I understand Mozilla's position here, but why make it an agreement? There are a number of Open Source licenses that allow (or require) the software to make certain notices to the end user. There is nothing in Firefox's license "agreement" that really requires the user to agree to. It's kind of like some of the windows OSS projects that put the GPL text into the "EULA" box, even though it doesn't require any actual agreement (from an end user at least). If the Ubuntu installer just put an "OK" button on the license notice rather than making it an "agreement" and requiring the user to accept it before they can install (or use?) the software, there probably wouldn't be any controversy, and the Mozilla folks could still protect their trademark, notify people about the lack of warranty, and handle any other information that they felt the need to convey.
It shouldn't mean dumbing it down, but all too often it ends up that way anyway, because it seems the quickest way to make something easy to use is usually to simply remove all the features or options that require a more advanced understanding of the software.
There's an old saying in the medical community about looking for Zebras when you should be looking for Horses. In their case it generally refers to the fact that common conditions are common and exotic conditions are rare. So when a patient walks into your office with a nasty cough, you should probably assume it's a cold or maybe the flu, rather than looking through all kinds of obscure diseases that might cause a cough exactly like the one the patient is describing.
In the context of this conversation, though, I'm going to adapt it to mean there's no reason that you shouldn't just use ext3 and be done with it. Seriously. There is a reason it's the default filesystem on virtually every modern Linux distribution, and I'm pretty sure that reason is not because the distribution maintainers all have an unreasonable grudge against Reiser, IBM, SGI, etc. I know it's not sexy, cool, and different just for the sake of being different, but it works, it works well, and it does everything you're asking for.
I guess I had never bothered to actually look up the Smart's fuel economy, but I had always assumed that it was a lot higher than that. Other than good fuel economy, why would anyone bother? Assuming the EPA numbers are accurate, it's hardly any better than my Corolla (well, before I added the roof rack, anyway). On our honeymoon to Europe, my wife and I rented a Renault that was a bit smaller than a Mini, and shaped a little like a Honda Fit. Not as sporty looking as a CRX, but IMO not ugly either. Completely bare bones car, but incredibly fun to drive - at least on the windy little roads where we were staying - and if I remember correctly (and did my conversions right), we got about 45-50 mpg even driving around on mountain roads the whole week. So those cars exist, just not in the US for some reason. Whether it has to do with US consumers or US vehicle regulations, I'm not really sure, but I don't think the problem lies with the car manufacturers.
True, and the Geo Metro got almost 60 in its prime. But both cars are about half the size of a Prius. If you are happy with a car that can fit 2 not quite full size adults, a bag of groceries, and not much else, buy a Smart, or maybe complain about the poor mileage of the MINI Cooper compared to similarly sized vehicles of yesteryear. Some of us would like to get that kind of gas mileage but see it as a higher priority to be able to fit our friends (or kids) and camping gear into our car. If there was really that high of a demand for the CRX or the Metro, their respective manufacturers would still be making them.
And just what are you comparing your Hybrid to, a Chevy Malibu? Many people would barely see half that savings in a typical week compared to a similarly sized non-hybrid, even with gas prices where they are now. You'd have to put almost 400 miles per week in a Prius to save $26 compared to driving a Corolla. At $4 per gallon an average American (i.e. one who drives 10-15k miles per year) would have to drive a Prius for 6-8 years just to break even on the car, all other things being equal. Of course, most people can't ignore the interest payments on their car, and it's hard to say what the price of gas will do over that time period. And then there's also the tax incentives to consider (which really don't work out to be quite as attractive as they sound, but that's a post for another day...)
Suffice to say, most people aren't buying their Hybrids just to save money on gas. Those who are either drive an awful lot, or aren't being very honest with themselves when they do the math.
There are a lot of problems with the current Social Security, but none of them would be solved by making it optional. The problem is that the people who don't need it would be the ones to opt out, the people who do need it would not be sufficient to support it, and we'd all end up paying for it some other way anyway. One of the problems is that it has turned into, as you say, a wealth transfer program. It wasn't actually designed to be that way, but it turned into it pretty quickly when somebody in Congress started complaining about all thqt money sitting around. Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's much that can be done now, to turn it back into the program it was intended to be.
