I second that Readability is awesome, and I use it frequently when I use Firefox.
However, the Safari Reader feature does more than readability--it combines multipage articles into one. Beyond that I think it actually uses Readability code?
I can't tell if you're trying to troll or not (I'm guessing yes due to AC?) but in any case...
Unless you're talking Esperanto, no language was designed, correct.
However, you would have to be incredibly foolish to underestimate the normative powers of the institutions and high culture! Many countries/languages--France, Spain, Turkey, etc--have government institutions that decide what words are official, and what spellings are official. This gets passed on through schools, dictionaries etc. Sometimes their success is great, other times not so much. America doesn't have anything quite like that, but "CNN english" absolutely has a normative impact, as do the Chicago Manual of Style and Strunk and White.
Someone deciding how a language ought to be spoken, written, etc is as old as language.
What's the old quote? "England and America are two countries separated by a common tongue." What does that mean for French and Germans speaking English?:p
I cringe everytime I hear english. It's the language of borrowed words, and I'm pretty sure the rules for it were invented a lot later, when people realized they might have to teach it.
Here, you're largely right. Many rules and normative practices WERE invented relatively recently. For instance, the rule to never split infinitives (hah) came into being because you don't split infinitives in Latin, and Latin is the perfect language (of course infinitives in Latin are a single word, so it's not wonder they can't be split!). I believe another example is the world "island" -- why the "s" ?? It's totally unpronounced? Well, the spelling was modified to look more like Franco-Latin as opposed to the english pronunciation...
This is why when it comes to english, I prefer to be practical: If it's understandable by everyone involved, it is "good" language. If nobody understands it, it is "bad" language. Whether the words are on the approved list or not is pedantic and not useful.
Here you're (imho) wrong. Your practical rule may make sense to you, but around the world there are billions of English speakers. It's far and away the most spoken language. I do NOT mean native speakers, I mean people who have learned some level of English. This is a critical distinction for things like "Spanglish," "Hinglish," "Engrish" and so on. What you and I may easily understand, somebody else may not. Hell, people from the backwoods of Minnesota and somebody from an isolated holler in Appalachia vs a inner-city Brooklynite already have a different enough starting base!
The point of rules and standard words is to create some standard that millions of people can use and expect (or hope!) to be understood.
This is not to say that languages cannot and should not evolve, just that I don't think your point is correct.
On the actual topic of the article, I hate twitter and tweet, and am more than glad to see a big-name source of journalism axe the term twitter! I think it's a very fair point that in one, or two, or ten years there's an incredibly high chance people won't be using twitter. Not to mention, I see people around here complain about "Xeroxing" things all the time:-p Anyway, think about reading something about the internet from 1996 or so that might use terms... "After I opened Mozilla was altavistaing the topic, i got ICQed and knew something strange was going on"
Would anybody today who DIDN'T use the Internet then (ie, the vast majority of people) understand what the heck those words meant?
Funny you say that...when I'm not in rant mode, I'm generally accused of having too much of both.
Fair enough:) As is abundantly apparent, making any real conclusions about other people from the internets is not one of the most fruitful things one can do!
I only said what I did as it's just a fact that people ARE affected by marketing, packaging, what someone else referred to as the sizzle. It's like how you still see people on ipod who think the ipod was/is crap and are shocked the nomad didn't win! You or I may not approve of that, but that's the way it is, and I think the vast majority of people are affected by marketing/what not in some factors of their lives.
Asshole answer: Because I like making people nerdrage.
I like that answer!
Rarely do I get a reasonable, calm, non-confrontational response; I find that (and fanboyism in general) to be quite amusing. Dickish, I know.
I find your honesty quite refreshing, and largely agree!
The two main reasons I prefer Android over the iPhone is 1. No AT&T and 2. I don't like the walled garden. If the iPhone came to Verizon, I MIGHT consider getting one...but as long as the walled garden is in place, I highly doubt it would happen. Chances are, the appstore has everything I could ever possibly need...but I still don't like the idea of being tied to it, nor do I like the idea of violating my warranty just so I can install whatever I want.
I have an iPhone. I like the iPhone. I REALLY dislike AT&T and I am not enthusiastic about the walled garden. I don't really _care_ that much either though. I would love to be able to just compile ssh or what not and have at it, but no go. Well I guess technically you can do it for $100, but anyway...
