Read TFA. It is possible (trivially, supposedly) to force Macs to use DHX (the insecure protocol). So, essentially, even if you use the secure system, it doesn't matter. That is a bit troubling for OS X enterprise users, to say the least.
I suppose the lesson here is that after 15 years of being the #1 target, M$ might finally be starting to get its shit in a respectable state, while Apple, for all its theoretical security, has very little experience dealing with actual security issues. Or maybe it's just a random bug, IDK.
How, exactly, does this help answer the question of where life came from (possibly)? Is it easier/ more likely for these compounds to form on meteors than simply to originate on Earth? Or does this merely shove the question back to "well, it didn't come from Earth, so it came from a meteor!" "How did it get on the meteor?" "...I don't know, aliens maybe?" I really don't understand why they hypothesized that meteors brought the compounds here. Is it really just that we have no idea how they can form on Earth by themselves?
Software patents do *not* work "in theory." (Neither does communism, IMHO, but I must tip my hat to the nice straw man/ red herring argument there) The people who created the system are, in point of fact, lawyers and companies who want to create business for themselves and monopolies, respectively. As someone commented above, most members of Congress are lawyers. And by definition so are all the members of our court system. Lawyers love business, like all professions, and I have no problem with that necessarily. Unfortunately, it happens that the group of people who create their business also profit by that business, directly or indirectly. So no, lawyers don't just play by the rules of the system, they quite often create those rules as they see fit.
May I be allowed to say: holy fucking shit. 250,000 patents in one phone? Insane. Absolutely insane. The patent system is supposed to be used so a new device has maybe a handful of patents in it. Quite often, only one. Because very few inventions are really novel and deserving of protection. But everyone on/. should know this already, and I'm just treading old ground.
I'll end this by just saying: fuck lawyers. There is good reason why so many people despise and hate them, and our present patent system is an excellent example. Leeches, most of 'em (to be fair, a few are alright... but very, very few.)
My understanding of the point of cloud computing was that it would be distributed. I.e. the failure of any one data or computing center would mean the data was still available. Hence, the term "cloud": nebulous, non-localized. Apparently, someone forgot to tell Microsoft and Amazon what the buzzwords they were using actually mean. I more or less expected that of M$, but the fact that Amazon failed too, well, thats pretty a little surprising. I guess it's kinda the norm for all large corporations.
Glancing at the article, it looks like this outage effected only a certain area, but still, cloud should mean other data centers would take over. I particularly love the quote "Dublin has become a key cloud computing gateway." If one city serves as a "gateway", its not a cloud system. I understand using it as one data center, but others should take over automatically for that area in case of a failure. If you don't have a failover system, you don't have a real cloud computing platform. You have a wannabe cloud computing platform. Or maybe they are just taking a buzzword and redefining it to suit their purposes. That's... exactly what we should expect, I suppose.
Or am I completely misunderstanding the meaning of this latest buzzword? It's quite possible, I never quite got down what "Web 2.0" was supposed to mean either. Beyond lots and lots of Flash.
Exactly. There is a reason Star Trek proposes using antimatter engines on starships. The fuel can be created on planets using massive fields of power generators, whether fusion or solar, rendering efficiency of creation relatively unimportant, and then deployed as a high-efficiency compact power source for ships. We do something similar with the RTGs in deep-space probes.
On the other hand, antimatter IIRC only releases something like ~50% of its energy in a usable manner, and even that is spread across many energy types (X-rays, heat, light, etc.) Of course, when dealing with an order of magnitude more energy total, it's still far better than nuclear.
Out of curiosity, do you happen to know of any such providers that are fairly inexpensive? I know of a couple of VPN services, but most (I believe) shut you down if they are informed of infringement.
The real question is not so much is it better now, as will it be better later. The answer to the latter is almost definitely yes. The army is one of the few organizations that has the budget and will to exercise forethought for the future. And that helps develop technology. So while robots may not be effective now, thanks to the efforts of the military they might be 20 years from now. Which is why they spend so much money developing them now.
I was thinking dragging your finger along a table or stationary object, and testing the resistance that way. It's Friday, I might not be explaining this the best. Although your way works too. Perhaps we both have over thought this subject.
Ok, yeah, outside was a poor choice of words. I meant the finger-nail side (or just the edge, for that matter). I was thinking "outside" as opposed to inside your hand, i.e. when you grab something it is "in" your hands. Outside would just be the outer portion of your hand with respect to that (back of the hand might be more precise.)