The biggest problem that I see with Social Security is that the age that you can start collecting has not increased significantly (from 65 to 67) since the program was established, while our average life expectancy has increased by almost ten years. This results in people living off Social Security for a much longer time, and therefore puts a much larger strain on the people who are paying into it. Of course, this ties in with the main point of this article. Surprise, surprise, people are working longer because people are living longer. Whether because they haven't saved up enough money - it's a lot harder to save up enough to last you 15 years than 5 - or because they just want to keep working. Granted I don't know that many people at retirement age, but everyone I know who is still working at 65 is doing so because they enjoy their work, not because they have to. My father is a college professor, and he recently had a student who started college when she was over 65. She got her college degree at 70, and went on to business school because she had started doing accounting work for her sons' business, and wanted to be able to get more involved.
At least with regards to carbon dating, it has been known for some time that strict carbon dates are not accurate. These are referred to as "uncalibrated" dates. The explanation that I remember seeing is that the atmospheric ratio of C14/C12 has not been constant over the earth's history, but this may be a factor as well. At any rate, carbon dates for at least the last 15,000 years can be calibrated - that is, the concentration of C14 in the object being tested can be compared to the concentration of C14 in an object of a known age (e.g. from tree rings, ice cores, documented historical sites) to get a more accurate assessment of an objects age. In some cases this can lead to objects being considerably older than originally thought. For example, an uncalibrated carbon date of 9,000BC corresponds to a calibrated carbon date of nearly 11,000BC.
I think there were a lot of gameplay elements of DN3D that have still never been fully replicated in any game that I've played. (Admittedly I've fallen a bit out of the FPS gaming scene since the later days of Return to Castle Wolfenstein.) I still remember the first time I walked into a room full of pipe bombs left waiting for me, and frantically backpedaling to get out of the room before they went off. I also liked how you could trigger pipe bombs even after you had died. It made for some great revenge moments.
One of my favorite tactics was placing the laser tripmines into door frames. If done right they were completely undetectable when the door was closed, and would give anyone who opened the door a nasty surprise. The catch was that their blast radius wasn't that large, so for a big doorframe you needed to put them on both sides, which was pretty tricky to accomplish without getting blown up yourself. After a while the people I played with got pretty good at avoiding the explosions, but they still made for a good way to keep track of where people were on the map.
In the USA this is social security and medicare and medicaid and the various state programs that compliment them.
"Hi there, Social Security. You're looking very nice today. Did you drop a few pounds around the middle?" Oh... You meant "complement". Sorry...
More seriously, the slowdown in population growth has a little less to do with women's rights and a lot more to do with the changing demographic profile of our country. Ever since the start of the baby boomer generation, more of our population has been moving off of farms and into cities and suburbs. As that happens, the growth rate has naturally fallen accordingly.
Check out the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel". The author makes a pretty convincing argument that the difference in development between different cultures is based primarily on how early each individual culture developed agriculture, which in turn is dependent more than anything else on how suitable the area they live in was for developing agriculture. For example, 5 out of the 6 large domestic animals and almost all of the worlds most productive crops are native to central Eurasia, and quickly spread throughout the rest of Europe and Asia. The sole other domesticated animal and many of the other productive crops were native to Central and South America, which at the time they were "discovered" by Europeans was home to the most advanced civilization outside of Eurasia. (In particular, they where the only civilization outside Eurasia to develop literacy.) On the other extreme, the most "primitive" of modern people are the Aboriginees of Australia, a continent that was almost completely unsuitable for basic agriculture, and the only continent where food production was never developed natively.