Your posts in this thread lead me to believe you lack either empathy or basic understanding of human psychology (or both--is it the same thing??)
What's the point in bitching about the fact that a company came up with a term to describe a new product that is loosely based on physics? ie, what are you getting out of this conversation? Do you realize how much you are playing into Apple's hands by spending so much time talking about this product? They LOVE the fact that people are writing articles about their new screen and discussing it weeks before it's even out.
Compare to the Androids where it's a different model every several months that people (mostly the nerd demographic as far as I can tell? I' m judging this off of advertising campaigns as well) lust after.
No, it's not akin to leaving a car or home door open. An HTTP request is supposed to be safe and legal - we've launched dozens do access/. and post this message. Entering someone else's car or home isn't - everyone knows they're not supposed to do it.
Ok, you don't like the analogy. I personally think there is something of merit in it, you don't. I've admitted since post #1 that it is flawed, and explained exactly why (for reasons we largely agree upon).
What we DON'T agree upon I suppose is the remedy. Forget the analogy. Should somebody accessing data they know full well they should not be accessing--data that in this case has personal information it--is this a problem? I say it is! This particular case is perhaps confounded by the fact that AT&T is stupid douchebags...
"It's HTTP ergo public" cannot be a defense. Passwords and protection have existed since the early days of computers and have FAILED since the early days of computer. Think of the government employees who merely accessed a database of personal information on private citizens and have gotten into a great deal of trouble (think of Joe the Plumber and Obama personal info).
To get back to the realm of analogy (but away from the house!) if you found a print out of email addresses and iPad cell identifiers just sitting on a public park bench, is it ok to publish information from that? This is of course not a perfect analogy either (no analogy is...) because the hacking group in question did no just stumble across this information, they actively sought it out.
Thanks for the note...that was my understanding but I know very little about east Asian languages.
In a somewhat similar situation, there are a TON of Arabic loanwords into Persian and Turkish. Over the years many of these words have changed so that an Arabic reader would be very confused by many of them! As an eg (bad transliteration ahead) the Arabic words shey/eshya (s/pl) means "thing/things." In Turkish shey/eshya means "thing/luggage"
Nothing of that should be illegal. Come on, you can set up basic authentication in Apache in five lines in.htaccess [cyberciti.biz].
Any URL that doesn't require authentication should be fair game, imho. Anything less than that and we start going on a grey area and the 'net turns into a unsafe place where you can be illegal just by clicking a link.
Simple question then--by your standard if a company or even a person makes a mistake (pick your reason, bad syntax in httpd.conf, web server software error, web app software error, etc) and accidentally leaves some data available (akin to leaving a car or home door open?) can anybody access and not be at fault?
As I said before, it's pretty clear that the hacking group here knew they were getting into something they shouldn't. Is that a problem? Yes or no?
Randomly searching directories for non-listed files? Is that a problem? What about typing "/private" to the end of a URL and finding something?
For instance with this story, it's not clear how the hacking group found the script in question. If it's not publicly listed is it a problem? The second it started returning what is obviously non-public information, is that a problem?
I completely agree that stumbling across something private on a public website is easy to do. But if the "stumbler" has to do a lot of work to stumble on the information...? (and I absolutely DON'T excuse AT&T for this leak either)
So if you forget to lock your house door or window, or a car door, or accidentally leave a window open, etc, it's ok for anybody to enter your house and look around?
Not a perfect analog at all as on the web such access can be committed easily and accidentally, but I think the point remains.
The total vast majority of people on the planet write their native language in a script that can be traced back to Phoenician or Chinese characters.
You're correct when it comes to script in europe, however chinese characters don't influence any other written languages languages, they are incorporated as they are to specify a specific meaning of a term.
I am by no means an expert on East Asian languages, but my understanding is that your statement is basically flat out wrong.
For instance in this story, (AFAIK) Japanese kanji do not always have identical or the same meanings to the original Chinese characters. Seeing as how Kanji and other earlier scripts used Chinese characters to encode Japanese words and grammar, I think this is an important distinction. Secondly and far more to the point, the other two Japanese writing systems--Katakana and Hiragana--are syllabic yet their forms are derived DIRECTLY from Chinese characters. Exactly what I was talking about.
In the case of Korean, I thought characters weren't used frequently anymore. I don't know if there are direct analogs between the Korean alphabet and Chinese characters, but the influence is clear.
