A monopoly, by itself, is nothing more than one single vendor dominating a market. By itself, it does nothing more than change the price point slightly -- instead of being concerned with "Minimize cost per unit, price just above cost, sell high volume", it becomes concerned with "Maximize total profit by reducing volume and increasing sell price".
The problem is "We control market X; we will leverage our control of X to take over Y".
The first is legal; the second is not.
It was microsoft's attempt to turn "Control of the desktop OS" into "Control of the internet" and "Control of applications" that got them into trouble.
It was the Bush (? Or was it Regan) administration that permitted a slap-on-the-wrist punishment to go un-appealed.
Gads, California got more ($5000) for the destruction of the public transit system back in the early 1900's than the U.S. got for destruction of the independent computer software market and internet applications. (Or do you understand what it means when microsoft "extends" the html standard, while still permitting these documents to be tagged as ".html", "text/html", when they are really ".ieml", or "application/IE-markup".)
> 2a. Windows is still vulnerable to autorun attacks in CDs and USB keys.
As any Amiga user that ran into the Disk-Validator virus will tell you, autorun and autoplay are nightmares waiting to happen.
Disk-Validator was what, 1986? 20 years ago that the idea of "If a specially marked disk is inserted, run a program without any user confirmation" was demonstrated to be a disaster, a way for malicious programs to clobber computers.
I know of no way to disable autorun and autoplay on Windows systems without disabling AutoInsertNotification (notify the system if a disk is changed), yet that one is wanted.
And yes, auto-play is a problem. My friend has a windows XP system that tries to run the Photo Gallery installer anytime a disk is inserted with pictures or videos, and I don't know how to disable it. It seems to be triggered by autoplay. And if this can trigger program X, then it can be rigged to trigger program Y.
Let me see. I can either trust a network run by volunteers, that I have no contractual obligations to, where at least one node is known to have logged -- AND POSTED -- account names and passwords (with "xxx" blotting out most of both), or I can trust a commercial entity with pockets, that I have a contractual relation with, that I can take to court if necessary.
Hmm. Sounds like a no brainer to me.
Oh, wait a second. A single, centralized exit point? Even if this company is 100% on the level, what do we know about their single exit point ISP?
> Compare that to Linux, or even Windows -- add/remove programs, click "uninstall". Done.
I'm sorry, on windows that just runs a vendor supplied script. Did it forget to remove a driver that it installed? Does it work correctly if you install A, then B, then uninstall A?
Can you check if it installed driver program X? Can you check if it was uninstalled?
For that matter, did you even know that it was installing a system driver? Does the system do anything to tell you that this is a user-level install versus a system-level install? With the "All user" versus "Single user" setup, can you even control which it is? How badly messed up is the "All user" concept -- if I clean up my own desktop, have I screwed over all the other users on my system?
And did I give it permission to install anything? Did it install a new CD-Rom driver before I even agreed to let it, and then leave it there when I said "No thanks"?
What do you really need in an "installer" program, for OS level support? Ultimately, any changes made by this program, or by any program on the system in response to activities by this program, have to be tracked at the OS kernel level -- that means that any Open/write/close traces need to be monitored. And even at that, what if the program didn't have the "I'm an installer" bit set, and none of that kernel level tracking was done?
The bottom line? You can't have an installer program if you want any chance of an OS -- Operating SYSTEM level tracking. Kernel level tracking is just more nightmare than anything else without some hefty support, starting with a versioning filesystem. Now figure out how to track "Which of the many programs running now was responsible for this change" when you've got multiple users, multiple windows, multiple programs all running at once.
For the system to track things for you, what do you need?
1. Nothing goes into the system unless the system puts it in. 2. The system tracks what it puts in, and lets you manage it.
That means packages with no installer scripts.
That means that, as far as I know, none of: Windows, Mac OS,.rpm's, Suse, etc.
Nothing more than tarballs without "install.sh" or "install.exe". Nothing but plain ".zip"'s of the program in a working state.
You're kidding, right? Or is this what "Trolling" means?
Plain text cannot convey any meta information. Nor can it properly handle non 7-bit ascii.
So lets say I want to indicate that formatting has [b]bold[/b] letters in my text. Clearly, plain text is 100% compatible with everything, right?
Or lets say I want to format for 2 column output. Do I assume 10 characters per inch, 8.5 inches across, and layout in a predetermined font -- the old "plain text" format? Ouch, that gives me line 1, line 33, line 2, line 34, line 3, line 35, etc. Text is all messed up. No good.
I want to have my text -- line 1, 2, 3, 4, etc -- and then format it in two column seperately.
And I haven't even mentioned fonts, margins, etc.