More to your point, "cooperation" (from a societal standpoint) only meaningly develops when a society has developed food production to the point where it can afford to have a large population of people who are dedicated to pursuits other than gathering food. The problem in Sub-Saharan Africa is that none of the civilizations had yet developed to that point (due to lack of native domesticable plants and animals) before the arrival of Eurasian influence. As a result, while they have access to Eurasian technology, they are still in many ways playing catch-up in the area of societal development. The difference in Africa versus the Americas and Australia was that in Africa the native population was left largely in place by European explorers, while in the Americas and Australia, the native populations were mostly replaced by settlers from Europe, who brought with them the enormous head start of Eurasian food processing and societal development.
That's going a little overboard isn't it? I think the trick is to take the batteries out when grandparents leave, but still keep them around. Then when they go to visit their granparents for a week, you put the batteries back in... Same end result (unless your parents/in-laws are much more tolerant of the noisy toys than you are), but no need to give away perfectly functional toys, or bend the truth with your family.
I don't see any problem with it. His statement was that from an interface perspective the browser should treat HTTPS with a self signed certificate the same as plain HTTP. So the browser wouldn't do anything to notify that the connection was protected, but it also wouldn't complain to the user if the certificate hasn't changed. I don't think anyone who understands the issue thinks that self signed certs should be treated the same as signed certs. What a lot of people are complaining about is that Firefox (and IE) shouldn't be treating self-signed certs as worse then plain HTTP. At worst, they are no better than plain HTTP, and the browsers should treat them accordingly.
Does your SSH client give you four pages of scary error messages before it lets you log into a new server?
We analyzed the most current version of TrueCrypt available at the writing of the paper, version 5.1a. We shared a draft of our paper with the TrueCrypt development team in May 2008. TrueCrypt version 6.0 was released in July 2008. We have not analyzed version 6.0, but observe that TrueCrypt v6.0 does take new steps to improve TrueCrypt's deniability properties (e.g., via the creation of deniable operating systems, which we also recommend in Section 5).
(emphasis mine)
The hidden OS feature was a new feature added after their analysis, and as such, they don't actually discuss its effectiveness.
Cache is not a history. Cache is a snapshot in time. And it sounds like Google's snapshot just happens to be more recent than Baidu's, which doesn't surprise me one bit.
I comped the mans bill for the sundae he never got and had a good portion of the restaurant employees gathered to see if the trainee would ever solve the melting mystery. She never did and until I opened the first page of The Lost Blogs the six sundaes in the microwave was the stupidest thing I have ever seen.
And not only that, but starting now, you are the greatest asshole that I have never met.
I've played around a bit with AS3, and what I've found so far are a lot more annoyances than any useful additions. More importantly, it is not compatible with JS 1.5. In my experience so far, classes are only really "necessary" in so far as people whose first experience with OOP was C++/Java/C# don't seem to be willing to learn anything else. I've worked on many large projects written in JavaScript, and while there are a lot of annoyances that appear in JavaScript in large applications, all of them are easily solvable while still working inside the Prototype structure. Many of them can be worked around now, although in many cases the workarounds shouldn't be necessary. These are the sort of things that I think they should be looking at in a new version of JavaScript. Let's fix the minor annoyances rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Private Variables - I know Crockford insists that you can do private variables in JavaScript using closures, but his method doesn't work cleanly with the prototype model of inheritance. Given the choice between private variables and inheritance, I'll choose inheritance every time.
Namespaces - The current commonly accepted practice of using objects in place namespaces works fine for declaring a namespace, but we need a better way to "import" namespaces than just assigning them to a global variable, a la: "window.foo = myNs.myApp.foo;"
Accessing "super" methods - In theory, this should be easy to do, but the prototype system as currently implemented has some rather arbitrary built in limitations when accessing the prototype chain that makes this much more awkward than it should be.
No access to prototypes of built in objects - Why can't I make a new object that inherits from Array? or DomDocument? This one is particularly irritating because there is no good workaround, and while it's not a common problem to run into, when you do need it, you really need it.
