Do what I do -- protest DST. I grew up in Indiana where they didn't participate in the DST silliness (Indiana recently caved to the peer pressure and now does do the switch). I've since moved to another state that does practice DST. For a few years, I went along with it, but last summer I decided to try not switching. I just got up earlier and mentally subtracted an hour from other people's times. It's a little confusing at times (especially when others send meeting notices that clearly say standard time but they mean daylight time), but otherwise it works very well. At work, I set my TZ variable correctly, and 90% of all the times I see on clocks are as I expect them. I plan on doing the same with this year's summer time.
The thing I learned most from my experiment, however, is that it takes a lot of will power to get up earlier. Most people simply do not have the will power to get up and be in bed an hour earlier. And sadly, that's the reason we spend so much time, money, and effort on DST. Just to trick lazy people into getting out of bed an hour earlier. It's also the reason why a permanent year round DST (which I've seen some people advocate) is doomed to fail. People would just adjust and do everything an hour later (and then we'd need a 2 hour DST). Only the constant switching keeps them in line.
So, while I personally despise DST as a ridiculous concept, it does have its uses.
using.Net allows us to hire cheap workforce that can do 'Brains-Free Programming!'.
[Emphasis mine]
That's about the scariest thing I've ever heard. Assuming that BFSI is "Business, Financial Services, and Insurance" (the first link on a Google search for "BFSI"), at least you're (probably) not writing code that's directly dealing with life and death situations, but I can't imagine the kinds of WTFs are being produced by your cheap, "brains free" workforce. Even monotonous coding requires some thought, or you're going to end up with an unmaintainable pile of crap.
Saying "copy this directory to your hard drive -- it contains all the apps and libraries you will need" may be a fine way of installing software. But it's no more a package management system than saying "run this setup.exe -- it will copy all the apps and libraries you will need". Package management involves managing packages and (implicitly) their dependencies.
There's certainly no reason why someone couldn't ship software for Linux in the OS X way. Just have a shell script that sets the PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc to the application's directory (maybe plus a "bin" or a "lib" where necessary) and then run the main app. Mozilla has been doing that sort of thing for a while, though most people choose to install their distro's version of the software. There are disadvantages, however, as be-fan pointed out. Either the program assumes certain libraries are installed (like Gnome or KDE) or it ships them with it (causing bloat and perhaps other incompatibilities).
Package management is something that Linux is superior in compared to most proprietary operating systems like Windows and OS X. There are still problems and ways to make it better, but no one who uses Linux really wants to go back to the "setup.exe" way of installing applications.
"Human readability"? Have you ever actually looked at a suitably complex XML document? It's very difficult to really read and understand. It's really just one step up from a binary format because it does make it easier for a developer to figure out what's going on. It's certainly not something you'd want to look at often.
Frankly, XML is hard to parse for both humans and computers (though certainly [large] general purpose parsers have been written for XML). XML generally works and there are some neat things you can do with it using XSLT. I'm not saying we should throw it out, but neither should we sing its praises either. It's really a terrible format that many developers have put many years into making work.
A MacBook doesn't violate the concept of a free market because Apple makes and sells both the hardware and software. The laptop/OS X combo is in fact a single product developed by a single company.
So, if Microsoft developed and manufactured all the Windows computers and laptops in use today, that would somehow be better? Not having Dell, HP, Compaq, Gateway, and hundreds of other manufacturers would make a better free market? Apple is actually a worse proposition than the Windows world, because Apple is the single source for both the hardware and the software. At least in the Microsoft world, you have a choice of various hardware providers. True, most of them impose the Microsoft tax, but there are many (mostly smaller shops) that do not.
Personally, I prefer the Linux world, where the is a choice (and a free market) in both hardware and software. I can choose from a number of different software solutions, ranging from Free (like Debian) to expensive (like RedHat Enterprise) depending on my needs. Sure, the Apple way is simpler because there are no choices, and even looks appealing because they have nice hardware and software, but I prefer the free market way.
Just imagine if Apple had 90+% of the market share in the 90s. Would there be a MacOSX today? I doubt it. People would be cursing Jobs the way the curse Gates now, and telling people to switch from the oppressive Apple systems (and the "Apple Tax") to the more free Microsoft underdogs. Part of that would be the "grass is always greener" mentality, but products with incredibly large market shares tend to stagnate (for example, IE before Mozilla/Firefox became popular).
If you want a free market with choice and continued innovation, choose Linux. If you want to get locked into a proprietary solution, choose Apple or Microsoft.
(I may have been overly critical of Apple in this post. While the Apple system is proprietary, Apple has made strides in the last decade to be more open and to use more open standards. Though this is mostly because they have to to compete with MS, it is good to see more systems support greater interoperability.)
".NET" may have meant something specific in the past (though I'm pretty sure it had nothing to do with the already existing and widely known ".net" top level domain), but I agree with the GP that MS squandered that by going around and putting it on every MS product. I think there might have even been an office.net at one point (though maybe that was just a potential name of some version). What does writing a document have to do with running code in a virtual machine?
Which is why all laws (even the most sane ones prohibiting theft and murder and such) need to have expiration dates. If every law needed to be renewed every 10 years or so, that would (a) get rid of the old laws no one cares about any more and (b) keep the lawmakers busy so they don't have time to make up new worthless laws, while at the same time making them look like they're doing something important to their constituents.
