You never know when some unfriendly aliens are going to try to exterminate the planet and the only way to organize a global counter-offensive is via Morse Code...
VB.net is really only VB in name these days. The code is vastly different.
But my question is... is VB.Net less bloated? Same code, different code, whatever. Is it less bloated? That has been my primary complaint more and more in every version since VB3.
Linux is making inroads everywhere. Obviously it's strongest on the server, but the desktop is making progress. I've been using Linux since 1995 (I believe) to run our Internet server. I never really considered using it on my desktop until I got a laptop preloaded with XP. It was just annoying and bloated. I had heard that Linux on the desktop had improved so I bought a new hard drive and went to install Linux on it. Graphical installation. Detected the embedded network card. Detected my USB mouse and keyboard. Detected my sound card. Basically, installation was just as easy as Windows. I'm now running Linux on my laptop and will never go back.
Linux IS a threat to Microsoft, period. Their own financial reports to the SEC acknowledge as much. From corporations to governments, everyone is either unhappy with Microsoft, sick of their nonexistant security, or outright switching to Linux.
To think that Microsoft is going to win this in the end is naive. The momentum is quite the opposite.
Geesh. STFU about VB3 already. It's about as antiquated as your grandma's underwear.
Give up on your cliche comebacks. They're older and more boring than VB3.
You've gone way off-topic as it is, talking about a language that isn't even offered in.NET, and has nothing to do with Java.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe VisualBasic is included in.Net. And my point is that the latest IDE incarnations from Microsoft are, like most of their products, far more bloated than they used to be. And that's why I've lost interest. As you mentioned, you've had the IDE just hang and your coworker's RAM got all sucked up overnight. That's never happened to me with VB3.
Again, my point isn't that we should all use VB3. I scarcely use any Microsoft development tools anymore. My point is that their IDE is big and bloated, more than it needs to be. Strange hanging and sucking up RAM seems consistent with that.
The rest of your post is interesting, but not at all what I was replying to originally. My reply was simply that Microsoft's IDEs no longer impress me. They are bigger and slower than they used to be. How that compares with IDEs available for Java is something I have nothing to say because I haven't done any Java work under any recent IDEs. My observation was limited to my experience with Microsoft's recent IDEs.
His essay does make sense. If you go from paper to electronic voting, yes, you still have the traditional forms of intimidation... but the actual voting mechanism?
Right now a vote can be thrown out because the voter makes a stupid mistake. Perhaps the voter is stupid or maybe the ballot format is. A vote can be ignored if a vote counter at each counting location doesn't like the vote and slips it into the garbage or, as the essay says, just records the Republican votes as Democratic votes. The numbers can be messed up anywhere along the line.
With electronic voting the only thing that fundamentally has to be checked is that the whole world agrees the code is correct without little treasures to modify votes. You make the code simple (it doesn't have to be complicated), you bring in software developers that represent each political party, you give them each the code to browse to their heart's content. Each software developer then compiles the program with their own copy of the code (which they inspected and can archive and take with them) and they all come back and all the executables better be identical. That way everyone agrees we're talking about the same thing. Then you do an MD5 on that bugger and somehow work that into the encrypted vote that is recorded on the system. That takes care of the actual program that is being used being known to be valid and accepted by everyone.
Once you political parties are confident that the program itself is sound, getting the kinks out to keep vote selling out of town are minor details.
If the program can be certified by all concerned as described above there is virtually no way anyone could modify the results on election day.
Starting it up, and reading all of my files, takes 20 seconds.
And starting VB3 and reading all my files takes, oh, a second. Maybe 2 sometimes.
It doesn't peg the CPU when compiling.
I have a fairly large legacy app developed under VB3. I can't even tell you whether or not it "pegs" the CPU when compiling because by the time I get the meter up the compilation is done.
Please don't compare Studio 6
I don't dare install it Studio.Net. I don't need it since I don't do much MS development anymore. I don't have it and I'm not going to buy it just to see how bloated it is (or isn't).
But are you suggesting that Studio.NET has broken a Microsoft trend that EVERYTHING they make is more and more bloated? Windows... Word... Excel... DevStudio. I have yet to see Microsoft actually unbloat anything. But I must admit I stopped at DevStudio 6.0 and Office 2000.