I don't know that any of them are used currently, but I also remember that some northern Chinese "barbarian" groups in history used Chinese character-derived scripts.
Irony is the Americans claiming they won the war of independence yet still speaking the queens English and then raping the hell out of it and telling everyone else their spelling is the correct one.
Call it a war of independence, revolution, whatever, the semantics tend to be irrelevant as the fledgling United States DID win.
Is it perhaps ironic that you claim post-revolutionary American's kept speaking the "queens English" and yet "raped" the hell out of it? Perhaps that should tell you something? It's called linguistic evolution! It happens to everyone, even you.
Besides... who _exactly_ "tells everyone else their spelling is the correct one" ?
Boy, this is really going to blow your mind when you realize that the English alphabet you're typing in is a modified form of the Latin alphabet, which was a borrowed and changed form of the Etruscan alphabet. The Etruscans had of course borrowed and modified the Greek alphabet (get it, Alpha Beta??). The Greeks had taken the Phoenician Alphabet, "bastardized" and "basically copied" and "changed it at it's [sic] will." The Phoenicians were uncreative hacks as well, and starting from Egyptian hieroglyphics just changed it without any respect to the original creators.
Now we're talking about 3000+ years of bastardization, copying, and changing at will (irony? no), so the evidence is a little shaky, but who knows who the Egyptians shamelessly copied from? Probably the Sumerians. Awful.
Some information for you...truly independent creations of writing systems have been rather rare worldwide. Take for instance Mongolian script. It looks pretty unusual right? Pretty geographically isolated area, far from e.g. the Middle East. Possibly unique? Nope. The Mongols (an Altaic language) borrowed from the Uyghurs (a Turkic language) who borrowed from the Sogdians (an Indo-European language) who borrowed from Syriac (Semitic language) and Aramaic. And so on, further and further back.
That process of bastardization, copying, and changing at will is how knowledge and language and culture throughout history has progressed. The total vast majority of people on the planet write their native language in a script that can be traced back to Phoenician or Chinese characters.
You're absolutely right about most of your individual points, but I disagree with your conclusion. As I mentioned at some point earlier, this computer essentially exists to run two legacy programs. It's not used for regular surfing and has uptodate Firefox for the occasional need. Is it 100% safe? Absolutely not, but I would think it's safer than most!
I believe that the precautions we've taken (and we take for all of our computers!) are acceptable.
Basically since we blocked IE several years ago, we've had very few problems at all with windows boxes. I'm not losing sleep over this one either.
The "preexec" as well as the "%m" subsitution could be useful in a mixed environment. To be honest I've no idea how people running Windows servers manage without half the things you can do with Samba, ISC DHCP server, etc.
What I ended up doing was just creating a blank Windows7 profil (happens when an XP user logs into Windows7 client on the domain for the first time), and then manually copying directories from the old profile to the new. For instance old ~\Application Data\directories -> ~\AppData\Roaming\directories. Also copied a few registry keys over (by export/import), but ignored most of them.
I imagine something superior could be done with symlinks and scripting on the samba server side?
I figure there has to be a better way, but I couldn't figure it out, and all of the MS docs seemed geared towards (duh) homogenous windows activedirectory environments. Looking forward to Samba4.
IMHO Windows has always tended to run unnecessary services. e.g. What is the point of running "Wireless Zero Config" when no applicable hardware is present?
Completely agree.
Why can't I pin a network share/document/application to the start bar?
I wasn't aware you could do this in any version of Windows. Even with "mapped drives"? (Who's smart idea was it to put settings to stop Windows moaning about running executables from network drives under "Internet Settings" too!)
Well you COULD put a link to a network share program into the Quickbar (I forget if that's its proper name). Turns out thats how you have to do it in Windows7 as well. The difference is you have to go through contortions to enable to the quickbar in Windows 7, as the Windows7 start bar essentially supercedes its functionality.
It's firewalled (locally and at the router), has limited outbound access (including logging), IE is blocked, no new programs are installed, and the user login is not an administrator account. I think win2k is getting malicious detection program updates too?
It's probably not perfect, and there may still be problems, but I think in our situation it's probably adequate.
When one googles OS9 and 3/5 top hits refer to "Mac OS 9" (including all of the images and videos) I feel absolutely safe, secure, and justified in using os9 as shorthand. Sheer pedantry at its worst to suggest otherwise.