I imagine you can test this yourself pretty well. Test the grip you get on an object with both the inside and outside of a finger. Its not exactly scientific, but it leads me to suspect that yes, they'd have a harder time gripping things. It feels to me like the fingerprint side gives considerably greater grip. Could also have different consistency to the skin, so like I say, not scientific. The sweat also gives a grip advantage (I suspect this is why palms get sweaty in tense situations. It allows one to hang on better, quite literally).
Most of their products are also either so crippled (Chronium) or limited by other means (Android and HW makers drivers) that they're practically unusable for real use or development.
Really. What about all the third-party manufacturers making Android devices without a license from Google (Archos comes to mind, although in retrospect they might have a license... point is they don't need one)? Or how about CyanogenMod or other modifications for Android based on the OSS part? Lots of people use them, and they work on lots of phones. That is precisely the advantage of OSS that you claim Google doesn't allow. And what "stripped parts"? According to Wikipedia, the entire Android OS made by Google, including the telephony part, is OSS. The only closed source part is the Marketplace, and that should have obvious reasons. (also, it isn't technically part of the OS) Honeycomb, of course, isn't OSS ATM, but again, they have good reasons for that.
Android is most absolutely not closed-source like its competitors. Seriously, is iOS open in absolutely any way whatsoever? What closes Android down on phones are Samsung etc. locking down the phone in hardware. HTC, IIRC, allows their phones to load custom firmware with no modifications or hacking needed. I know you keep saying "Google isn't the geeky company they used to be", but honestly, I've never seen you offer any real evidence of that.
As for Chrome/Chromium, well, there you have a point. Google is an odd kind of open source company. Their business doesn't depend upon releasing code and community development, like many such companies do (Red Hat, Mozilla, etc.) they do it more because they want the community to have it than anything else. And that, IMO, makes them even more of a geeky company than others that are more concerned with being open sourced because they rely on it. Google releases open source whenever it is practical for them to do so, but they don't rely on open source development like many companies do (or not in the same way) which leads me to suspect that releasing the source code is more an act of good faith than anything else.
Ok, first, since when did the "we speculate that the Chinese government might have been involved" become "its almost definitely the Chinese"? Yeah, sure, it's likely China, but do we really have any evidence at this point? Hell, for all we know it could be our own governments (that'd certainly explain the silence).
And secondly, if it is the Chinese, chances are the US government has its own program that they've been pursuing for quite some time, and calling out China for its actions would, if they call us out in return, simply make us look like hypocrites. For those who think we don't have a cyberwarfare program in secret, look no further than Stuxnet. It was so well created, it was almost by sheer luck that it was even noticed at all (beyond simply as a generic malware). Sure, the Israelis were likely behind it in part, but I'd wager a fair amount of money the US was heavily involved. Could be our cyber warfare program is just good enough that no one has even noticed it. Well, that and it hacks Chinese companies, who are hardly going to report it to Western news services.
Oh, and since when did it become the national governments job to defend against cyber warfare threats? Isn't that kind of dangerous, in the "the government now controls the Internet" sort of way? I, for one, do not want the government taking up that job. That way leads to a closed-gate Internet with government regulation at every level. Freedom that is not.
Technically, it (usually) still is illegal. Some of the games have either been legitimately or semi-legitimately approved by the original license owner for distribution, but in most cases such sites are still breaking copyright law. For instance, a few years ago I was able to get Commander Keen on one of those sites, but as you may know it's now available for sale again on Steam. Generally, someone still owns the copyright.
Now, very few of the actual owners will care. In most cases, the game will never be sold again, and the creators approve of someone keeping their game alive. Which is why, in quite a few cases, they let the community have the source code to maintain the game and keep it alive, or simply don't do anything to stop the redistribution.
The juno mission web site is a gigantic, slothlike, steaming pile of crap. It takes forever to load, plays music, makes your computer get hot which causes the fans to crank up, forces you to read agonizingly slow text that fades in, etc... I couldn't even find what I was looking for so I just closed the tab. What a huge waste of money.
