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User: gbjbaanb

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  1. Re:One Question on Mozilla SSL Policy Considered Bad For the Web · · Score: 2, Interesting

    stolen credit cards can be easy to detect... but can also be very easy to miss. If the charge is less than a certain amount, most CC software processes it directly (and if it turns out to be stolen, too bad, the acquirer refuses and the merchant takes the few dollars hit). The idea is that the cost and time of processing the small amounts aren't worth the bother. I think the acquirers also mandate it - possibly not nowadays in the super-fast always-on networks we have, but in the days when authentication was via dial-up they'd have been saturated with connections for every $5 transaction.

    The other factor is that sometimes stolen cards aren't marked as stolen for some time - if I lost my wallet this morning, I wouldn't know about it until I came to pay for lunch.

    So, considering you can get a certificate via bogus means, how does this apply when it gets revoked shortly afterwards. I mean, you do have all up-to-date CRLs installed on your browser don't you? Or use OSCP. IE6 doesn't support it, but IE7 does... but only on Vista. There were problems with OSCP on FF2 (and the advice was turn it off), so I don't know how many FF3 installs there are with it still turned off (just check... mine included!)

  2. Re:News? on Microsoft's Annual Report Reveals OSS Mistakes · · Score: 4, Informative

    The idea that Microsoft does all it's own innovation is bunkum for the uninformed.

    You've got to understand who it is that keeps telling everyone how much innovation that they do - yup, Microsoft marketing itself. That way investors and PHBs look and think how great and forward-looking the company is, not realising that the only thing MS does towards innovation is buy innovative companies!

    Add to the list: Hotmail, Virtual PC/Server, Windows networking (BSD for TCPIP, IBM for lanman), Visual Sourcesafe, Foxpro, SQL Server (though, to be fair they did rewrite lots of it in later versions), Internet Explorer, Visio.. the list does go on and on.

    I'm not sure if Microsoft counts as innovation for NT itself, seeing as they 'bought' Cutler's team wholesale to reproduce VMS in a different package, and Heljberg who reproduced Java in a different package.

  3. Re:You need to fix yourself first on How To Fix the Poor Usability of Free Software · · Score: 1

    I'll play devil's advocate for Notes - at least they try to be user-friendly, but I just don't know how they can fail to make it work (not cock it up like other companies), they try their hardest and it just comes out wrong.

    The others are made from pure Elbonian mud. I know the difference for small v large companies too, there is a case for going with a small company because it is responsive to the needs of the customer. Big companies are only responsive to their own needs. I think the same applies to software projects too, and partly explains the popularity of the better OSS projects. Long may they continue.

  4. Re:You need to fix yourself first on How To Fix the Poor Usability of Free Software · · Score: 1

    come to think of it, I use plenty of commercial software, some of which has terrible usability (yes, anything by Oracle, Siebel and co). We are even going through a bit of an argument at work where the bosses bought Siebel at huge (no - HUGE) cost, yet we still want to use Mantis because it does everything we need it to whilst being significantly easier to use.

    That still doesn't mean usability shouldn't be raised as a very important issue in the F/OSS world.

  5. Re:usability != "make it pretty" on How To Fix the Poor Usability of Free Software · · Score: 1

    or in other words: http://xkcd.com/456/

    Usability isn't just the GUI, its the whole package. I think Linux is getting there, but some better standardisation would make code samples, tutorials, and examples much more readily available, and contribute to a better "experience" for the end-user.

  6. Re:WTF is this "education" worship going on? on Gates Issues Call For "Creative Capitalism" · · Score: 1

    yeah, well, I fink it wuz you dunno wot you is talking about right.

    I never said people who confuse those words were uneducated idiots, just uneducated. Apart from the odd mistake which is acceptable and unavoidable, someone who knew the difference would use the correct term. Unfortunately, these errors seems to be made all the time. So they're ;)

  7. Re:WTF is this "education" worship going on? on Gates Issues Call For "Creative Capitalism" · · Score: 1

    the difference between "they're" and "their" is nothing like parapraxis errors (the so-called Freudian slip). The difference is when you think of one thing but write (or say) another.

    Getting they're and their wrong is because you just don't know the differnce between them and when to use which. Similar to getting "who" and "whom", or "its" and "it's".

    Your analogy (of boob job/blow job) is a good one but they show how parapraxis confuses two different things in the mind. The 'theirs' error is not due to the same error (or as the pun goes: A Freudian slip is like saying one thing, but meaning your mother).