And then there's "How is this done?". Do we use control codes for formatting? Oh dear, we destroyed 8-bit clean / non ascii characters. And how do we represent those? Do we assume (horrible, horrible broken Java) that 16 bits will represent any character, and just double the size of plain ascii files? Do we use UTF-8? UTF-7? UTF-16? How about UCS-4 -- oh, wait, that just means that the "Universal" character format is only big enough to hold "earth-based" characters, and will fail when we join the galactic group.
Meta information -- formatting layout, fonts, etc -- CANNOT be done in plain text. You have to have some sort of extra information.
Up til now, I've always been recommending RTF to all my clients, because I knew about compatibility problems with.doc formats. But now that I know that RTF was a microsoft standard, and then not even implemented properly by microsoft, and artificially changed by microsoft? What's that line again? "Embrace. Extend. Exterminate"
Oh, yea -- I've used three different styles of markup in this. All "plain text", right? 100% understandable everywhere, right?
Yea, sure. Preview tells me that the "Voice" tag I gave in there disappears completely. Of course it's compatible.
> Desktop PC support is the lowest rung of the IT ladder. It's true. If you call the help desk, and the guy whose been there for years shows up, send him/her away. You only stay in desktop support if you don't have the skills to move up.
Not true. Moving up requires both work skills, people skills, and opportunity to move up.
What if the work environment says "No, we're not promoting anyone, gotta keep costs down"?
What if the work environment says "We don't consider job B to be a promotion from job A; we hire job B people from outside the company".
What if you're skilled enough to handle higher level work, but so over qualified for the low level work that people think "Gee, if we hire this person, they'll just leave us for a better company, so we'll hire someone less qualified that will stay".
What if you have Asperger's, and react differently in social situations, such that at employment review times you are passed on promotion regardless of skill?
What if you feel that something like the http://infrastructures.org/ system for keeping systems under control is the right way to go, and management feels that the established system is superior, so you get canned for suggesting it?
The BSA? The people who want to come in, find stuff on your computer, and fine you?
You do tell them to go elsewhere, don't you?
They are not government. There's no law that I know of giving them any authority. They are just private investigators that have to ask to see your stuff, and you have to grant them permission.
Nothing -- nothing that I know of -- gives them any right to demand it.
And if they think you have something, they still have to go and show enough proof to a judge. "They won't let us inspect, they must be hiding something" isn't valid.
Besides, why would you let some third party that doesn't follow your privacy standards look at machines with private data?
Next time the BSA knocks, tell them "Go Away". They have no legal authority. They are like the "Night Watchmen", from when Sherridan told them that they were civilian authorities with no military authority, and were operating outside the chain of command.
Just say "No". Just say "Am I required to?". "No". "Good-bye".
Look at Puzzle Pirates (www.puzzlepirates.com). They have a persistant world game in java that plays fast.
Ok, so you need at least 512 MB, preferably 1gig of memory. And yes, it works (Slowly) even with only 128 or 256.
But it works. It doesn't require a reconfigured kernel. It doesn't crash in the middle. It's not horribly slow.
Yes, there's loading lag when you go from A to B. Most games have that, sadly.
You want to blame Java. What for?
1. An app that wanted a reconfigured kernel? Yes, no good app should need that. This one did. 2. Horrible config file re-write? That's not a language issue. 3. Death from timeout with no ablity to fix up? That's not a language issue. 4. Writing config file changes in-place, without getting everything changed first? That's not a language issue.
You've used a bunch of bad apps, that happened to have been written in one language, Java. Shall I talk about the bad C++ apps I've used, and blame the language?
Ohh --- better. I'll complain about the bad Microsoft Windows brand graphical operating system programs I've used, and then blame MS Windows for it.
Oh, wait, I just ruined my own argument, didn't I?
Have you ever heard of Medicare or Medicaid? For a person with those types of diseases, all you have to do to is apply.
Yes, I have.
I have Asperger's. I've applied -- twice -- to SSD. Both times they claim to have lost my appeal after turning me down. Both times the county's doctor has examined me, determined that I have a textbook case, and recommended that I get disability support. Both times they've turned me down.
I'm now trying to find a good advocate to help me, because whatever it is, I clearly cannot get this on my own.
Medicare/Medicaid? If I get SSD approved, then I'm covered. If I don't, I'm not. So I have to just manage to stay healthy with no coverage.
Pure and simple, Microsoft has protected their market share by remaining backwards compatible, and will continue to do so for that reason only.
When windows 95 came out, and Microsoft was competing with 3.x versus Os2/Warp, 95 was released without one critical piece of backwards compatibility.
Although old 16 bit programs were given twiddled names from file requestors (needed, as they needed to work with short file names), end users were shown ugly twiddles all over the place.