Those are the major annoyances I've dealt with off the top of my head. Recently I've been spending much more time on server side work than client side, so maybe I've forgotten some. Really, though, JavaScript, whether by design or by accident, has a pretty solid base as an OOP language, and I would rather see efforts on cleaning up what's already there than trying adding a whole list of new irritations and inconsistencies to the language, just because "That's how Flash does it."
As far as a JAR-like deployment, that's easy to do now. There are plenty of JavaScript preprocessors out there that will suck in all your JS source files, and spit out a combined file with extraneous white space and comments removed. GZip compression can be handled transparently by the web server for most browsers. It's an extra step in the deployment process, but then, so is JAR. And depending on your server side environment, you may be able to make it all happen transparently (I've done so with.NET without too much difficulty.) The only real downside is that you can't meaningfully combine JavaScript and CSS, and it doesn't work for images. There are other techniques that you can use to combine images as well, but that's getting into another topic...
I don't think we'll see Silverlight stomping Flash any time soon. Even if Microsoft manages to get the client adoption rate up over 90% (which I think will be a long battle for them) I think they'll have a hard time getting developers to abandon Flash in large numbers. For all their experience in platform lock-in maneuvers, their own past is working strongly against them right now. Microsoft has spent the last 6 years doing everything in their power to alienate the people that they now need to win over in order to gain significant penetration into that market. There is not a client facing web developer out there that hasn't gone through significant pain to deal with Microsoft's blatant disregard for web standards, and while some may have short memories and be willing to jump on the MSFT bandwagon now that they've promised to play nice, there are still a lot of people out there with long memories. I'm not saying that they won't be able to pull this one off, but they have a long fight ahead of them to even come close.
Apparently because the US one is coming from 12 hours in the future. (At the time of this posting, it says "As of 8/18, 10:41 PM ET" Do they have a time machine to watch the days events before the rest of us?
I don't think "blame" is really the right word to use here, but since you did use it, and I can't think of a better one off the top of my head, I would say that the largest part of the "blame" goes to the content owner who somehow believes that they can somehow share their work without, er...sharing it. If the end user has the ability to play a recording once, then they have the ability to play it a thousand times. There is no middle ground. If you can't accept that, you shouldn't be selling content.
Beyond that, I suppose some small amount of blame should probably go to Adobe for selling and advertising a product that they know can never live up to their claims. But even then, they are only marketing it because of the other group of people I already mentioned. If they would accept the reality of their situations, then Adobe wouldn't have a viable product.
While it's nice to think that they backported all of that code for the good of their customers, I don't think that's what really happened. The reason most of that stuff appeared for Windows XP was because Vista was taking way too long to get out the door, and they were afraid that by the time it was out the door, it would have been too late. Microsoft updated IE6 in SP2 because people were starting to realize that they didn't have to live with popups anymore. Unfortunately for Microsoft, that meant installing third party addons like the Google Toolbar, or switching away from IE entirely. Either way you look at it, that's bad for Microsoft, so they had to do something about it. But SP2 wasn't enough to stop the flow of users away from IE to other browsers, so Microsoft had to break down and release IE7 for XP despite having sworn for years and years that there would be no new releases of IE (and having all but shut down their IE development group). Likewise, with Windows Media Player under increased pressure from iTunes.
If Vista had actually been ready when they originally planned, I'm fairly sure Microsoft would have been happy to keep these features as a reason to upgrade to Vista, and not added them to XP for the benefit of their customers. It must be killing Microsoft that Vista took so long to develop that every compelling reason to upgrade had to be either backported to XP or dropped from the release, which is what has put them in this position.
I'm not really a systems administrator by trade, however, I have been conscripted into acting like one from time to time. I "manage", if you can call it that, a small handful of DNS servers for a large handful of domain names. Aside from the basic theory, I really only know enough about how DNS works to have gotten those servers running some time ago. And that's been enough for me, until now...
Most of those servers have been patched, but for reasons that I am not going to go into now, one of them is still not. Now, my understanding is that this attack can only be used against a name server that does a recursive lookup to another name server, correct? Since all of the name servers I manage are authoritative for the domains I control, this attack only would affect people who use these name servers to look up a domain that I do not control, correct? Assuming no one is using these servers to look up domain names where they are not listed as the NS, this shouldn't affect me...