An example of such pedantry--you're wrong because the operating system you're referring to is ACTUALLY OS-9 or OS-9000.
Because it won't still work forever. Application developers will start to rely on features introduced in Windows Vista, and web application developers will start to rely on HTML5 features that aren't in IE 8.
Yes, that's a reason to upgrade (and the one I explicity said!)--when things no longer work. For instance, our Windows 2000 workstation is used everyday, has no need for internet browsing or webapps, and run apps which havent been updated in several years. We have the system firewalled, IE is not used, and it works for its purposes perfectly. We have no reason to upgrade. We will upgrade when something hardware dies most likely.
It's beyond obvious to reply to "why upgrade if it still works" with "one day it might not work":-P
What you're barring has already happened to Windows 98: major vulnerabilities published after the announced end of extended support. I see no reason why Windows XP will differ.
There's a good chance you will be right. Depending on the vulnerability they might matter and they might not. If it's a critical vulnerability that can't be protected against, upgrade. Though my understanding is XP will receive security patches for 4 more years?
Windows XP came out in late-2001...hardly "the 90s"
At my small office workplace we are down to one remaining Windows 2000 computer, majority XP, no Vista, and one Windows 7. It was a pain to convert our roaming desktops from 2k/XP style to Vista/7 style (samba server). I personally really like Windows 7 though it of course comes with the assortment of upgrading pains and things that make you slap your forehead and say "WHY?!" -- example, out of the box Windows 7 runs a maintenance task that deletes broken shortcuts. Unfortunately for whatever reason it believes shortcuts to documents and programs on our network shares are broken, and so they repeatedly disappeared until we figured that out. Why can't I pin a network share/document/application to the start bar? etc
We also have an OS9 computer that doesn't get used often anymore (though did up until about 3 months ago), OSX 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6.
Why upgrade if it still works? (of course barring any major security vulnerabilities that can't be protected against)
Slashdot Mirror
I second that Readability is awesome, and I use it frequently when I use Firefox.
However, the Safari Reader feature does more than readability--it combines multipage articles into one. Beyond that I think it actually uses Readability code?
I can't tell if you're trying to troll or not (I'm guessing yes due to AC?) but in any case...
Unless you're talking Esperanto, no language was designed, correct.
However, you would have to be incredibly foolish to underestimate the normative powers of the institutions and high culture! Many countries/languages--France, Spain, Turkey, etc--have government institutions that decide what words are official, and what spellings are official. This gets passed on through schools, dictionaries etc. Sometimes their success is great, other times not so much. America doesn't have anything quite like that, but "CNN english" absolutely has a normative impact, as do the Chicago Manual of Style and Strunk and White.
Someone deciding how a language ought to be spoken, written, etc is as old as language.
What's the old quote? "England and America are two countries separated by a common tongue." What does that mean for French and Germans speaking English? :p
I cringe everytime I hear english. It's the language of borrowed words, and I'm pretty sure the rules for it were invented a lot later, when people realized they might have to teach it.
Here, you're largely right. Many rules and normative practices WERE invented relatively recently. For instance, the rule to never split infinitives (hah) came into being because you don't split infinitives in Latin, and Latin is the perfect language (of course infinitives in Latin are a single word, so it's not wonder they can't be split!). I believe another example is the world "island" -- why the "s" ?? It's totally unpronounced? Well, the spelling was modified to look more like Franco-Latin as opposed to the english pronunciation...
This is why when it comes to english, I prefer to be practical: If it's understandable by everyone involved, it is "good" language. If nobody understands it, it is "bad" language. Whether the words are on the approved list or not is pedantic and not useful.
Here you're (imho) wrong. Your practical rule may make sense to you, but around the world there are billions of English speakers. It's far and away the most spoken language. I do NOT mean native speakers, I mean people who have learned some level of English. This is a critical distinction for things like "Spanglish," "Hinglish," "Engrish" and so on. What you and I may easily understand, somebody else may not. Hell, people from the backwoods of Minnesota and somebody from an isolated holler in Appalachia vs a inner-city Brooklynite already have a different enough starting base!
The point of rules and standard words is to create some standard that millions of people can use and expect (or hope!) to be understood.
This is not to say that languages cannot and should not evolve, just that I don't think your point is correct.