Is Microsoft actually removing bloat from their applications? Or are you just a fan? This is not a flame, I really want to know.
and VB3, which is so old that it shits doilies
Yes, very old. And not acceptable to do any professional development anymore since it's 16-bit. But it loads in under a second when I double-click the icon, has never crashed on me (except when I make a mistake in a custom DLL), and scarcely registers on the resource meter. When I just need to do something real quick (write a quick TCP/IP daemon for testing, write a loan payment calculator, what have you) I invariably double-click on VB3 because it's just faster to get into and develop the quick app. A slim, 16-bit IDE is just faster than a 32-bit bloated IDE. And if you're just doing something quick and dirty, why bother with the bloat?
Granted, many people aren't doing something quick and dirty. But still, would they want the bloat if they could avoid it?
Disclaimer: I'm just saying that my experience with DevStudio is that it's slow and bloated. I haven't done any Java development so I'm not claiming they are any better. But I have a very low opinion of DevStudio and feel it has become more and more bloated after every incarnation since VB3/VC1.51.
Yeah, but they are targeting customers of specific companies that sold Smart-Card busting material. While there's some grey-market about it, the readers were flashed with a rom to break DirectTV card encryption--these aren't generic writers.
I do a lot of work with microcontrollers and a few years ago I was fascinated by the possibilities of smart cards so I bought a device. It was the cheapest product that had the flexibility I wanted. I don't remember where I bought it, but the site did mention DSS. But what did I care? It was the cheapest option.
As far as I know these devices weren't sold with any ROM to do anything. In fact, they made it very clear that it was the responsibility of the customer to flash whatever ROM they wanted.
Basically, what I bought was the equivalent of a computer with a virgin, unpartitioned hard drive. I then installed Linux on it. Now Microsoft sends me a letter saying "Hey, you bought this thing and you could have installed an illegal copy of Windows on it. Give us $3500 or we'll sue you." It's exactly the same and just as asburd.
They might all be scum, but I'd rather pay the "monthly extortion" of Comcast because I agreed up-front to it. I don't have DirectTV, Cable, or anything else. I don't even live in the U.S. right now. But one day when I move back to the United States I will definitely NOT be subscribing to DirectTV. They may have the best programming and best prices (someone else said that, I don't know that's true), but I'd rather pay a little more than fund a company that goes around suing innocent people and sees nothing wrong with that.
The whole concept of "sue 'em all, we think most of them are pirates" is the equivalent of nuking the Middle East as a solution to the Middle East problem. It might hit the bad apples, but if you end up hurting the innocent then it's unacceptable. That DirectTV engages in this practice even if they think the amount of collateral damage is "miniscule" should be prohibited.
If you have a case against an individual, sue them. If you don't, don't sue them. It's that simple. Anything else is an abuse of the legal system, and threatening to sue them is a threat to abuse the legal system unless extortion money is paid. I'm happy to see that they are being sued under RICO. Seems very appropriate.
Re:VS sucks
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Java vs .NET
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I haven't used any Java IDEs, but I agree with parent that VisualStudio sucks. Like virtually everything MS, it's become bloated.
I do very little Microsoft development these days, but I have both VB3 as well as DevStudio6 installed in my Win4Lin Windows installation. When I need to crank out something real fast, I run VB3. When I need to qukckly reference the help files, I click on VB3's.HLP files which load immediately as opposed to the new stuff that takes quite awhile to bring up.
In my opinion, Microsoft's IDE was at its height at VB3 and VC1.51 which I think was about 1993. Ever since then it's become more and more bloated. Sure, it does stuff that the older versions didn't. But just because it does more doesn't mean it's better--it just means it's bigger.
If you "renege on the promise you will be subject to charges of willful copyright infringement." So basically you are giving up any possible defense you may have because you've entered into a contract where you agree to accept those charges.
Plus, how are they going to know if you renege? I'd rather not be the subject of a surprise search of my hard drive to verify that I'm complying with my side of the deal even if I am. I don't need that kind of aggrevation any more than a business wants to deal with a BSA audit even if they're 100% legit.
The less the BSA, Microsoft, RIAA, government, etc. know about me personally the better, even if I'm 100% legit.
Actually, no. But you may be misunderstanding my previous post.
Reason: Digital media can make an identical-quality copy with almost no effort. DRM is designed to stop that. So even if the video can be captured or the audio recorded, the quality will be terrible, and the annoying effort required to capture the media will limit the amount of it that's available.
I disagree. If they somehow made CDs non-rippable then people can and would play the CDs and pipe it into the audio-in of their sound card. Yes, you'll suffer some quality loss but nothing along the lines of "terrible" and certainly less quality loss than most MP3s recorded at 128kbps already suffer.