This effectively meant that older programs were broken, and needed to be replaced with new ones.
New ones that didn't run on the competing OS's.
Suddenly, the market share of microsoft increased -- leveraging the "new computers come with us by default" / "People have to buy and install our competition" with "New apps no longer work with our competition".
Microsoft keeps or breaks backwards compatibility based on "What's best for us, given the current environment?".
Don't forget -- XP changed the driver model and broke a LOT of device drivers. Still think they have backwards compatibility as a big thing?
Mac OS X is a nice example, that regulary uses emulation to ensure backward compatibility. Between 68k and PowerPC, between different version of OS and OS X, between PPC and Intel.... each time they make a new architecture offering new possibility, and instead of keeping some old stuff that only drags evolution back, they choose to emulate it,
No longer true. They stopped shipping the 680x0 emulator a while back (they stopped documenting it much earlier, while it was still shipping).
If I wanted to install a 68040 program that used the NX-classes today (say, Nextstep Improv), I'd be out of luck.
Did I say "Wanted"? "Can't find a replacement copy" might be better -- it came with my old slab.
1. Flaws in/dev/random existed for a long time, and when someone actually wanted to analize it (horribly written), he got no help at all from the developers. After managing to determine what it was doing, and seeing that it relied on security through obscurity, it's possible to understand that open source does not mean "many pairs of eyes are looking for flaws".
2. Just because something is open source doesn't mean it's fixable. The flaws/bugs in open office are huge. To try to fix them? First I'd have to learn a brand-new windowing system (I've never written a line of X in my life). Second, I'd have to learn the inside guts of a major big programming environment that has probably been repatched repeatedly through many different versions and could use a big re-write. Third, I'd have to say that spending however many hours this would take was more valuable to me than X, Y or Z -- the things I'd have to give up.
Fixing bugs occurs when the cost of those bugs, compared to the value of the time it would take to fix them, falls within a favorable range compared to purchasing a bug-free product off the marketplace. That's a very narrow range -- too much of my time, and I either purchase (if I have a good income/my time is valuable), or do without (if I have to give up many other things).
Who finds it cheap to fix these things? The developers.
3. Open source people listen? I'm sorry, how often do you find a "submit idea to developers" link in a program? Bug tracking? Firefox, as an example, wants me to download and test the latest nightly build of Mozilla, and only submit the bug report if it's not in Mozilla, but only in the firefox user interface system. That's easy? That's friendly?
4. Ubuntu being easier to install than windows? Err, you must have installed a different version of ubuntu than I did. I installed the june 06 release of the server system -- I took the LAMP option because my client needed a web server.
I had to go back and install, and manually configure, with no aid of any kind, **everything** -- the multiple ethernet connections, time server, DHCP server, samba, etc -- EVERYTHING defaults to not installed. Worse, even some things that I consider basic stuff --/usr/bin/strings -- isn't installed. And the package system there stinks. I had no idea what package provides stuff like strings, and there's no way to say "Here's a filename, which package owns it".
Easy to use? The command line package installer doesn't install recommended packages, at all. The graphical one will default to installing them, but won't tell you why a given package is being installed, and the install for samba turned out to be horrendously huge -- it turns out that besides required, and recommended, there's "suggested", which was a no-no, that defaulted true.
Easy to use? There's no good way to find out what isn't installed. There's no tool for automatically updating the init.d script links, at least not that I could find (probably in some package that didn't install). The last time I installed from scratch, redhat 7 had a nice configuration tool for controlling all the main parts of the system -- kinda like windows control panel. Granted, it was a first version -- it didn't work properly if a panel was larger than the screen (no scroll bars), but it was a mostly functional, working system.
5. Games? Give me a Qemu system configured so I can easily load either a free dos (for older dos games), or install my windows CD (for windows games). Configure it to run as an unprivileged user (since windows is so inherently unsecure), etc.
Or heck, just make it easy to install that on my own. Can I get a copy of Qemu for my system? Sure -- there's a native port for Mac Os X. But there's a huge difference between "This will work, if stuff is installed", and "Here's a step-by-step of how to install Nextstep", but no where is "Here's how to run your old dos games"; no where is "This is what you do to install windows".
> I defy you to point to a model that predicted Bill Gate's recent charitable contributions. You just don't have one.
Alright, how about a model that states that people will invest money whereever they feel that the total return will be the best.
Why give to charity? Why donate time and effort to free software?
Because people feel that the total return will be best.
What is the total return?
That's dependent on the individual. Some people only look at total funds in their pocket. Some people look at the improvements to society for the next generation to grow up in Sometimes that is specifically what will benefit the portion of society that their own children will see, not the world as a whole.