Others have pointed out that there may be something more involved, but I haven't seen anyone point out what I think is the real issue. And that is, AFAIK, most companies aren't suing Google directly. They are suing the third-party makers of Android phones. If Google had joined in the bid, they wouldn't have sole rights to the patents, and, depending on the terms, might well not have been able to license them to the actual phone makers, whom the other three would still have been able to sue. So Google would have been able to make Android smartphones, but no one else would have been able to. Google doesn't really care to make phones themselves, the whole point of Android is that third-parties make all the actual phones. That may well not have been able to happen had they joined the cartel.
No, it isn't complicated. But it is considerably different, and that threw me off quite a bit. I have no interest in using a Mac in any case, but if I have to also relearn all the habits I picked up from Windows and Linux, then it isn't worth ever working with Macs. If a friend asks me for help with one, I am basically forced to say "no". If, on the other hand, someone asked me to look at, say, KDE which I also know very little about, I could say yes, because generally it works the same as all the others (from my very limited experience with it.) If pretty much all the GUI's use a fairly standard interface, than there is a lot to be said for maintaining that standard.
They fall into the trap that all GUI makers do. Once the GUI works, and works well, it only needs to be maintained, not changed. But, since they want to feel like they're doing something, they actually change it. The result is a different feel, which whether it technically works better or not alienates users. Witness Firefox. Now, it is possible to make changes that result in improvements, or at least maintaining the same level of usefulness. But those are rare. The GUI system has been in major use for 20 years or so, and it more or less reached maturity 15 years ago.
There is a reason the GUI for XP is nearly the same as that for Win95. It looks a bit different, but someone could go from one to the other almost instantly. (Compare that to OS X, which I've only used a couple of times but managed to confuse the hell out of me. Worse, every similar implementation has its own rules that make shifting from one to the other nearly impossible without relearning the whole system.) Refinements have been made to the point where no further changes were needed. GUI designers still wanted to find something better, not realizing that for the way we use computers, it doesn't really exist. And then we got KDE 4, GNOME 3, and to a lesser extent Win 7 and Vista (MS prudently, for once, made pretty minor changes that were easy to revert. And actually work pretty well, because they didn't abandon the old system entirely). Minor change is the key. The Desktop isn't going to undergo any paradigm shifts anytime soon, and that is a good thing. It works, it works well, and new interfaces are just solutions looking for problems.
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Read TFA. It is possible (trivially, supposedly) to force Macs to use DHX (the insecure protocol). So, essentially, even if you use the secure system, it doesn't matter. That is a bit troubling for OS X enterprise users, to say the least.
I suppose the lesson here is that after 15 years of being the #1 target, M$ might finally be starting to get its shit in a respectable state, while Apple, for all its theoretical security, has very little experience dealing with actual security issues. Or maybe it's just a random bug, IDK.
How, exactly, does this help answer the question of where life came from (possibly)? Is it easier/ more likely for these compounds to form on meteors than simply to originate on Earth? Or does this merely shove the question back to "well, it didn't come from Earth, so it came from a meteor!" "How did it get on the meteor?" "...I don't know, aliens maybe?" I really don't understand why they hypothesized that meteors brought the compounds here. Is it really just that we have no idea how they can form on Earth by themselves?
Software patents do *not* work "in theory." (Neither does communism, IMHO, but I must tip my hat to the nice straw man/ red herring argument there) The people who created the system are, in point of fact, lawyers and companies who want to create business for themselves and monopolies, respectively. As someone commented above, most members of Congress are lawyers. And by definition so are all the members of our court system. Lawyers love business, like all professions, and I have no problem with that necessarily. Unfortunately, it happens that the group of people who create their business also profit by that business, directly or indirectly. So no, lawyers don't just play by the rules of the system, they quite often create those rules as they see fit.
May I be allowed to say: holy fucking shit. 250,000 patents in one phone? Insane. Absolutely insane. The patent system is supposed to be used so a new device has maybe a handful of patents in it. Quite often, only one. Because very few inventions are really novel and deserving of protection. But everyone on /. should know this already, and I'm just treading old ground.
I'll end this by just saying: fuck lawyers. There is good reason why so many people despise and hate them, and our present patent system is an excellent example. Leeches, most of 'em (to be fair, a few are alright... but very, very few.)
My understanding of the point of cloud computing was that it would be distributed. I.e. the failure of any one data or computing center would mean the data was still available. Hence, the term "cloud": nebulous, non-localized. Apparently, someone forgot to tell Microsoft and Amazon what the buzzwords they were using actually mean. I more or less expected that of M$, but the fact that Amazon failed too, well, thats pretty a little surprising. I guess it's kinda the norm for all large corporations.