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I understand Mozilla's position here, but why make it an agreement? There are a number of Open Source licenses that allow (or require) the software to make certain notices to the end user. There is nothing in Firefox's license "agreement" that really requires the user to agree to. It's kind of like some of the windows OSS projects that put the GPL text into the "EULA" box, even though it doesn't require any actual agreement (from an end user at least). If the Ubuntu installer just put an "OK" button on the license notice rather than making it an "agreement" and requiring the user to accept it before they can install (or use?) the software, there probably wouldn't be any controversy, and the Mozilla folks could still protect their trademark, notify people about the lack of warranty, and handle any other information that they felt the need to convey.
It shouldn't mean dumbing it down, but all too often it ends up that way anyway, because it seems the quickest way to make something easy to use is usually to simply remove all the features or options that require a more advanced understanding of the software.
There's an old saying in the medical community about looking for Zebras when you should be looking for Horses. In their case it generally refers to the fact that common conditions are common and exotic conditions are rare. So when a patient walks into your office with a nasty cough, you should probably assume it's a cold or maybe the flu, rather than looking through all kinds of obscure diseases that might cause a cough exactly like the one the patient is describing.
In the context of this conversation, though, I'm going to adapt it to mean there's no reason that you shouldn't just use ext3 and be done with it. Seriously. There is a reason it's the default filesystem on virtually every modern Linux distribution, and I'm pretty sure that reason is not because the distribution maintainers all have an unreasonable grudge against Reiser, IBM, SGI, etc. I know it's not sexy, cool, and different just for the sake of being different, but it works, it works well, and it does everything you're asking for.
I guess I had never bothered to actually look up the Smart's fuel economy, but I had always assumed that it was a lot higher than that. Other than good fuel economy, why would anyone bother? Assuming the EPA numbers are accurate, it's hardly any better than my Corolla (well, before I added the roof rack, anyway). On our honeymoon to Europe, my wife and I rented a Renault that was a bit smaller than a Mini, and shaped a little like a Honda Fit. Not as sporty looking as a CRX, but IMO not ugly either. Completely bare bones car, but incredibly fun to drive - at least on the windy little roads where we were staying - and if I remember correctly (and did my conversions right), we got about 45-50 mpg even driving around on mountain roads the whole week. So those cars exist, just not in the US for some reason. Whether it has to do with US consumers or US vehicle regulations, I'm not really sure, but I don't think the problem lies with the car manufacturers.
True, and the Geo Metro got almost 60 in its prime. But both cars are about half the size of a Prius. If you are happy with a car that can fit 2 not quite full size adults, a bag of groceries, and not much else, buy a Smart, or maybe complain about the poor mileage of the MINI Cooper compared to similarly sized vehicles of yesteryear. Some of us would like to get that kind of gas mileage but see it as a higher priority to be able to fit our friends (or kids) and camping gear into our car. If there was really that high of a demand for the CRX or the Metro, their respective manufacturers would still be making them.
And just what are you comparing your Hybrid to, a Chevy Malibu? Many people would barely see half that savings in a typical week compared to a similarly sized non-hybrid, even with gas prices where they are now. You'd have to put almost 400 miles per week in a Prius to save $26 compared to driving a Corolla. At $4 per gallon an average American (i.e. one who drives 10-15k miles per year) would have to drive a Prius for 6-8 years just to break even on the car, all other things being equal. Of course, most people can't ignore the interest payments on their car, and it's hard to say what the price of gas will do over that time period. And then there's also the tax incentives to consider (which really don't work out to be quite as attractive as they sound, but that's a post for another day...)
Suffice to say, most people aren't buying their Hybrids just to save money on gas. Those who are either drive an awful lot, or aren't being very honest with themselves when they do the math.