You really want a suprise in economics? How does the success of free software -- specifically, the stuff built and maintained by donated time, not research funds backed time -- differ from "the problem of the commons"? Here the commons actually works.
> The only type of machine this exploit targets are machines with multiple untrusted user accounts. I can't imagine why someone would be running this NVIDIA graphics driver on a server type machine anyway...
Possibilities: 1. Guest access at a library that is avoiding use of Microsoft products. 2. Corporate environments where you might want a secretary to have graphical use but not access to arbitrary files. 3. School environments where lots of students share a few computers.
Hmm... those sound like good places for Linux, where graphics are desirable.
Seriously, the "Only one person will use a computer" response sounds like Microsoft's response to shatter attacks.
When Alexa first came out, I was willing to use it. There were two features that it provided, and page ranking was actually the least important. Far more important to me was the goal of building an inverted index of the web -- tracking who linked to this site I was looking at, rather than seeing who this site links to.
All that changed when Alexa was bought by Amazon. And then the truth came out -- all the information that I thought was private was in the database, and now owned by a commercial company, with no restriction on how they used that information. All the information about me that came to the right of the question mark was now in a commercial database, just as bad as AOL's release of search engine queries.
That gave a 100% loss of trust for me. And not just me.
People who know what's going on won't install Alexa because it's giving unrestricted access to personal information to a commercial company for their own profit. And, the "backwards index" -- which helps the internet navigation globally -- is no longer the focus of the product.
So for most people, it has lost any purpose and functionality.
This is why it is so fundamentally off on any numbers it generates. Heck, Neilson ratings have to be more accurate:-).
Speaking of which, there used to be a system called cow9 over on Alta-Vista, that really worked well for search refinement.
As an example, if you did a search for "atm", you got back a graphic page (interactive, naturally) that clearly showed bank related pages, and network related pages, seperate. You could indicate which group you were interested in, as well as subdivisions based on keywords in the pages retreived.
Cow9 was the best way to find stuff. I have no idea why it was removed.
Fundamentals in the constitution? 1. A jury trial (the people) is required before fines over $20, or any imprisonment. 2. States (the people) can force an amendment process even if the congress won't approve amendments 3. War is only waged by congress, as representatives of the people.
Yes, there are others. But notice: 1. Jury trials are often denied. * We have brand new classes of law defined, other than "civil" or "criminal", and crimes defined there are denied jury trials. 2. Despite 49 states calling for a convention, congress has refused to schedule one, and the courts have ruled "It's not our jurisdiction". 3. The president has taken it on his own authority to wage war without end.
I could go on. But we're at the point where the people are no longer in charge in the US. Heck, we can't even vote a better person in anymore.
At least we can count on the two term limit, right? I mean, the president isn't going to abolish the election this year, right? (ack, that would give us his veep! (Cheney (sp?)))
3 rows of menubars and tabs taking up valuable vertical space.
More things NOT ON the menus == more things that cannot be keyboarded. Forced mousing == forced slowdown.
A brand new set of non-standard window frame and menu bar, so any sort of helper program (screen readers, etc) will be confused.
Yet another case of "No other program has these features" advertising claim, with the truth being that microsoft has abandoned -- AGAIN -- the standard UI routines that they feel are good enough for the rest of us. This leads to
Dozens and dozens of slightly different UI looks re-implemented in every program, slightly different, because no one wants to use the boring standard. Even though years and years ago, microsoft assured everyone that by using these standard routines, any improvements/enhancements would automatically be available to your programs, and they would never go out of date (cough cough twiddle filenames cough cough)
Heck, even the file menu is gone. Talk about "How do I save/load?".
All in all, it seems to be that microsoft is run by people with ADD/ADHD -- Make it different, make it colorful, we have no attention span, make it visually loud so people see us. Take a look at those sample reformatting images -- every one does something to try to say "See Me!", something to try to stand out. Yet when EVERYTHING is going to have the same "standout", the same "Look at me!", it will all just get ignored.
GAAAAA.
Can we please get some consistency from microsoft?
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a way to do double blind acupuncture testing. First time I've seen any workable approach to this.
"Oh, three or four"
A monopoly, by itself, is nothing more than one single vendor dominating a market. By itself, it does nothing more than change the price point slightly -- instead of being concerned with "Minimize cost per unit, price just above cost, sell high volume", it becomes concerned with "Maximize total profit by reducing volume and increasing sell price".
The problem is "We control market X; we will leverage our control of X to take over Y".
The first is legal; the second is not.
It was microsoft's attempt to turn "Control of the desktop OS" into "Control of the internet" and "Control of applications" that got them into trouble.
It was the Bush (? Or was it Regan) administration that permitted a slap-on-the-wrist punishment to go un-appealed.