As for video, I admit I do not know the details of how that all works but I'm certain that the exact same process is possible. Press "play" and pump it into the "video in" to a computer ripping it. Some quality, yes, but nothing like a shaky video recorded by someone pointing their camera at the movie screen.
This might not be good enough quality for some hardcore audio or visual aficionados, but it's entirely adequate for 99% of the population. Making DRM, again, pretty useless. Just makes add an additional step to the process of ripping it but doesn't add any additional steps for the person downloading it via P2P on the Internet. And this can actually drive otherwise honest users to just download it instead of buying it. Why buy a crippled version with DRM that limits usability when one can just hop online and a get a fully functional version for free?
Digital encryption will be how digital media is distributed in the future. By digital media, I mean all digital media that big corporations want to protect - music, movies, streamed video (i.e., all TV shows), electronic texts, you name it. It's the big gun that media producers intend to wield in the future.
I still don't understand the point. After all the effort, money, and inconvenience it can be heard (audio) or seen (video). In either case, people can and will convert that to non-DRM formats such as MP3 or Mpeg. Then it's business as usual. So what's the point?
My thoughts exactly. They talk about Haley's comet being seen at a large distance and then provide links to another comet breaking up. Other than both being comets I don't see the relevance.
Nice plan. Except for one thing: what makes you think even in your wildest dreams, that the government would let a major capitalist organisation be snuffed out like that? We're not talking ship-workers, or miners, or other manufacturers, we're talking pure-evil capitalism with the RIAA, and as I recall, they're the types the government numbers as "one of their own."
Let's get off your "government is evil and only loves corporations" pedestal for a moment and think... The "government" is NOT a single person. It doesn't even have a mind of its own. The "government" is you, me, and everyone that is employed on our behalf. Those people are mostly just making a living working 9-5. It's not the Borg. We don't have a few million federal employees that have somehow been brainwashed into doing corporate bidding.
That said, if you think even the government can keep certain things from happening, you're wrong. The government tried prohibition and failed. The government tried to prevent terrorism and failed. The government tried to maintain segregation and failed. The government has failed many times. If you think the government can "will" the RIAA to survive or somehow protect it from technology I think you're quite mistaken.
At the size of a BIC lighter, there's no reason why you couldnt stick half a dozen of these in your laptop case. 60 hours away from a store is much more impressive - potentially a whole week worth of usage.
Uh, yeah, but at $200 a battery those 6 batteries would cost close to what my laptop cost. I'm not worried about the size of carrying half a dozen batteries, but how much is that going to cost? And will I have to spend another $1200 on another set of incompatible batteries when I buy a new laptop?
Thing is, you don't need a gigantic uprising. All you need is college students no longer making the trip to the record store. And from what I've seen in terms of the college students I know, that's already happening even without the RIAA making a conscious effort at pissing them off.
True, but they should go for injunctions against the file sharers, not $50k fines.
If the RIAA is going to go after their customers legally, they should get injunctions. Take them to court and have a court tell them they must stop sharing files or they will be liable for the full amount. I think most people--and especially most teenagers and college students--will be sufficient scared by being served by the court and having to appear before the court and receive that warning officially. If the RIAA wants to scare teenagers and college students into not trading music that's all they need to do; and those people might actually buy some music someday.
Going after these people that, by definition, have no money to start with and trying to extort them into paying $50k (which they don't have) will probably lead them to declare bankruptcy before they even graduate from college. Now that's killing a consumer. That consumer is going to be pissed at you for life, as will many of the people he knows. You're not going to get any browny points in the court of public opinion in financially destroying a teenager. And I can guarantee you that that person will NEVER buy a product from you again. You think I'd give another dollar to an organization that extorted $50k out of me?
No, the RIAA is crazy. Yes, they should go after the end users. But they should do so with injunctions. What they're doing is a massacre and it will earn them no favor in the public. I don't think injunctions would cost them any business, but going after teenagers with $50k fines is going to cost them the business of all those that are disgusted by a multibillion dollar organization extorting an amount of money from teenagers that is completely unreasonable given their "crime."
When they do go out of business they'll just cite piracy as the reason... Either way they'll be portrayed as victims and filesharers online as the ones who killed a benevolent organization. Either way, they win.
No, if they go out of business they lose. I could care less what an expired, non-existant bankrupt recording industry cites as the reason for their demise. They can say whatever they want. If they no longer exist, they lost.