On the actual topic of the article, I hate twitter and tweet, and am more than glad to see a big-name source of journalism axe the term twitter! I think it's a very fair point that in one, or two, or ten years there's an incredibly high chance people won't be using twitter. Not to mention, I see people around here complain about "Xeroxing" things all the time :-p Anyway, think about reading something about the internet from 1996 or so that might use terms... "After I opened Mozilla was altavistaing the topic, i got ICQed and knew something strange was going on"
Would anybody today who DIDN'T use the Internet then (ie, the vast majority of people) understand what the heck those words meant?
Funny you say that...when I'm not in rant mode, I'm generally accused of having too much of both.
Fair enough :) As is abundantly apparent, making any real conclusions about other people from the internets is not one of the most fruitful things one can do!
I only said what I did as it's just a fact that people ARE affected by marketing, packaging, what someone else referred to as the sizzle. It's like how you still see people on ipod who think the ipod was/is crap and are shocked the nomad didn't win! You or I may not approve of that, but that's the way it is, and I think the vast majority of people are affected by marketing/what not in some factors of their lives.
Asshole answer: Because I like making people nerdrage.
I like that answer!
Rarely do I get a reasonable, calm, non-confrontational response; I find that (and fanboyism in general) to be quite amusing. Dickish, I know.
I find your honesty quite refreshing, and largely agree!
The two main reasons I prefer Android over the iPhone is 1. No AT&T and 2. I don't like the walled garden. If the iPhone came to Verizon, I MIGHT consider getting one...but as long as the walled garden is in place, I highly doubt it would happen. Chances are, the appstore has everything I could ever possibly need...but I still don't like the idea of being tied to it, nor do I like the idea of violating my warranty just so I can install whatever I want.
I have an iPhone. I like the iPhone. I REALLY dislike AT&T and I am not enthusiastic about the walled garden. I don't really _care_ that much either though. I would love to be able to just compile ssh or what not and have at it, but no go. Well I guess technically you can do it for $100, but anyway...
"He sounds like Wally Gator!" -Captain Murphy
Sealab 2021 reference++
Your posts in this thread lead me to believe you lack either empathy or basic understanding of human psychology (or both--is it the same thing??)
What's the point in bitching about the fact that a company came up with a term to describe a new product that is loosely based on physics? ie, what are you getting out of this conversation? Do you realize how much you are playing into Apple's hands by spending so much time talking about this product? They LOVE the fact that people are writing articles about their new screen and discussing it weeks before it's even out.
Compare to the Androids where it's a different model every several months that people (mostly the nerd demographic as far as I can tell? I'
m judging this off of advertising campaigns as well) lust after.
And there, THAT is the point.
Placebo effect. Do you honestly think the average, non-technical person would notice this detail about the display had Jobs not said anything?
Yes.
At the least they would realize it's a better looking display...which is the point.
Bastiat. Read him!
No, it's not akin to leaving a car or home door open. An HTTP request is supposed to be safe and legal - we've launched dozens do access /. and post this message. Entering someone else's car or home isn't - everyone knows they're not supposed to do it.
Ok, you don't like the analogy. I personally think there is something of merit in it, you don't. I've admitted since post #1 that it is flawed, and explained exactly why (for reasons we largely agree upon).
What we DON'T agree upon I suppose is the remedy. Forget the analogy. Should somebody accessing data they know full well they should not be accessing--data that in this case has personal information it--is this a problem? I say it is! This particular case is perhaps confounded by the fact that AT&T is stupid douchebags...
"It's HTTP ergo public" cannot be a defense. Passwords and protection have existed since the early days of computers and have FAILED since the early days of computer. Think of the government employees who merely accessed a database of personal information on private citizens and have gotten into a great deal of trouble (think of Joe the Plumber and Obama personal info).
To get back to the realm of analogy (but away from the house!) if you found a print out of email addresses and iPad cell identifiers just sitting on a public park bench, is it ok to publish information from that? This is of course not a perfect analogy either (no analogy is...) because the hacking group in question did no just stumble across this information, they actively sought it out.
Thanks for the note...that was my understanding but I know very little about east Asian languages.
In a somewhat similar situation, there are a TON of Arabic loanwords into Persian and Turkish. Over the years many of these words have changed so that an Arabic reader would be very confused by many of them! As an eg (bad transliteration ahead) the Arabic words shey/eshya (s/pl) means "thing/things." In Turkish shey/eshya means "thing/luggage"
Nothing of that should be illegal. Come on, you can set up basic authentication in Apache in five lines in .htaccess [cyberciti.biz].