Gads, California got more ($5000) for the destruction of the public transit system back in the early 1900's than the U.S. got for destruction of the independent computer software market and internet applications. (Or do you understand what it means when microsoft "extends" the html standard, while still permitting these documents to be tagged as ".html", "text/html", when they are really ".ieml", or "application/IE-markup".)
Does this mean that "People over a certain age are automatically disqualified" are illegal?
Gee, someone tell that to the NSA.
> 2a. Windows is still vulnerable to autorun attacks in CDs and USB keys.
As any Amiga user that ran into the Disk-Validator virus will tell you, autorun and autoplay are nightmares waiting to happen.
Disk-Validator was what, 1986? 20 years ago that the idea of "If a specially marked disk is inserted, run a program without any user confirmation" was demonstrated to be a disaster, a way for malicious programs to clobber computers.
I know of no way to disable autorun and autoplay on Windows systems without disabling AutoInsertNotification (notify the system if a disk is changed), yet that one is wanted.
And yes, auto-play is a problem. My friend has a windows XP system that tries to run the Photo Gallery installer anytime a disk is inserted with pictures or videos, and I don't know how to disable it. It seems to be triggered by autoplay. And if this can trigger program X, then it can be rigged to trigger program Y.
Let me see. I can either trust a network run by volunteers, that I have no contractual obligations to, where at least one node is known to have logged -- AND POSTED -- account names and passwords (with "xxx" blotting out most of both), or I can trust a commercial entity with pockets, that I have a contractual relation with, that I can take to court if necessary.
Hmm. Sounds like a no brainer to me.
Oh, wait a second. A single, centralized exit point? Even if this company is 100% on the level, what do we know about their single exit point ISP?
Decentralized exit nodes FTW.
> Compare that to Linux, or even Windows -- add/remove programs, click "uninstall". Done.
.rpm's, Suse, etc.
I'm sorry, on windows that just runs a vendor supplied script. Did it forget to remove a driver that it installed? Does it work correctly if you install A, then B, then uninstall A?
Can you check if it installed driver program X?
Can you check if it was uninstalled?
For that matter, did you even know that it was installing a system driver? Does the system do anything to tell you that this is a user-level install versus a system-level install? With the "All user" versus "Single user" setup, can you even control which it is? How badly messed up is the "All user" concept -- if I clean up my own desktop, have I screwed over all the other users on my system?
And did I give it permission to install anything? Did it install a new CD-Rom driver before I even agreed to let it, and then leave it there when I said "No thanks"?
What do you really need in an "installer" program, for OS level support? Ultimately, any changes made by this program, or by any program on the system in response to activities by this program, have to be tracked at the OS kernel level -- that means that any Open/write/close traces need to be monitored. And even at that, what if the program didn't have the "I'm an installer" bit set, and none of that kernel level tracking was done?
The bottom line? You can't have an installer program if you want any chance of an OS -- Operating SYSTEM level tracking. Kernel level tracking is just more nightmare than anything else without some hefty support, starting with a versioning filesystem. Now figure out how to track "Which of the many programs running now was responsible for this change" when you've got multiple users, multiple windows, multiple programs all running at once.
For the system to track things for you, what do you need?
1. Nothing goes into the system unless the system puts it in.
2. The system tracks what it puts in, and lets you manage it.
That means packages with no installer scripts.
That means that, as far as I know, none of: Windows, Mac OS,
Nothing more than tarballs without "install.sh" or "install.exe". Nothing but plain ".zip"'s of the program in a working state.
> Upgrading is almost always preferable to a clean install, since you keep all of your settings.
And every Microsoft Windows guide I've seen recommends clean intalls over upgrades because of the "mixture" problem. Hmm...
You're kidding, right? Or is this what "Trolling" means?
.doc formats. But now that I know that RTF was a microsoft standard, and then not even implemented properly by microsoft, and artificially changed by microsoft? What's that line again? "Embrace. Extend. Exterminate"
Plain text cannot convey any meta information. Nor can it properly handle non 7-bit ascii.
So lets say I want to indicate that formatting has [b]bold[/b] letters in my text. Clearly, plain text is 100% compatible with everything, right?
Or lets say I want to format for 2 column output. Do I assume 10 characters per inch, 8.5 inches across, and layout in a predetermined font -- the old "plain text" format? Ouch, that gives me line 1, line 33, line 2, line 34, line 3, line 35, etc. Text is all messed up. No good.
I want to have my text -- line 1, 2, 3, 4, etc -- and then format it in two column seperately.
And I haven't even mentioned fonts, margins, etc.