"The strategy can be reduced to 'We should really charge you $150,000 per song you have downloaded. Pay us $50,000 now, and we'll say no more about it.'"
So they're going after high school and college students for $50k? Yeah, right. The RIAA might actually succeed at causing these people to get a free college education... if they have a college debt and the RIAA comes after them for $50k they might just have to declare bankruptcy and their higher education turns out to be free.
This is all just absurd, of course. The penalty does not fit the crime. If I were one of them and received a judgement for $50k, I'd be quite tempted to move to Cancun and just forget about it.:)
Exactly. I thought it was pretty cool until I RTFA and it said that you couldn't recharge by plugging in.
With the current batteries you only get 1.5-3 hours, but that means you have 1.5-3 hours away from a PLUG and then it costs nothing to refill (I often refill sitting at the airport while waiting for my flight). Now we're talking 10 hours but those are 10 hours away from a STORE or REFILL station, and then I'm going to have to pay some inflated amount for the refill. Stores and refill stations just aren't going to be as numerous as plugs. At least I don't see any store or refill station in my house for after I go completely wireless during an electrical storm.
This technology has the potential to be cool, but I tend to believe the actual coolness will be less than its potential.
This article emphasizes the role of DRM in commercial settings. It's perfectly reasonable for corporate customers to want to control access to their documents in the workplace, and that's what the Office 2003 DRM features are targeted towards. It's just a dumb client-server authentication scheme, people.
Yes, and as such it seems entirely stupid. So the executive flying to L.A. won't be able to access the documents while on a 4-hour flight. Nor will he be able to do so from the hotel unless they open up the firewall to let him access the authentication server--something that seems inherently dangerous considering it's Microsoft we're talking about. Employees may not be able to work from home or in the evening for the same reason. If you send the document to an external consultant or a client it's going to be a major hassle to give them access--short of saving a version with no access restrictions.
If Microsoft is going to implement DRM in their Office platform, this is the way we want them to do it. It seems like a pretty stupid way to implement it that's going to cause more problems than it's going to solve. And if by implementing this DRM and showing consumers just how inconvenient it is the consumers learn that DRM is not their friend, all kind of Microsoft plans may go down the toilet.
When you buy a certificate it isn't the certificate file that is of real value, it's the procedures and policies that the CA runs their business on.
Don't even get me started on that. Like others have said, the whole CA scheme is a fraud. Pure money for companies like Verisign. We're paying for their procedures and policies? It is extremely easy to submit fradulent or manufactured document and you WILL get your certificate. At the same time, someone who plays by the rules can easily spend a few weeks dealing with the endless document requests (which seem to change each time you renew, even though they already "verified" who you are and had no complaints in the last year).
I originally had an SSL certificate from Thawte back in 2000 or 2001. At the time it was the cheapest, I think it was $150 per year or something. They requested documents that aren't needed in my state and as a result I didn't have. The final result was I had to get an SSL certificate registered to me personally because they requested documents a Colorado partnership wasn't required to have. When it came time to renew they asked me for a whole new set of documents that a Colorado partnership doesn't have. I explained to them that Colorado partnerships don't have the documents they were requesting and, besides, the dang certificate I wanted to renew was registed to me PERSONALLY, not the partnership. No go, it was like talking to a wall. I told them to cancel the renewal, went to Comodo where I pay $69/year instead, and they were able to process my certificate with no problem.
The whole CA scheme IS essentially a scam. I certainly don't trust someone just because Verisign or Thawte says I can trust them. That's just silly.
I was on vacation for a week, hence my delay in responding. Your message was quite long and certainly expresses your view on the issue, but I mostly just want to respond to your response of my primary objection to the challenge/response approach (even though you call it a red herring, even though it most definitely isn't).
As for adding to the flow of email by sending challenge messages to return addresses that are likely to be bogus, that's an unfortunate consequence, but the spammers are causing the problem by forging bogus return addresses in the first place -- so blame the source.
That's where I disagree with you. You are increasing someone's spam problem in an effort to reduce your own. You're increasing network traffic just to avoid spam yourself. That's just selfish. It also doesn't solve spam on a global basis since it's actually increasing spam and email traffic--you just don't see it yourself.
The three options you mentioned are:
Spammer uses real email address. Unlikely. But if it happens then the spammer is just treated as a legitimate sender, no big deal.