  8. Re:Hah! on NVidia Reportedly Will Exit Chipset Business · · Score: 1

    Considering their driver issues for Vista, I wonder if they should stick to hardware (they seem to be good at that) and just outsource their driver development. Possibly just open the specs and let open source drivers get written.

  9. Re:Relief on Microsoft and Apache - What's the Angle? · · Score: 1

    thanks for realising and correcting me .. it was late when I was posting.

  10. Re:Anti-Linux? on Microsoft and Apache - What's the Angle? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    it goes like this, MS doesn't give anything to Windows-based open source projetcs, just primarily Linux-based ones.

    So what are they likely to do with Apache? Integrate .NET in with it of course, whch won't work on non-Windows boxen. I think they hope that they'll get open-source developers to develop for Apache(.NET) and thus be locked-in to Windows.

    I think that's what people are worried about, MS are trying to gently persuade people to stop development for all platforms in favour of Windows only.

  11. Re:WCF and CXF on Microsoft and Apache - What's the Angle? · · Score: 1

    soon, if MS has its way all those problems will be resolved.

    You'll be writing C# through SOAP using WCF to talk to .... C# :-)

  12. Re:Relief on Microsoft and Apache - What's the Angle? · · Score: 1, Insightful

    you've seen the code Microsoft develops by themselves havn't you? Its not pretty.

    All the good stuff that MS has ever done, has been bought - either from buying the company, or the individual who developed it.

    I suppose IIS8 might have a new configuration file and a picture of a feather in its logo.....

  13. Re:It'll never happen. on Linux Foundation Promises LSB4 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    COO: so, we've developed a new widget, brilliant. When can we ship it.
    DEV: today, its all tested. I've run it myself on my Debian box.
    COO: sure, it'll run on Customer B's Redhat environment won't it?
    DEV: Ummmm.. well, not straight off.
    COO: ok, so what do we need to do to make it work?
    DEV: well, alter a couple of paths, recompile, change the dependancy for package Z and build a rpm
    COO: and how long will that take?
    DEV: a week, maybe 2 with testing.
    COO: so, that's 2 weeks development costs on top of what we've already spent. We wouldn't have this kind of problems with Windows!

    and I'm not trolling either - standards are good, making extra work for yourself for no good reason is bad. Its not as if a common directory layout, ABI or programming libraries need to affect open source linux in any way. The Kernel is a standard, and no-one complains they don't have a choice of kernels to develop against.

  14. Re:Don't be a Nevile Chamberlain. on Microsoft's Open Source Guru Faces Tough Fight · · Score: 1

    Heresy? no, monopoly.

    (or at least, attempting any tactic to undermine competitors and maintain said monopoly.)

  15. Re:Don't be a Nevile Chamberlain. on Microsoft's Open Source Guru Faces Tough Fight · · Score: 1, Insightful

    MS are definitely the enemy here, even Microsoft developers say so:

    When Walker [Scott Walker of open source DotNetNuke Web application] said his team was being ignored, he was speaking specifically of other groups in Microsoft -- among these being the open source group led by Sam Ramji. Walker said Ramji's group seems most interested in luring non-.NET (read: Linux)-based open source developers and projects over to the Microsoft platform. Native .NET developers -- including DotNetNuke -- just aren't on Ramji's radar.

    So, MS's push for open source acceptance is nothing of the sort - its a part marketing drive to help Microsoft and Microsoft software alone.

  16. Re:Prediction on Windows Is Dead – Long Live Midori? · · Score: 3, Informative

    1. single address spaces are more common than you think. Not everyone runs Windows (where virtual memory models - in software - were put in place because of legacy CPU architectures)(read up on Large Memory Model windows programming with near and far pointers).
    Such things are obsolete today (on 64-bit architectures), but still around in the form of PAE on 32-bit.

    2. VMM access is done through hardware, this is not slow.

    3. Often the issue with memory safety is not 1 app overwriting anothers, but one app overwriting the same apps - a lot of code runs in "aggregated" processes (eg a web server running code).

    4. Remember that a managed memory model (with a GC) does not guarantee memory safety. You can easily get objects that are permanently used and exhaust your memory as a simple example.