And then there's "How is this done?". Do we use control codes for formatting? Oh dear, we destroyed 8-bit clean / non ascii characters. And how do we represent those? Do we assume (horrible, horrible broken Java) that 16 bits will represent any character, and just double the size of plain ascii files? Do we use UTF-8? UTF-7? UTF-16? How about UCS-4 -- oh, wait, that just means that the "Universal" character format is only big enough to hold "earth-based" characters, and will fail when we join the galactic group.
Meta information -- formatting layout, fonts, etc -- CANNOT be done in plain text. You have to have some sort of extra information.
Up til now, I've always been recommending RTF to all my clients, because I knew about compatibility problems with
Oh, yea -- I've used three different styles of markup in this. All "plain text", right? 100% understandable everywhere, right?
Yea, sure. Preview tells me that the "Voice" tag I gave in there disappears completely. Of course it's compatible.
(it was "english-scifi" on the Dalek line)
> Desktop PC support is the lowest rung of the IT ladder. It's true. If you call the help desk, and the guy whose been there for years shows up, send him/her away. You only stay in desktop support if you don't have the skills to move up.
Not true.
Moving up requires both work skills, people skills, and opportunity to move up.
What if the work environment says "No, we're not promoting anyone, gotta keep costs down"?
What if the work environment says "We don't consider job B to be a promotion from job A; we hire job B people from outside the company".
What if you're skilled enough to handle higher level work, but so over qualified for the low level work that people think "Gee, if we hire this person, they'll just leave us for a better company, so we'll hire someone less qualified that will stay".
What if you have Asperger's, and react differently in social situations, such that at employment review times you are passed on promotion regardless of skill?
What if you feel that something like the http://infrastructures.org/ system for keeping systems under control is the right way to go, and management feels that the established system is superior, so you get canned for suggesting it?
The BSA? The people who want to come in, find stuff on your computer, and fine you?
You do tell them to go elsewhere, don't you?
They are not government.
There's no law that I know of giving them any authority.
They are just private investigators that have to ask to see your stuff, and you have to grant them permission.
Nothing -- nothing that I know of -- gives them any right to demand it.
And if they think you have something, they still have to go and show enough proof to a judge. "They won't let us inspect, they must be hiding something" isn't valid.
Besides, why would you let some third party that doesn't follow your privacy standards look at machines with private data?
Next time the BSA knocks, tell them "Go Away". They have no legal authority. They are like the "Night Watchmen", from when Sherridan told them that they were civilian authorities with no military authority, and were operating outside the chain of command.
Just say "No".
Just say "Am I required to?". "No". "Good-bye".
So you have some bad apps.
There are good Java apps out there.
Look at Puzzle Pirates (www.puzzlepirates.com). They have a persistant world game in java that plays fast.
Ok, so you need at least 512 MB, preferably 1gig of memory. And yes, it works (Slowly) even with only 128 or 256.
But it works. It doesn't require a reconfigured kernel. It doesn't crash in the middle. It's not horribly slow.
Yes, there's loading lag when you go from A to B. Most games have that, sadly.
You want to blame Java. What for?
1. An app that wanted a reconfigured kernel? Yes, no good app should need that. This one did.
2. Horrible config file re-write? That's not a language issue.
3. Death from timeout with no ablity to fix up? That's not a language issue.
4. Writing config file changes in-place, without getting everything changed first? That's not a language issue.
You've used a bunch of bad apps, that happened to have been written in one language, Java. Shall I talk about the bad C++ apps I've used, and blame the language?
Ohh --- better. I'll complain about the bad Microsoft Windows brand graphical operating system programs I've used, and then blame MS Windows for it.
Oh, wait, I just ruined my own argument, didn't I?
Mod parent up
Have you ever heard of Medicare or Medicaid? For a person with those types of diseases, all you have to do to is apply.
Yes, I have.
I have Asperger's. I've applied -- twice -- to SSD. Both times they claim to have lost my appeal after turning me down. Both times the county's doctor has examined me, determined that I have a textbook case, and recommended that I get disability support. Both times they've turned me down.
I'm now trying to find a good advocate to help me, because whatever it is, I clearly cannot get this on my own.
Medicare/Medicaid? If I get SSD approved, then I'm covered. If I don't, I'm not. So I have to just manage to stay healthy with no coverage.
Pure and simple, Microsoft has protected their market share by remaining backwards compatible, and will continue to do so for that reason only.
When windows 95 came out, and Microsoft was competing with 3.x versus Os2/Warp, 95 was released without one critical piece of backwards compatibility.
Although old 16 bit programs were given twiddled names from file requestors (needed, as they needed to work with short file names), end users were shown ugly twiddles all over the place.
This effectively meant that older programs were broken, and needed to be replaced with new ones.