Spammer forges a bogus email address. At the very least spammers now use valid domains since so many email servers reject email that doesn't have a valid sending domain. So even if the email address itself is invalid, the domain is valid--so your challenge/response system is going to connect to the victim email server and attempt to send a challenge/response. That consumes bandwidth and CPU time both on your server and, worse, for the victim server.
Spammer forges someone's email address. This is the worst case. It consumes your CPU and bandwidth, the victim server CPU and bandwidth, and spams the innocent victim.
The vast majority of spammers fall into #2 or #3 so, unfortunately, your challenge/response system at a minimum increases email traffic and at worst spams innocent victims.
To blame the spammers for a flawed anti-spam technique is to completely nuke Israel and the Palestinians and then blame them because they made such a mess to start with that the only solution was to glass 'em. No, I think the world would blame Bush for that, not the Palestinians.
Or, on a smaller scale, it's to install a security system on your house that shoots anyone that touches your house without providing a code beforehand. Yes, you'll succeed at not getting robbed but you'll also problably take out a few girls selling Girl Scout cookies. Should we blame the robbers because your security system shot the Girl Scout?
Challenge/responese targets innocent victims because it assumes the return address is correct. We all know that that's not the case yet challenge/response chooses to shrug it off and say "Blame the spammers." No, I blame the spammers for spam. But I blame the users of C/R for ignoring reality and the increase in traffic and spam that THEY create.
Fact is, there are anti-spam solutions (Bayesian filters, primarily) that are so effective that there is no reason to resort to an archaeic anti-spam solution such as C/R that increases mail traffic on the network and increases spam for others just so YOU can avoid spam.
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But my question is... is VB.Net less bloated? Same code, different code, whatever. Is it less bloated? That has been my primary complaint more and more in every version since VB3.
Linux is making inroads everywhere. Obviously it's strongest on the server, but the desktop is making progress. I've been using Linux since 1995 (I believe) to run our Internet server. I never really considered using it on my desktop until I got a laptop preloaded with XP. It was just annoying and bloated. I had heard that Linux on the desktop had improved so I bought a new hard drive and went to install Linux on it. Graphical installation. Detected the embedded network card. Detected my USB mouse and keyboard. Detected my sound card. Basically, installation was just as easy as Windows. I'm now running Linux on my laptop and will never go back.
Linux IS a threat to Microsoft, period. Their own financial reports to the SEC acknowledge as much. From corporations to governments, everyone is either unhappy with Microsoft, sick of their nonexistant security, or outright switching to Linux.
To think that Microsoft is going to win this in the end is naive. The momentum is quite the opposite.
Give up on your cliche comebacks. They're older and more boring than VB3.
You've gone way off-topic as it is, talking about a language that isn't even offered in .NET, and has nothing to do with Java.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe VisualBasic is included in .Net. And my point is that the latest IDE incarnations from Microsoft are, like most of their products, far more bloated than they used to be. And that's why I've lost interest. As you mentioned, you've had the IDE just hang and your coworker's RAM got all sucked up overnight. That's never happened to me with VB3.
Again, my point isn't that we should all use VB3. I scarcely use any Microsoft development tools anymore. My point is that their IDE is big and bloated, more than it needs to be. Strange hanging and sucking up RAM seems consistent with that.
The rest of your post is interesting, but not at all what I was replying to originally. My reply was simply that Microsoft's IDEs no longer impress me. They are bigger and slower than they used to be. How that compares with IDEs available for Java is something I have nothing to say because I haven't done any Java work under any recent IDEs. My observation was limited to my experience with Microsoft's recent IDEs.
YMMV.
Right now a vote can be thrown out because the voter makes a stupid mistake. Perhaps the voter is stupid or maybe the ballot format is. A vote can be ignored if a vote counter at each counting location doesn't like the vote and slips it into the garbage or, as the essay says, just records the Republican votes as Democratic votes. The numbers can be messed up anywhere along the line.
With electronic voting the only thing that fundamentally has to be checked is that the whole world agrees the code is correct without little treasures to modify votes. You make the code simple (it doesn't have to be complicated), you bring in software developers that represent each political party, you give them each the code to browse to their heart's content. Each software developer then compiles the program with their own copy of the code (which they inspected and can archive and take with them) and they all come back and all the executables better be identical. That way everyone agrees we're talking about the same thing. Then you do an MD5 on that bugger and somehow work that into the encrypted vote that is recorded on the system. That takes care of the actual program that is being used being known to be valid and accepted by everyone.
Once you political parties are confident that the program itself is sound, getting the kinks out to keep vote selling out of town are minor details.