There are a lot of problems with the current Social Security, but none of them would be solved by making it optional. The problem is that the people who don't need it would be the ones to opt out, the people who do need it would not be sufficient to support it, and we'd all end up paying for it some other way anyway. One of the problems is that it has turned into, as you say, a wealth transfer program. It wasn't actually designed to be that way, but it turned into it pretty quickly when somebody in Congress started complaining about all thqt money sitting around. Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's much that can be done now, to turn it back into the program it was intended to be.
The biggest problem that I see with Social Security is that the age that you can start collecting has not increased significantly (from 65 to 67) since the program was established, while our average life expectancy has increased by almost ten years. This results in people living off Social Security for a much longer time, and therefore puts a much larger strain on the people who are paying into it. Of course, this ties in with the main point of this article. Surprise, surprise, people are working longer because people are living longer. Whether because they haven't saved up enough money - it's a lot harder to save up enough to last you 15 years than 5 - or because they just want to keep working. Granted I don't know that many people at retirement age, but everyone I know who is still working at 65 is doing so because they enjoy their work, not because they have to. My father is a college professor, and he recently had a student who started college when she was over 65. She got her college degree at 70, and went on to business school because she had started doing accounting work for her sons' business, and wanted to be able to get more involved.
At least with regards to carbon dating, it has been known for some time that strict carbon dates are not accurate. These are referred to as "uncalibrated" dates. The explanation that I remember seeing is that the atmospheric ratio of C14/C12 has not been constant over the earth's history, but this may be a factor as well. At any rate, carbon dates for at least the last 15,000 years can be calibrated - that is, the concentration of C14 in the object being tested can be compared to the concentration of C14 in an object of a known age (e.g. from tree rings, ice cores, documented historical sites) to get a more accurate assessment of an objects age. In some cases this can lead to objects being considerably older than originally thought. For example, an uncalibrated carbon date of 9,000BC corresponds to a calibrated carbon date of nearly 11,000BC.
I think there were a lot of gameplay elements of DN3D that have still never been fully replicated in any game that I've played. (Admittedly I've fallen a bit out of the FPS gaming scene since the later days of Return to Castle Wolfenstein.) I still remember the first time I walked into a room full of pipe bombs left waiting for me, and frantically backpedaling to get out of the room before they went off. I also liked how you could trigger pipe bombs even after you had died. It made for some great revenge moments.
One of my favorite tactics was placing the laser tripmines into door frames. If done right they were completely undetectable when the door was closed, and would give anyone who opened the door a nasty surprise. The catch was that their blast radius wasn't that large, so for a big doorframe you needed to put them on both sides, which was pretty tricky to accomplish without getting blown up yourself. After a while the people I played with got pretty good at avoiding the explosions, but they still made for a good way to keep track of where people were on the map.
"Hi there, Social Security. You're looking very nice today. Did you drop a few pounds around the middle?" Oh... You meant "complement". Sorry...
More seriously, the slowdown in population growth has a little less to do with women's rights and a lot more to do with the changing demographic profile of our country. Ever since the start of the baby boomer generation, more of our population has been moving off of farms and into cities and suburbs. As that happens, the growth rate has naturally fallen accordingly.
Check out the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel". The author makes a pretty convincing argument that the difference in development between different cultures is based primarily on how early each individual culture developed agriculture, which in turn is dependent more than anything else on how suitable the area they live in was for developing agriculture. For example, 5 out of the 6 large domestic animals and almost all of the worlds most productive crops are native to central Eurasia, and quickly spread throughout the rest of Europe and Asia. The sole other domesticated animal and many of the other productive crops were native to Central and South America, which at the time they were "discovered" by Europeans was home to the most advanced civilization outside of Eurasia. (In particular, they where the only civilization outside Eurasia to develop literacy.) On the other extreme, the most "primitive" of modern people are the Aboriginees of Australia, a continent that was almost completely unsuitable for basic agriculture, and the only continent where food production was never developed natively.