New ones that didn't run on the competing OS's.
Suddenly, the market share of microsoft increased -- leveraging the "new computers come with us by default" / "People have to buy and install our competition" with "New apps no longer work with our competition".
Microsoft keeps or breaks backwards compatibility based on "What's best for us, given the current environment?".
Don't forget -- XP changed the driver model and broke a LOT of device drivers. Still think they have backwards compatibility as a big thing?
Mac OS X is a nice example, that regulary uses emulation to ensure backward compatibility. Between 68k and PowerPC, between different version of OS and OS X, between PPC and Intel.... each time they make a new architecture offering new possibility, and instead of keeping some old stuff that only drags evolution back, they choose to emulate it,
No longer true. They stopped shipping the 680x0 emulator a while back (they stopped documenting it much earlier, while it was still shipping).
If I wanted to install a 68040 program that used the NX-classes today (say, Nextstep Improv), I'd be out of luck.
Did I say "Wanted"? "Can't find a replacement copy" might be better -- it came with my old slab.
Some other thoughts:
/dev/random existed for a long time, and when someone actually wanted to analize it (horribly written), he got no help at all from the developers. After managing to determine what it was doing, and seeing that it relied on security through obscurity, it's possible to understand that open source does not mean "many pairs of eyes are looking for flaws".
/usr/bin/strings -- isn't installed. And the package system there stinks. I had no idea what package provides stuff like strings, and there's no way to say "Here's a filename, which package owns it".
1. Flaws in
2. Just because something is open source doesn't mean it's fixable. The flaws/bugs in open office are huge. To try to fix them? First I'd have to learn a brand-new windowing system (I've never written a line of X in my life). Second, I'd have to learn the inside guts of a major big programming environment that has probably been repatched repeatedly through many different versions and could use a big re-write. Third, I'd have to say that spending however many hours this would take was more valuable to me than X, Y or Z -- the things I'd have to give up.
Fixing bugs occurs when the cost of those bugs, compared to the value of the time it would take to fix them, falls within a favorable range compared to purchasing a bug-free product off the marketplace. That's a very narrow range -- too much of my time, and I either purchase (if I have a good income/my time is valuable), or do without (if I have to give up many other things).
Who finds it cheap to fix these things? The developers.
3. Open source people listen? I'm sorry, how often do you find a "submit idea to developers" link in a program? Bug tracking? Firefox, as an example, wants me to download and test the latest nightly build of Mozilla, and only submit the bug report if it's not in Mozilla, but only in the firefox user interface system. That's easy? That's friendly?
4. Ubuntu being easier to install than windows? Err, you must have installed a different version of ubuntu than I did. I installed the june 06 release of the server system -- I took the LAMP option because my client needed a web server.
I had to go back and install, and manually configure, with no aid of any kind, **everything** -- the multiple ethernet connections, time server, DHCP server, samba, etc -- EVERYTHING defaults to not installed. Worse, even some things that I consider basic stuff --
Easy to use? The command line package installer doesn't install recommended packages, at all. The graphical one will default to installing them, but won't tell you why a given package is being installed, and the install for samba turned out to be horrendously huge -- it turns out that besides required, and recommended, there's "suggested", which was a no-no, that defaulted true.
Easy to use? There's no good way to find out what isn't installed. There's no tool for automatically updating the init.d script links, at least not that I could find (probably in some package that didn't install). The last time I installed from scratch, redhat 7 had a nice configuration tool for controlling all the main parts of the system -- kinda like windows control panel. Granted, it was a first version -- it didn't work properly if a panel was larger than the screen (no scroll bars), but it was a mostly functional, working system.
5. Games? Give me a Qemu system configured so I can easily load either a free dos (for older dos games), or install my windows CD (for windows games). Configure it to run as an unprivileged user (since windows is so inherently unsecure), etc.
Or heck, just make it easy to install that on my own. Can I get a copy of Qemu for my system? Sure -- there's a native port for Mac Os X. But there's a huge difference between "This will work, if stuff is installed", and "Here's a step-by-step of how to install Nextstep", but no where is "Here's how to run your old dos games"; no where is "This is what you do to install windows".
> 1 & 2 were something like reducing population growth, killing excess/useless members of the population etc.
So you send off the telephone sanitizers and other such people? Or do you say that poor people are isolated and not permitted to breed?
(That's HHGTTG and B5 both).
> I defy you to point to a model that predicted Bill Gate's recent charitable contributions. You just don't have one.
Alright, how about a model that states that people will invest money whereever they feel that the total return will be the best.
Why give to charity? Why donate time and effort to free software?
Because people feel that the total return will be best.
What is the total return?
That's dependent on the individual.
Some people only look at total funds in their pocket.