Any URL that doesn't require authentication should be fair game, imho. Anything less than that and we start going on a grey area and the 'net turns into a unsafe place where you can be illegal just by clicking a link.
Simple question then--by your standard if a company or even a person makes a mistake (pick your reason, bad syntax in httpd.conf, web server software error, web app software error, etc) and accidentally leaves some data available (akin to leaving a car or home door open?) can anybody access and not be at fault?
As I said before, it's pretty clear that the hacking group here knew they were getting into something they shouldn't. Is that a problem? Yes or no?
Or like cops with speeding cameras recording what goes on on the road? An issue a lot on slashdot have a problem with? ;-)
I'm not so sure that the mere fact that "it's accessible via something on the internet" makes information automatically public.
That's an incredibly disingenuous reply...do you know what happened here?
That's exactly the problem.
Randomly searching directories for non-listed files? Is that a problem? What about typing "/private" to the end of a URL and finding something?
For instance with this story, it's not clear how the hacking group found the script in question. If it's not publicly listed is it a problem? The second it started returning what is obviously non-public information, is that a problem?
I completely agree that stumbling across something private on a public website is easy to do. But if the "stumbler" has to do a lot of work to stumble on the information...? (and I absolutely DON'T excuse AT&T for this leak either)
So if you forget to lock your house door or window, or a car door, or accidentally leave a window open, etc, it's ok for anybody to enter your house and look around?
Not a perfect analog at all as on the web such access can be committed easily and accidentally, but I think the point remains.
The total vast majority of people on the planet write their native language in a script that can be traced back to Phoenician or Chinese characters.
You're correct when it comes to script in europe, however chinese characters don't influence any other written languages languages, they are incorporated as they are to specify a specific meaning of a term.
I am by no means an expert on East Asian languages, but my understanding is that your statement is basically flat out wrong.
For instance in this story, (AFAIK) Japanese kanji do not always have identical or the same meanings to the original Chinese characters. Seeing as how Kanji and other earlier scripts used Chinese characters to encode Japanese words and grammar, I think this is an important distinction. Secondly and far more to the point, the other two Japanese writing systems--Katakana and Hiragana--are syllabic yet their forms are derived DIRECTLY from Chinese characters. Exactly what I was talking about.
In the case of Korean, I thought characters weren't used frequently anymore. I don't know if there are direct analogs between the Korean alphabet and Chinese characters, but the influence is clear.
I don't know that any of them are used currently, but I also remember that some northern Chinese "barbarian" groups in history used Chinese character-derived scripts.
The Latin Alphabet is most used, followed by Ara
Irony is the Americans claiming they won the war of independence yet still speaking the queens English and then raping the hell out of it and telling everyone else their spelling is the correct one.
Call it a war of independence, revolution, whatever, the semantics tend to be irrelevant as the fledgling United States DID win.
Is it perhaps ironic that you claim post-revolutionary American's kept speaking the "queens English" and yet "raped" the hell out of it? Perhaps that should tell you something? It's called linguistic evolution! It happens to everyone, even you.
Besides... who _exactly_ "tells everyone else their spelling is the correct one" ?
Boy, this is really going to blow your mind when you realize that the English alphabet you're typing in is a modified form of the Latin alphabet, which was a borrowed and changed form of the Etruscan alphabet. The Etruscans had of course borrowed and modified the Greek alphabet (get it, Alpha Beta??). The Greeks had taken the Phoenician Alphabet, "bastardized" and "basically copied" and "changed it at it's [sic] will." The Phoenicians were uncreative hacks as well, and starting from Egyptian hieroglyphics just changed it without any respect to the original creators.
Now we're talking about 3000+ years of bastardization, copying, and changing at will (irony? no), so the evidence is a little shaky, but who knows who the Egyptians shamelessly copied from? Probably the Sumerians. Awful.
Some information for you...truly independent creations of writing systems have been rather rare worldwide. Take for instance Mongolian script. It looks pretty unusual right? Pretty geographically isolated area, far from e.g. the Middle East. Possibly unique? Nope. The Mongols (an Altaic language) borrowed from the Uyghurs (a Turkic language) who borrowed from the Sogdians (an Indo-European language) who borrowed from Syriac (Semitic language) and Aramaic. And so on, further and further back.