More to your point, "cooperation" (from a societal standpoint) only meaningly develops when a society has developed food production to the point where it can afford to have a large population of people who are dedicated to pursuits other than gathering food. The problem in Sub-Saharan Africa is that none of the civilizations had yet developed to that point (due to lack of native domesticable plants and animals) before the arrival of Eurasian influence. As a result, while they have access to Eurasian technology, they are still in many ways playing catch-up in the area of societal development. The difference in Africa versus the Americas and Australia was that in Africa the native population was left largely in place by European explorers, while in the Americas and Australia, the native populations were mostly replaced by settlers from Europe, who brought with them the enormous head start of Eurasian food processing and societal development.
That's going a little overboard isn't it? I think the trick is to take the batteries out when grandparents leave, but still keep them around. Then when they go to visit their granparents for a week, you put the batteries back in... Same end result (unless your parents/in-laws are much more tolerant of the noisy toys than you are), but no need to give away perfectly functional toys, or bend the truth with your family.
I don't see any problem with it. His statement was that from an interface perspective the browser should treat HTTPS with a self signed certificate the same as plain HTTP. So the browser wouldn't do anything to notify that the connection was protected, but it also wouldn't complain to the user if the certificate hasn't changed. I don't think anyone who understands the issue thinks that self signed certs should be treated the same as signed certs. What a lot of people are complaining about is that Firefox (and IE) shouldn't be treating self-signed certs as worse then plain HTTP. At worst, they are no better than plain HTTP, and the browsers should treat them accordingly.
Does your SSH client give you four pages of scary error messages before it lets you log into a new server?
Hmmm, apparently slashdot stylesheets don't let you em inside a blockquote. I was mainly going for this statement:
(e.g., via the creation of deniable operating systems, which we also recommend in Section 5)
Did you actually read what he said?
(emphasis mine)
The hidden OS feature was a new feature added after their analysis, and as such, they don't actually discuss its effectiveness.
Cache is not a history. Cache is a snapshot in time. And it sounds like Google's snapshot just happens to be more recent than Baidu's, which doesn't surprise me one bit.
Maybe the email was sent back when Slashdot actually carried useful information.
And not only that, but starting now, you are the greatest asshole that I have never met.
Time to update the preferences, I think...
I've played around a bit with AS3, and what I've found so far are a lot more annoyances than any useful additions. More importantly, it is not compatible with JS 1.5. In my experience so far, classes are only really "necessary" in so far as people whose first experience with OOP was C++/Java/C# don't seem to be willing to learn anything else. I've worked on many large projects written in JavaScript, and while there are a lot of annoyances that appear in JavaScript in large applications, all of them are easily solvable while still working inside the Prototype structure. Many of them can be worked around now, although in many cases the workarounds shouldn't be necessary. These are the sort of things that I think they should be looking at in a new version of JavaScript. Let's fix the minor annoyances rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Private Variables - I know Crockford insists that you can do private variables in JavaScript using closures, but his method doesn't work cleanly with the prototype model of inheritance. Given the choice between private variables and inheritance, I'll choose inheritance every time.
Namespaces - The current commonly accepted practice of using objects in place namespaces works fine for declaring a namespace, but we need a better way to "import" namespaces than just assigning them to a global variable, a la: "window.foo = myNs.myApp.foo;"
Accessing "super" methods - In theory, this should be easy to do, but the prototype system as currently implemented has some rather arbitrary built in limitations when accessing the prototype chain that makes this much more awkward than it should be.
No access to prototypes of built in objects - Why can't I make a new object that inherits from Array? or DomDocument? This one is particularly irritating because there is no good workaround, and while it's not a common problem to run into, when you do need it, you really need it.
Those are the major annoyances I've dealt with off the top of my head. Recently I've been spending much more time on server side work than client side, so maybe I've forgotten some. Really, though, JavaScript, whether by design or by accident, has a pretty solid base as an OOP language, and I would rather see efforts on cleaning up what's already there than trying adding a whole list of new irritations and inconsistencies to the language, just because "That's how Flash does it."