Some people look at the improvements to society for the next generation to grow up in
Sometimes that is specifically what will benefit the portion of society that their own children will see, not the world as a whole.
You really want a suprise in economics? How does the success of free software -- specifically, the stuff built and maintained by donated time, not research funds backed time -- differ from "the problem of the commons"? Here the commons actually works.
> The only type of machine this exploit targets are machines with multiple untrusted user accounts. I can't imagine why someone would be running this NVIDIA graphics driver on a server type machine anyway...
Possibilities:
1. Guest access at a library that is avoiding use of Microsoft products.
2. Corporate environments where you might want a secretary to have graphical use but not access to arbitrary files.
3. School environments where lots of students share a few computers.
Hmm... those sound like good places for Linux, where graphics are desirable.
Seriously, the "Only one person will use a computer" response sounds like Microsoft's response to shatter attacks.
When Alexa first came out, I was willing to use it. There were two features that it provided, and page ranking was actually the least important. Far more important to me was the goal of building an inverted index of the web -- tracking who linked to this site I was looking at, rather than seeing who this site links to.
:-).
All that changed when Alexa was bought by Amazon. And then the truth came out -- all the information that I thought was private was in the database, and now owned by a commercial company, with no restriction on how they used that information. All the information about me that came to the right of the question mark was now in a commercial database, just as bad as AOL's release of search engine queries.
That gave a 100% loss of trust for me. And not just me.
People who know what's going on won't install Alexa because it's giving unrestricted access to personal information to a commercial company for their own profit. And, the "backwards index" -- which helps the internet navigation globally -- is no longer the focus of the product.
So for most people, it has lost any purpose and functionality.
This is why it is so fundamentally off on any numbers it generates. Heck, Neilson ratings have to be more accurate
Inertia is only powerful if mass or velocity is high.
And velocity of an inertial body is only a question of how quickly you are changing direction from it.
So it's really a question of how much change you are making, and how big that 800 pound gorilla is.
So, if you know the size of the inertial opposition, the amount you can handle, then you know what speed of change you can impose.
Examples: Microsoft: Mass infinite, oh, wait...
Speaking of which, there used to be a system called cow9 over on Alta-Vista, that really worked well for search refinement.
As an example, if you did a search for "atm", you got back a graphic page (interactive, naturally) that clearly showed bank related pages, and network related pages, seperate. You could indicate which group you were interested in, as well as subdivisions based on keywords in the pages retreived.
Cow9 was the best way to find stuff. I have no idea why it was removed.
> the people make the rules.
Sadly, not anymore in the US.
Fundamentals in the constitution?
1. A jury trial (the people) is required before fines over $20, or any imprisonment.
2. States (the people) can force an amendment process even if the congress won't approve amendments
3. War is only waged by congress, as representatives of the people.
Yes, there are others. But notice:
1. Jury trials are often denied.
* We have brand new classes of law defined, other than "civil" or "criminal", and crimes defined there are denied jury trials.
2. Despite 49 states calling for a convention, congress has refused to schedule one, and the courts have ruled "It's not our jurisdiction".
3. The president has taken it on his own authority to wage war without end.
I could go on. But we're at the point where the people are no longer in charge in the US. Heck, we can't even vote a better person in anymore.
At least we can count on the two term limit, right? I mean, the president isn't going to abolish the election this year, right? (ack, that would give us his veep! (Cheney (sp?)))
This is an improved UI?
3 rows of menubars and tabs taking up valuable vertical space.
More things NOT ON the menus == more things that cannot be keyboarded. Forced mousing == forced slowdown.
A brand new set of non-standard window frame and menu bar, so any sort of helper program (screen readers, etc) will be confused.
Yet another case of "No other program has these features" advertising claim, with the truth being that microsoft has abandoned -- AGAIN -- the standard UI routines that they feel are good enough for the rest of us. This leads to
Dozens and dozens of slightly different UI looks re-implemented in every program, slightly different, because no one wants to use the boring standard. Even though years and years ago, microsoft assured everyone that by using these standard routines, any improvements/enhancements would automatically be available to your programs, and they would never go out of date (cough cough twiddle filenames cough cough)
Heck, even the file menu is gone. Talk about "How do I save/load?".
All in all, it seems to be that microsoft is run by people with ADD/ADHD -- Make it different, make it colorful, we have no attention span, make it visually loud so people see us. Take a look at those sample reformatting images -- every one does something to try to say "See Me!", something to try to stand out. Yet when EVERYTHING is going to have the same "standout", the same "Look at me!", it will all just get ignored.
GAAAAA.
Can we please get some consistency from microsoft?
Oh, wait, I feel like the genie. 2 lanes or 4?