That process of bastardization, copying, and changing at will is how knowledge and language and culture throughout history has progressed. The total vast majority of people on the planet write their native language in a script that can be traced back to Phoenician or Chinese characters.
That's indeed a very good reason! :-)
You're absolutely right about most of your individual points, but I disagree with your conclusion. As I mentioned at some point earlier, this computer essentially exists to run two legacy programs. It's not used for regular surfing and has uptodate Firefox for the occasional need. Is it 100% safe? Absolutely not, but I would think it's safer than most!
I believe that the precautions we've taken (and we take for all of our computers!) are acceptable.
Basically since we blocked IE several years ago, we've had very few problems at all with windows boxes. I'm not losing sleep over this one either.
The "preexec" as well as the "%m" subsitution could be useful in a mixed environment. To be honest I've no idea how people running Windows servers manage without half the things you can do with Samba, ISC DHCP server, etc.
What I ended up doing was just creating a blank Windows7 profil (happens when an XP user logs into Windows7 client on the domain for the first time), and then manually copying directories from the old profile to the new. For instance old ~\Application Data\directories -> ~\AppData\Roaming\directories. Also copied a few registry keys over (by export/import), but ignored most of them.
I imagine something superior could be done with symlinks and scripting on the samba server side?
I figure there has to be a better way, but I couldn't figure it out, and all of the MS docs seemed geared towards (duh) homogenous windows activedirectory environments. Looking forward to Samba4.
IMHO Windows has always tended to run unnecessary services. e.g. What is the point of running "Wireless Zero Config" when no applicable hardware is present?
Completely agree.
Why can't I pin a network share/document/application to the start bar?
I wasn't aware you could do this in any version of Windows. Even with "mapped drives"? (Who's smart idea was it to put settings to stop Windows moaning about running executables from network drives under "Internet Settings" too!)
Well you COULD put a link to a network share program into the Quickbar (I forget if that's its proper name). Turns out thats how you have to do it in Windows7 as well. The difference is you have to go through contortions to enable to the quickbar in Windows 7, as the Windows7 start bar essentially supercedes its functionality.
It's firewalled (locally and at the router), has limited outbound access (including logging), IE is blocked, no new programs are installed, and the user login is not an administrator account. I think win2k is getting malicious detection program updates too?
It's probably not perfect, and there may still be problems, but I think in our situation it's probably adequate.
When one googles OS9 and 3/5 top hits refer to "Mac OS 9" (including all of the images and videos) I feel absolutely safe, secure, and justified in using os9 as shorthand. Sheer pedantry at its worst to suggest otherwise.
An example of such pedantry--you're wrong because the operating system you're referring to is ACTUALLY OS-9 or OS-9000.
Because it won't still work forever. Application developers will start to rely on features introduced in Windows Vista, and web application developers will start to rely on HTML5 features that aren't in IE 8.
Yes, that's a reason to upgrade (and the one I explicity said!)--when things no longer work. For instance, our Windows 2000 workstation is used everyday, has no need for internet browsing or webapps, and run apps which havent been updated in several years. We have the system firewalled, IE is not used, and it works for its purposes perfectly. We have no reason to upgrade. We will upgrade when something hardware dies most likely.
It's beyond obvious to reply to "why upgrade if it still works" with "one day it might not work" :-P
What you're barring has already happened to Windows 98: major vulnerabilities published after the announced end of extended support. I see no reason why Windows XP will differ.
There's a good chance you will be right. Depending on the vulnerability they might matter and they might not. If it's a critical vulnerability that can't be protected against, upgrade. Though my understanding is XP will receive security patches for 4 more years?
Windows XP came out in late-2001...hardly "the 90s"
At my small office workplace we are down to one remaining Windows 2000 computer, majority XP, no Vista, and one Windows 7. It was a pain to convert our roaming desktops from 2k/XP style to Vista/7 style (samba server). I personally really like Windows 7 though it of course comes with the assortment of upgrading pains and things that make you slap your forehead and say "WHY?!" -- example, out of the box Windows 7 runs a maintenance task that deletes broken shortcuts. Unfortunately for whatever reason it believes shortcuts to documents and programs on our network shares are broken, and so they repeatedly disappeared until we figured that out. Why can't I pin a network share/document/application to the start bar? etc
We also have an OS9 computer that doesn't get used often anymore (though did up until about 3 months ago), OSX 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6.
Why upgrade if it still works? (of course barring any major security vulnerabilities that can't be protected against)