If the program can be certified by all concerned as described above there is virtually no way anyone could modify the results on election day.
Uhm, VisualStudio? :)
Starting it up, and reading all of my files, takes 20 seconds.
And starting VB3 and reading all my files takes, oh, a second. Maybe 2 sometimes.
It doesn't peg the CPU when compiling.
I have a fairly large legacy app developed under VB3. I can't even tell you whether or not it "pegs" the CPU when compiling because by the time I get the meter up the compilation is done.
Please don't compare Studio 6
I don't dare install it Studio.Net. I don't need it since I don't do much MS development anymore. I don't have it and I'm not going to buy it just to see how bloated it is (or isn't).
But are you suggesting that Studio.NET has broken a Microsoft trend that EVERYTHING they make is more and more bloated? Windows... Word... Excel... DevStudio. I have yet to see Microsoft actually unbloat anything. But I must admit I stopped at DevStudio 6.0 and Office 2000.
Is Microsoft actually removing bloat from their applications? Or are you just a fan? This is not a flame, I really want to know.
and VB3, which is so old that it shits doilies
Yes, very old. And not acceptable to do any professional development anymore since it's 16-bit. But it loads in under a second when I double-click the icon, has never crashed on me (except when I make a mistake in a custom DLL), and scarcely registers on the resource meter. When I just need to do something real quick (write a quick TCP/IP daemon for testing, write a loan payment calculator, what have you) I invariably double-click on VB3 because it's just faster to get into and develop the quick app. A slim, 16-bit IDE is just faster than a 32-bit bloated IDE. And if you're just doing something quick and dirty, why bother with the bloat?
Granted, many people aren't doing something quick and dirty. But still, would they want the bloat if they could avoid it?
Disclaimer: I'm just saying that my experience with DevStudio is that it's slow and bloated. I haven't done any Java development so I'm not claiming they are any better. But I have a very low opinion of DevStudio and feel it has become more and more bloated after every incarnation since VB3/VC1.51.
I do a lot of work with microcontrollers and a few years ago I was fascinated by the possibilities of smart cards so I bought a device. It was the cheapest product that had the flexibility I wanted. I don't remember where I bought it, but the site did mention DSS. But what did I care? It was the cheapest option.
As far as I know these devices weren't sold with any ROM to do anything. In fact, they made it very clear that it was the responsibility of the customer to flash whatever ROM they wanted.
Basically, what I bought was the equivalent of a computer with a virgin, unpartitioned hard drive. I then installed Linux on it. Now Microsoft sends me a letter saying "Hey, you bought this thing and you could have installed an illegal copy of Windows on it. Give us $3500 or we'll sue you." It's exactly the same and just as asburd.
The whole concept of "sue 'em all, we think most of them are pirates" is the equivalent of nuking the Middle East as a solution to the Middle East problem. It might hit the bad apples, but if you end up hurting the innocent then it's unacceptable. That DirectTV engages in this practice even if they think the amount of collateral damage is "miniscule" should be prohibited.
If you have a case against an individual, sue them. If you don't, don't sue them. It's that simple. Anything else is an abuse of the legal system, and threatening to sue them is a threat to abuse the legal system unless extortion money is paid. I'm happy to see that they are being sued under RICO. Seems very appropriate.
I do very little Microsoft development these days, but I have both VB3 as well as DevStudio6 installed in my Win4Lin Windows installation. When I need to crank out something real fast, I run VB3. When I need to qukckly reference the help files, I click on VB3's .HLP files which load immediately as opposed to the new stuff that takes quite awhile to bring up.
In my opinion, Microsoft's IDE was at its height at VB3 and VC1.51 which I think was about 1993. Ever since then it's become more and more bloated. Sure, it does stuff that the older versions didn't. But just because it does more doesn't mean it's better--it just means it's bigger.
If you "renege on the promise you will be subject to charges of willful copyright infringement." So basically you are giving up any possible defense you may have because you've entered into a contract where you agree to accept those charges.
Plus, how are they going to know if you renege? I'd rather not be the subject of a surprise search of my hard drive to verify that I'm complying with my side of the deal even if I am. I don't need that kind of aggrevation any more than a business wants to deal with a BSA audit even if they're 100% legit.
The less the BSA, Microsoft, RIAA, government, etc. know about me personally the better, even if I'm 100% legit.
Actually, no. But you may be misunderstanding my previous post.
