framework". Through a few keywords related to the product that you intend to write if you want, but it's not really necessary. Adding a preferred language to the search may help. (I prefer the Google defalt- English.) Print out the results- at least the first page, and if you want, add the second and third pages for completeness. Skim through the results and cross out any that are clearly not relevant to your search. Cut out the rest and put them in a hat / jar / bowl / whatever. Then...
Take the hat / jar / bowl / whatever to the paper shredder and run them all through one at a time. Now, get back to work and quit wasting time on such a stupid question.
Or maybe more appropriately was Ben Franklin's quote: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
I prefer Bruce Schnier: "Trying to make bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet."
Really, until we all watch movies and hear music via a Matrix-plug in the back of our neck, anything we see or hear can be copied. And even then I wouldn't rule it out entirely. Sooner or later the media cartels are going to have to learn and accept that fact, or they are going to die out.
Not that I will miss them.
> As far as I can tell, IE7's tab implementation is only useful for people who never
> plan to use more than 2-3 tabs at a time.
Or have a larger screen res.
Ah, yes, I *remember* when I was stuck with a 17" monitor and used 640x480 or 800x600 to avoid the need for squinting. My condolences.
In some ways, I'd prefer to have my old 17" monitor at work back. I was running 1600x1200 on my 17" CRT, but it has since been replaced by a 17" LCD that only runs at 1024x768.
On the other hand, my current desk has a window behind it, so I'll take the reduced resultion as an acceptable tradeoff for the substantially reduced glare. (Can't see people sneaking up behind me in the reflection anymore, though.)
What do you mean they're "dependent on oil exports?" They're the ones who are exporting oil, which would mean they would already have plenty for their needs...
They are dependent on their oil exports. Without the money they make from exporting oil, their economy would collapse. Hence, anything that they can do to decrease the amount of oil they use, and thus increase the amount they can export, helps their economy.
we fielded a number of questions and even complaints from customers saying "When are you going to give us tabbed browsing in IE." Now we've done that; IE7 has a very, very good tab implementation.
He must be using a pretty significantly different version of IE7 than the Beta 2 preview that I am using, because the tab implementation on my version is pretty terrible. Because the tabs have to share space with 9 different buttons/menus, I can only have about 3-4 tab names become virtually indistinguishable. In a Firefox window of the same size, I can have at least 8 tabs showing before the titles begin to lose meaning. As far as I can tell, IE7's tab implementation is only useful for people who never plan to use more than 2-3 tabs at a time.
And who thought it was a good idea to hide the menu until I press the Alt key?
Actually, having observed a decent amount of domestic dog behaivor, I think the original poster may be at least somewhat right. While I don't know whether this applies to other social animals, the fact that we have a very strong memory for previous social interactions is different from how wolves or domestic dogs behave. Most of a dogs ability to identify friendly or aggressive unknowns is based off of the recognition of body language and other visual cues, and memory of previous interactions with a given animal plays a much less prominent role than it does for humans. This has some interesting consequenses. On one hand, dogs will respond to these visual cues from other animals as well, not just other dogs, so it is possible, for example, for a person to learn these signals, and calm (or provoke) a strange dog. On the other hand, a dog that has never learned or has forgotten these signals, for whatever reason, may act in a very violent manner both without provocation and without warning, even around dogs or other animals that it knows well.
While you are right that the capacity to violence is not limited to humans, I suspect that we are at least somewhat unique in the extent that we hold grudges and are capable of premiditated violence in response to remembered actions. Violence between dogs is almost always in response to immediate circumstances, and (in my experience, at least) rarely due to something that happened in a previous encounter.
While most modern cultures have some concept of burial, I don't think this was true of many older civilizations, when it might have actually made a difference. I know at least some of the ancient cliff dwelling Native American societies, (Mesa Verde, for example), merely threw the dead bodies out of the caves down to the valley floor, along with their trash, at least in the winter.
If you want to argue that a candidate cannot send you an email once a day (or once an hour) then I think you are wrong. If you want to argue that a candidate cannot send you 1000 emails per hour shutting down your inbox, then I think you are right. You really do have to go to extremes to find cases where restricting political speech is justified and constitutional.
Actually, I don't really care how oeften they send emails to me. As far as I am concerned, there should be two restrictions.
a) Since I didn't provide my email address when I registered, I think they should be required to disclose where they got the address from, and, for elections that cover a specific region, how they know (or think they know) that I am registered in that region.
b) If I ask them to stop sending me emails, either because I am no longer of a resident of the district in which they are campaigning, or just because I am not interested, they should be required to stop.
That's it. They can send a hundred emails a day if they want, but if I ask them to stop, then they should stop. (and even if it's not legally required, they should have the common sense to know that harassing somebody into voting for you isn't likely to work.)
It's not just a matter of cost. 72% of the energy content of gasoline => 72% of the distance that you can drive on a tank of gas. Sometimes that can be a big deal...
And tell me, would you buy a new car that you knew you wouldn't be able to get fuel for outside of the state you lived in? Especially if you lived in Iowa or Nebraska?
A console doesn't have the margins to be viable independently... You can say that the they should sell them at a price point where they are viable... but I'd suggest such a price point likely doesn't exist!
This is a commonly repeated myth. The XBOX was only the second console that was not able to turn a per unit profit. Sony would still make plenty of money off the PS2 even if everyone who owned it used it only as a DVD player- In fact I suspect that would do better than most dvd player manufacturers these days. Microsoft took a gamble with both XBOXes that no other console manufacturer was ever willing to take, save Sega (and look how well that worked out for them...), because they were willing to throw away giant buckets of cash in an attempt to corner the market.
To say that political speech does not belong in email is just unamerican (and I use that phrase intentionally).
I never claimed that political speech does not belong in email. I get plenty of emails that are political in nature. Some I read and some I don't. I merely claimed that not all methods of sending political email messages are protected as free speech, just as not all methods of going door to door to talk to your (potential) constituents are protected. The example I gave was an example of a method that is not allowed. I never claimed that there weren't plenty of methods that were allowed. As far as I am concerned the same should be true of email.