Glancing at the article, it looks like this outage effected only a certain area, but still, cloud should mean other data centers would take over. I particularly love the quote "Dublin has become a key cloud computing gateway." If one city serves as a "gateway", its not a cloud system. I understand using it as one data center, but others should take over automatically for that area in case of a failure. If you don't have a failover system, you don't have a real cloud computing platform. You have a wannabe cloud computing platform. Or maybe they are just taking a buzzword and redefining it to suit their purposes. That's... exactly what we should expect, I suppose.
Or am I completely misunderstanding the meaning of this latest buzzword? It's quite possible, I never quite got down what "Web 2.0" was supposed to mean either. Beyond lots and lots of Flash.
On the other hand, antimatter IIRC only releases something like ~50% of its energy in a usable manner, and even that is spread across many energy types (X-rays, heat, light, etc.) Of course, when dealing with an order of magnitude more energy total, it's still far better than nuclear.
Out of curiosity, do you happen to know of any such providers that are fairly inexpensive? I know of a couple of VPN services, but most (I believe) shut you down if they are informed of infringement.
The real question is not so much is it better now, as will it be better later. The answer to the latter is almost definitely yes. The army is one of the few organizations that has the budget and will to exercise forethought for the future. And that helps develop technology. So while robots may not be effective now, thanks to the efforts of the military they might be 20 years from now. Which is why they spend so much money developing them now.
I was thinking dragging your finger along a table or stationary object, and testing the resistance that way. It's Friday, I might not be explaining this the best. Although your way works too. Perhaps we both have over thought this subject.
Ok, yeah, outside was a poor choice of words. I meant the finger-nail side (or just the edge, for that matter). I was thinking "outside" as opposed to inside your hand, i.e. when you grab something it is "in" your hands. Outside would just be the outer portion of your hand with respect to that (back of the hand might be more precise.)
Some sweat (i.e. being a tiny bit damp). Lots of sweat, no, then it starts slipping.
Why would they bother reviewing the book and posting it on the main page if it were bad?
I imagine you can test this yourself pretty well. Test the grip you get on an object with both the inside and outside of a finger. Its not exactly scientific, but it leads me to suspect that yes, they'd have a harder time gripping things. It feels to me like the fingerprint side gives considerably greater grip. Could also have different consistency to the skin, so like I say, not scientific. The sweat also gives a grip advantage (I suspect this is why palms get sweaty in tense situations. It allows one to hang on better, quite literally).
Most of their products are also either so crippled (Chronium) or limited by other means (Android and HW makers drivers) that they're practically unusable for real use or development.
Really. What about all the third-party manufacturers making Android devices without a license from Google (Archos comes to mind, although in retrospect they might have a license... point is they don't need one)? Or how about CyanogenMod or other modifications for Android based on the OSS part? Lots of people use them, and they work on lots of phones. That is precisely the advantage of OSS that you claim Google doesn't allow. And what "stripped parts"? According to Wikipedia, the entire Android OS made by Google, including the telephony part, is OSS. The only closed source part is the Marketplace, and that should have obvious reasons. (also, it isn't technically part of the OS) Honeycomb, of course, isn't OSS ATM, but again, they have good reasons for that.
Android is most absolutely not closed-source like its competitors. Seriously, is iOS open in absolutely any way whatsoever? What closes Android down on phones are Samsung etc. locking down the phone in hardware. HTC, IIRC, allows their phones to load custom firmware with no modifications or hacking needed. I know you keep saying "Google isn't the geeky company they used to be", but honestly, I've never seen you offer any real evidence of that.
As for Chrome/Chromium, well, there you have a point. Google is an odd kind of open source company. Their business doesn't depend upon releasing code and community development, like many such companies do (Red Hat, Mozilla, etc.) they do it more because they want the community to have it than anything else. And that, IMO, makes them even more of a geeky company than others that are more concerned with being open sourced because they rely on it. Google releases open source whenever it is practical for them to do so, but they don't rely on open source development like many companies do (or not in the same way) which leads me to suspect that releasing the source code is more an act of good faith than anything else.
Ok, first, since when did the "we speculate that the Chinese government might have been involved" become "its almost definitely the Chinese"? Yeah, sure, it's likely China, but do we really have any evidence at this point? Hell, for all we know it could be our own governments (that'd certainly explain the silence).