Reason: Digital media can make an identical-quality copy with almost no effort. DRM is designed to stop that. So even if the video can be captured or the audio recorded, the quality will be terrible, and the annoying effort required to capture the media will limit the amount of it that's available.
I disagree. If they somehow made CDs non-rippable then people can and would play the CDs and pipe it into the audio-in of their sound card. Yes, you'll suffer some quality loss but nothing along the lines of "terrible" and certainly less quality loss than most MP3s recorded at 128kbps already suffer.
As for video, I admit I do not know the details of how that all works but I'm certain that the exact same process is possible. Press "play" and pump it into the "video in" to a computer ripping it. Some quality, yes, but nothing like a shaky video recorded by someone pointing their camera at the movie screen.
This might not be good enough quality for some hardcore audio or visual aficionados, but it's entirely adequate for 99% of the population. Making DRM, again, pretty useless. Just makes add an additional step to the process of ripping it but doesn't add any additional steps for the person downloading it via P2P on the Internet. And this can actually drive otherwise honest users to just download it instead of buying it. Why buy a crippled version with DRM that limits usability when one can just hop online and a get a fully functional version for free?
I still don't understand the point. After all the effort, money, and inconvenience it can be heard (audio) or seen (video). In either case, people can and will convert that to non-DRM formats such as MP3 or Mpeg. Then it's business as usual. So what's the point?
Let's get off your "government is evil and only loves corporations" pedestal for a moment and think... The "government" is NOT a single person. It doesn't even have a mind of its own. The "government" is you, me, and everyone that is employed on our behalf. Those people are mostly just making a living working 9-5. It's not the Borg. We don't have a few million federal employees that have somehow been brainwashed into doing corporate bidding.
That said, if you think even the government can keep certain things from happening, you're wrong. The government tried prohibition and failed. The government tried to prevent terrorism and failed. The government tried to maintain segregation and failed. The government has failed many times. If you think the government can "will" the RIAA to survive or somehow protect it from technology I think you're quite mistaken.
Uh, yeah, but at $200 a battery those 6 batteries would cost close to what my laptop cost. I'm not worried about the size of carrying half a dozen batteries, but how much is that going to cost? And will I have to spend another $1200 on another set of incompatible batteries when I buy a new laptop?
If the RIAA is going to go after their customers legally, they should get injunctions. Take them to court and have a court tell them they must stop sharing files or they will be liable for the full amount. I think most people--and especially most teenagers and college students--will be sufficient scared by being served by the court and having to appear before the court and receive that warning officially. If the RIAA wants to scare teenagers and college students into not trading music that's all they need to do; and those people might actually buy some music someday.
Going after these people that, by definition, have no money to start with and trying to extort them into paying $50k (which they don't have) will probably lead them to declare bankruptcy before they even graduate from college. Now that's killing a consumer. That consumer is going to be pissed at you for life, as will many of the people he knows. You're not going to get any browny points in the court of public opinion in financially destroying a teenager. And I can guarantee you that that person will NEVER buy a product from you again. You think I'd give another dollar to an organization that extorted $50k out of me?
No, the RIAA is crazy. Yes, they should go after the end users. But they should do so with injunctions. What they're doing is a massacre and it will earn them no favor in the public. I don't think injunctions would cost them any business, but going after teenagers with $50k fines is going to cost them the business of all those that are disgusted by a multibillion dollar organization extorting an amount of money from teenagers that is completely unreasonable given their "crime."
No, if they go out of business they lose. I could care less what an expired, non-existant bankrupt recording industry cites as the reason for their demise. They can say whatever they want. If they no longer exist, they lost.
So they're going after high school and college students for $50k? Yeah, right. The RIAA might actually succeed at causing these people to get a free college education... if they have a college debt and the RIAA comes after them for $50k they might just have to declare bankruptcy and their higher education turns out to be free.
This is all just absurd, of course. The penalty does not fit the crime. If I were one of them and received a judgement for $50k, I'd be quite tempted to move to Cancun and just forget about it. :)
Exactly. I thought it was pretty cool until I RTFA and it said that you couldn't recharge by plugging in.
With the current batteries you only get 1.5-3 hours, but that means you have 1.5-3 hours away from a PLUG and then it costs nothing to refill (I often refill sitting at the airport while waiting for my flight). Now we're talking 10 hours but those are 10 hours away from a STORE or REFILL station, and then I'm going to have to pay some inflated amount for the refill. Stores and refill stations just aren't going to be as numerous as plugs. At least I don't see any store or refill station in my house for after I go completely wireless during an electrical storm.