As far as a JAR-like deployment, that's easy to do now. There are plenty of JavaScript preprocessors out there that will suck in all your JS source files, and spit out a combined file with extraneous white space and comments removed. GZip compression can be handled transparently by the web server for most browsers. It's an extra step in the deployment process, but then, so is JAR. And depending on your server side environment, you may be able to make it all happen transparently (I've done so with .NET without too much difficulty.) The only real downside is that you can't meaningfully combine JavaScript and CSS, and it doesn't work for images. There are other techniques that you can use to combine images as well, but that's getting into another topic...
I don't think we'll see Silverlight stomping Flash any time soon. Even if Microsoft manages to get the client adoption rate up over 90% (which I think will be a long battle for them) I think they'll have a hard time getting developers to abandon Flash in large numbers. For all their experience in platform lock-in maneuvers, their own past is working strongly against them right now. Microsoft has spent the last 6 years doing everything in their power to alienate the people that they now need to win over in order to gain significant penetration into that market. There is not a client facing web developer out there that hasn't gone through significant pain to deal with Microsoft's blatant disregard for web standards, and while some may have short memories and be willing to jump on the MSFT bandwagon now that they've promised to play nice, there are still a lot of people out there with long memories. I'm not saying that they won't be able to pull this one off, but they have a long fight ahead of them to even come close.
Apparently because the US one is coming from 12 hours in the future. (At the time of this posting, it says "As of 8/18, 10:41 PM ET" Do they have a time machine to watch the days events before the rest of us?
I don't think "blame" is really the right word to use here, but since you did use it, and I can't think of a better one off the top of my head, I would say that the largest part of the "blame" goes to the content owner who somehow believes that they can somehow share their work without, er ...sharing it. If the end user has the ability to play a recording once, then they have the ability to play it a thousand times. There is no middle ground. If you can't accept that, you shouldn't be selling content.
Beyond that, I suppose some small amount of blame should probably go to Adobe for selling and advertising a product that they know can never live up to their claims. But even then, they are only marketing it because of the other group of people I already mentioned. If they would accept the reality of their situations, then Adobe wouldn't have a viable product.
While it's nice to think that they backported all of that code for the good of their customers, I don't think that's what really happened. The reason most of that stuff appeared for Windows XP was because Vista was taking way too long to get out the door, and they were afraid that by the time it was out the door, it would have been too late. Microsoft updated IE6 in SP2 because people were starting to realize that they didn't have to live with popups anymore. Unfortunately for Microsoft, that meant installing third party addons like the Google Toolbar, or switching away from IE entirely. Either way you look at it, that's bad for Microsoft, so they had to do something about it. But SP2 wasn't enough to stop the flow of users away from IE to other browsers, so Microsoft had to break down and release IE7 for XP despite having sworn for years and years that there would be no new releases of IE (and having all but shut down their IE development group). Likewise, with Windows Media Player under increased pressure from iTunes.
If Vista had actually been ready when they originally planned, I'm fairly sure Microsoft would have been happy to keep these features as a reason to upgrade to Vista, and not added them to XP for the benefit of their customers. It must be killing Microsoft that Vista took so long to develop that every compelling reason to upgrade had to be either backported to XP or dropped from the release, which is what has put them in this position.
I'm not really a systems administrator by trade, however, I have been conscripted into acting like one from time to time. I "manage", if you can call it that, a small handful of DNS servers for a large handful of domain names. Aside from the basic theory, I really only know enough about how DNS works to have gotten those servers running some time ago. And that's been enough for me, until now...
Most of those servers have been patched, but for reasons that I am not going to go into now, one of them is still not. Now, my understanding is that this attack can only be used against a name server that does a recursive lookup to another name server, correct? Since all of the name servers I manage are authoritative for the domains I control, this attack only would affect people who use these name servers to look up a domain that I do not control, correct? Assuming no one is using these servers to look up domain names where they are not listed as the NS, this shouldn't affect me...
Or am I missing something important?
No kidding.... Why haven't they fallen off into the ocean yet. Wasn't that supposed to happen like 30 years ago?