    5. even if the managed memory model got rid of all the "hardware-costs", it introduces much more serious software costs. In the singularily overview the authors admit they had to make big changes to the GC and admit it is not suitable for all types of application (quote: For example, a
    generational garbage collector may introduce seconds-long pauses in program execution, which
    would disrupt a media player or operating system. On the other hand, a real-time collector
    suitable for the media player might penalize a computational task
    )

    6. Next do a search for 'Java memory safety' and see the links that pop up.

    Singularity is interesting, but I doubt they'd really make an OS out of it, especially a web-based one. Possibly some of it will find its way into Windows though.

  17. Re:Bike to work on How Do Geeks Exercise? · · Score: 1

    perhaps its because of all those killer cyclists out there.

    cycling is still good for you though, just don't let it go to your head so you think you have right of way over everyone else.

  18. Re:Why do they even try? on VMware ESXi Available For Free Starting Today · · Score: 1

    ok, let me rephrase that. They dumped Virtual Server in favour of VMWare Server. Then they bought ESX to run the corporate systems, and I run a VMware Server farm for the test/dev lab.

    I find the difference to be minimal - after all, both Server and ESX run virtual machines, have a interface and run on Linux (Centos for my vmservers)(and ESX is built on RedHat). From the user perspective, there's no difference - run up the VM, use it, sorted.

    I think people get hung up on the 'hypervisor' word, when really its just a stripped-down OS in the first place. ESX is RedHat with extraneous services removed, probably a slimmer kernel build, a memory module installed, its own filesystem and... that's about it. VMWare server on CentOS is just about the same (though I run the VMs on ext3 fs)

    I think the only substantial difference is the storage requirements as ESX is a bit more insistent on a better class of storage, whereas VMWare server will use any old filesystem. I havn't been able to compare performance as we don't run like with like... but I will soon!

  19. Re:Why do they even try? on VMware ESXi Available For Free Starting Today · · Score: 1

    I don't know about that. One thing the MS Markleting Machine knows is that installed base is difficult to replace (otherwise.. well, you know the rest). VMWare is the "industry leader" in virtualisation, even the place I work which is seriously pro-MS dumped Virtual PC/Server for VMware ESX back when they had to pay for it and bought a load fo licences.

    I think MS will keep on fighting, will keep on giving stuff away for 'free' (all you have to do is buy a copy of Windows Server 2008 :) ) and VMware will keep on taking their lunch and giving us more stuff for free which works better, performs better, is easier to manage, and runs all OSes equally.

  20. Re:more info. on VMware ESXi Available For Free Starting Today · · Score: 1

    its hardly a big deal, if you don't happen to have an 'enterprise class' storage controller available then get VMware Server which should be much more appropriate for your needs (and still free).

  21. Re:"62,200,000 is meaningless" on New Search Engine Cuil Takes Aim At Google · · Score: 4, Interesting

    true, however my colleague and I both noticed 1 thing immediately about this search engine:

    no f*cking links to shopping comparison sites.

    Just because of that, I may come back to it in a month or so, and if it continues to filter those b*st*rds, then I may well just keep using it. That in itself makes it a Google killer IMHO, some searches in Google return a dozen pages of the same kelkoo, pricerunner and dooyoo links.

  22. Re:Sugar and XP accomplish different things.... on Comparison of Windows XP and Linux/Sugar On the OLPC XO · · Score: 1

    Having as many copies of Word as you can carry is not much use if you cannot write in the first place.

    Education comes first. Being sold an expensive software product, way down there at the bottom of the 'things Africans need' list.

    so first get a teaching tool to the chidren, and teach them to read and write. Then they can buy their own copies of Word when they're older.

  23. Re:Yeah, right on Microsoft Blesses LGPL, Joins Apache Foundation · · Score: 1

    only when you have the IDE tools, otherwise its a nuisance.

    anyway, you conveniently missed my smiley.

  24. Re:Their cash is circling the drain.... on Microsoft Blesses LGPL, Joins Apache Foundation · · Score: 1

    $63 billion when a dollar was worth something :)

    Cash burn is not something to take lightly, MS is a HUGE corporation, they spend a vast fortune on staff wages at the least. Sales have to keep up or they will die a slow death. Anyone who doesn't believe that should look to IBM and DEC as past examples of companies that ruled the IT world.

  25. Re:Yeah, right on Microsoft Blesses LGPL, Joins Apache Foundation · · Score: 1

    embrace, extend, lawsuit, retreat... reinvent, replace and market.

    (C# = MS Java)(VB.NET = C# without curly brackets)(everything else = not fully supported anymore) :)