And secondly, if it is the Chinese, chances are the US government has its own program that they've been pursuing for quite some time, and calling out China for its actions would, if they call us out in return, simply make us look like hypocrites. For those who think we don't have a cyberwarfare program in secret, look no further than Stuxnet. It was so well created, it was almost by sheer luck that it was even noticed at all (beyond simply as a generic malware). Sure, the Israelis were likely behind it in part, but I'd wager a fair amount of money the US was heavily involved. Could be our cyber warfare program is just good enough that no one has even noticed it. Well, that and it hacks Chinese companies, who are hardly going to report it to Western news services.
Oh, and since when did it become the national governments job to defend against cyber warfare threats? Isn't that kind of dangerous, in the "the government now controls the Internet" sort of way? I, for one, do not want the government taking up that job. That way leads to a closed-gate Internet with government regulation at every level. Freedom that is not.
Now, very few of the actual owners will care. In most cases, the game will never be sold again, and the creators approve of someone keeping their game alive. Which is why, in quite a few cases, they let the community have the source code to maintain the game and keep it alive, or simply don't do anything to stop the redistribution.
girl afraid of them falling off if you wiggle them to much.
Speaking as a guy, that would be most unfortunate.
The juno mission web site is a gigantic, slothlike, steaming pile of crap. It takes forever to load, plays music, makes your computer get hot which causes the fans to crank up, forces you to read agonizingly slow text that fades in, etc... I couldn't even find what I was looking for so I just closed the tab. What a huge waste of money.
So... it's like a wife?
P.S. For those who still don't get the joke: Juno is the Roman goddess of marriage.
Well, she is a married god, so a cooking utensil is quite appropriate. Especially with that flat a chest.*ducks*
"Geophysicist" et al is just NASA's equivalent of the Air Force's "Deep Space Radar Telemetry".
Others have pointed out that there may be something more involved, but I haven't seen anyone point out what I think is the real issue. And that is, AFAIK, most companies aren't suing Google directly. They are suing the third-party makers of Android phones. If Google had joined in the bid, they wouldn't have sole rights to the patents, and, depending on the terms, might well not have been able to license them to the actual phone makers, whom the other three would still have been able to sue. So Google would have been able to make Android smartphones, but no one else would have been able to. Google doesn't really care to make phones themselves, the whole point of Android is that third-parties make all the actual phones. That may well not have been able to happen had they joined the cartel.
No, it isn't complicated. But it is considerably different, and that threw me off quite a bit. I have no interest in using a Mac in any case, but if I have to also relearn all the habits I picked up from Windows and Linux, then it isn't worth ever working with Macs. If a friend asks me for help with one, I am basically forced to say "no". If, on the other hand, someone asked me to look at, say, KDE which I also know very little about, I could say yes, because generally it works the same as all the others (from my very limited experience with it.) If pretty much all the GUI's use a fairly standard interface, than there is a lot to be said for maintaining that standard.
They fall into the trap that all GUI makers do. Once the GUI works, and works well, it only needs to be maintained, not changed. But, since they want to feel like they're doing something, they actually change it. The result is a different feel, which whether it technically works better or not alienates users. Witness Firefox. Now, it is possible to make changes that result in improvements, or at least maintaining the same level of usefulness. But those are rare. The GUI system has been in major use for 20 years or so, and it more or less reached maturity 15 years ago.
There is a reason the GUI for XP is nearly the same as that for Win95. It looks a bit different, but someone could go from one to the other almost instantly. (Compare that to OS X, which I've only used a couple of times but managed to confuse the hell out of me. Worse, every similar implementation has its own rules that make shifting from one to the other nearly impossible without relearning the whole system.) Refinements have been made to the point where no further changes were needed. GUI designers still wanted to find something better, not realizing that for the way we use computers, it doesn't really exist. And then we got KDE 4, GNOME 3, and to a lesser extent Win 7 and Vista (MS prudently, for once, made pretty minor changes that were easy to revert. And actually work pretty well, because they didn't abandon the old system entirely). Minor change is the key. The Desktop isn't going to undergo any paradigm shifts anytime soon, and that is a good thing. It works, it works well, and new interfaces are just solutions looking for problems.
I'm pretty sure iTunes is half of OS X at this point.
All we need now is an app that monitors how many monitoring apps there are! Otherwise, how are we going to keep track of them all?