This technology has the potential to be cool, but I tend to believe the actual coolness will be less than its potential.
Yes, and as such it seems entirely stupid. So the executive flying to L.A. won't be able to access the documents while on a 4-hour flight. Nor will he be able to do so from the hotel unless they open up the firewall to let him access the authentication server--something that seems inherently dangerous considering it's Microsoft we're talking about. Employees may not be able to work from home or in the evening for the same reason. If you send the document to an external consultant or a client it's going to be a major hassle to give them access--short of saving a version with no access restrictions.
If Microsoft is going to implement DRM in their Office platform, this is the way we want them to do it. It seems like a pretty stupid way to implement it that's going to cause more problems than it's going to solve. And if by implementing this DRM and showing consumers just how inconvenient it is the consumers learn that DRM is not their friend, all kind of Microsoft plans may go down the toilet.
Challenger=1986, != 1987. We are talking about Shuttle events before 1987.
Don't even get me started on that. Like others have said, the whole CA scheme is a fraud. Pure money for companies like Verisign. We're paying for their procedures and policies? It is extremely easy to submit fradulent or manufactured document and you WILL get your certificate. At the same time, someone who plays by the rules can easily spend a few weeks dealing with the endless document requests (which seem to change each time you renew, even though they already "verified" who you are and had no complaints in the last year).
I originally had an SSL certificate from Thawte back in 2000 or 2001. At the time it was the cheapest, I think it was $150 per year or something. They requested documents that aren't needed in my state and as a result I didn't have. The final result was I had to get an SSL certificate registered to me personally because they requested documents a Colorado partnership wasn't required to have. When it came time to renew they asked me for a whole new set of documents that a Colorado partnership doesn't have. I explained to them that Colorado partnerships don't have the documents they were requesting and, besides, the dang certificate I wanted to renew was registed to me PERSONALLY, not the partnership. No go, it was like talking to a wall. I told them to cancel the renewal, went to Comodo where I pay $69/year instead, and they were able to process my certificate with no problem.
The whole CA scheme IS essentially a scam. I certainly don't trust someone just because Verisign or Thawte says I can trust them. That's just silly.
As for adding to the flow of email by sending challenge messages to return addresses that are likely to be bogus, that's an unfortunate consequence, but the spammers are causing the problem by forging bogus return addresses in the first place -- so blame the source.
That's where I disagree with you. You are increasing someone's spam problem in an effort to reduce your own. You're increasing network traffic just to avoid spam yourself. That's just selfish. It also doesn't solve spam on a global basis since it's actually increasing spam and email traffic--you just don't see it yourself.
The three options you mentioned are:
- Spammer uses real email address. Unlikely. But if it happens then the spammer is just treated as a legitimate sender, no big deal.
- Spammer forges a bogus email address. At the very least spammers now use valid domains since so many email servers reject email that doesn't have a valid sending domain. So even if the email address itself is invalid, the domain is valid--so your challenge/response system is going to connect to the victim email server and attempt to send a challenge/response. That consumes bandwidth and CPU time both on your server and, worse, for the victim server.
- Spammer forges someone's email address. This is the worst case. It consumes your CPU and bandwidth, the victim server CPU and bandwidth, and spams the innocent victim.
The vast majority of spammers fall into #2 or #3 so, unfortunately, your challenge/response system at a minimum increases email traffic and at worst spams innocent victims.To blame the spammers for a flawed anti-spam technique is to completely nuke Israel and the Palestinians and then blame them because they made such a mess to start with that the only solution was to glass 'em. No, I think the world would blame Bush for that, not the Palestinians.
Or, on a smaller scale, it's to install a security system on your house that shoots anyone that touches your house without providing a code beforehand. Yes, you'll succeed at not getting robbed but you'll also problably take out a few girls selling Girl Scout cookies. Should we blame the robbers because your security system shot the Girl Scout?
Challenge/responese targets innocent victims because it assumes the return address is correct. We all know that that's not the case yet challenge/response chooses to shrug it off and say "Blame the spammers." No, I blame the spammers for spam. But I blame the users of C/R for ignoring reality and the increase in traffic and spam that THEY create.
Fact is, there are anti-spam solutions (Bayesian filters, primarily) that are so effective that there is no reason to resort to an archaeic anti-spam solution such as C/R that increases mail traffic on the network and increases spam for others just so YOU can avoid spam.