You're right, and even more so, the constitution of the United States does not regulate the PEOPLE of the United States, it regulates the GOVERNMENT of the United States. And it doesn't regulate it just by saying what it cannot do, it explicitly says what it IS empowered to do. In other words, the (Federal) government can only make laws (restricting the people) if the constitution grants it the power to do so and doesn't forbid it. The constitution grants no rights to the people -- the people are assumed to have all those rights. The constitution merely limits what kinds of laws the government can enact.
For example, there is no federal law setting the minimum drinking age. So, why is there a minimum drinking age in the United States? Because the federal government refuses to give highway money to any state that doesn't set a minimum drinking age of 21. Today, all the states have capitulated, but that does not make it a federal law, because the federal government is not granted that power.
Of course, that doesn't stop legislators from passing all kinds of unconstitutional laws, or even the courts from upholding them (somehow, interstate commerce can be used to justify anything in some judge's minds). But in the end, as you said, the people possess their rights inherently. They are not granted by the government.
Some might argue that the Habeas Corpus is not really a right -- the constitution even calls it a privilege. It is more like a procedure to protect against unlawful imprisonment. Even so, the AG is on thin ice (i.e., full of sh*t), since the constitution says that it shall not be suspended. If the procedure is not allowed, then it is, by definition, suspended.
We often speak of whole countries as "our enemies", so why not companies? IMHO, it makes more sense to speak of a company as an enemy than a specific member of that company. After all, individual to individual, members of the groups are not really enemies. Enemies want to destroy each other. Bill Gates isn't my enemy -- I don't (really) want to destroy him. Neither is Steve Ballmer. Or any other Microsoft employee. Microsoft the company isn't an enemy of me the individual, and the Linux community isn't an enemy to individual Microsoft employees (neither group wants to destroy the individuals of the other group). Individuals in either group may consider the other group as a whole as enemies, as the OP considered Microsoft an enemy and how people like Bill Gates consider the Linux community an enemy. Also as a whole, Microsoft is an enemy of the Linux community, as a whole.
Groups of people, like companies or countries, can very easily be enemies, even if individual members of each group don't necessarily consider each other enemies.
Also, the security industry as a whole preys on the fears of Windows users to keep them paying for various security products. While many of these products are useful, I don't think I've ever had an anti-virus tool correctly identify a piece of malware before infection (the only time I've ever had a legitmate infection was a decade ago before virus scanning was common place). Of course, I haven't really used Windows (or anti-malware tools) in many years, so the state of things may be different today. But in talking to other people, it seems that the Nortons and McAfees of the world cause more problems for most people than they solve.
I don't think the security industry is malicious, per se, but they do continue the idea (myth?) that everyone needs their products or they won't be safe. It's funny talking to some Windows people at work who think that we need to virus scan the data our own custom software will be reading (not executing) on non-Windows platforms. I'd suggest the Mythbusters should look into this, but they'd probably just blow up the computer:)
It's not really a Windows technical problem (what comScore did could probably be done on Linux), but more of a Windows culture problem. I don't know about you, but I get nervous when I download source code for a program and run it without looking over the code. I get doubly nervous if I download a binary and run it. Back when I ran Windows (many years ago), I had no problems downloading and running programs from the Internet. If I happen to use Windows today, I still do that (though I'm pretty selective of the sources of the binaries).
Of course, the question is if people migrated en mass to Linux, would they bring their bad Windows habits with them? Probably. Most people don't understand computers and don't really know why running binaries from the Internet is a bad thing. They do it all the time, and really they have no choice since most MS computers have no compilers on them.
Technically, it's possibly to have spyware on Linux. Culturally and socially, it's much less likely.
The discourse in this country over the last several years makes it seem as if we are more intent on feeding money to private schools (vouchers, vouchers, vouchers...) than actually getting serious about fixing public education.
IMHO, vouchers are the way to fix public education. Because of their virtual monopoly position, current public schools have way too much power over parents and students. Competition is one of the best ways to fix this. It's much more efficient than trying to legislate every little thing to "fix" public schools.
Personally, I believe that we need separation of education and state (kind of like separation of church and state). Schools should not be run by the state. That will inevitably cause indoctrination and conformity instead of education, much like this case.
Of course, most people are already indoctrinated and don't understand why we need freedoms like the freedoms of speech, religion, assembly and the press. Most people don't really understand why need the 4th or 2nd amendments, or any of the other amendments. Most people don't understand that the constitution of the United States gives the federal government power to do things (as opposed to being able to do anything except a certain few things).
So, for most people, it's a difficult battle to convince them that the state should not run the education system, because they see nothing wrong with it.
If you use a smartcard, the crypto happens on the card itself. The private key never leaves the card. Simply speaking, a request is made to the card to sign something, and it gives back the signature. This means that no one listening on the computer can duplicate the authentication (assuming there is nothing else wrong with the protocol, such as replay attacks, any sort of man in the middle, etc).
In essence, the smartcard idea is assuming that your machine could be compromised, and is moving the authentication to another machine (the smartcard) which is much harder to compromise.
Why not use PGP (or gpg) to sign the emails? That is a good, standard way of authenticating emails. What you're talking about is authenticating the the email server, which, while useful, isn't the same as authenticating the sender. Put it another way -- if everyone signed their emails, then we could all run open relay mail servers without an increase in spam. The server wouldn't matter -- only the individual messages.
Also, when you authenticate a server, only the server is trusted, not the messages. So, a trusted server could still be used to send out spam.
Any moderately complicated XML document is very difficult for humans to parse. Sure, they can read it, but it's often hard to understand. See, for example, this post on this article.
Also, parsing XML isn't exactly easy for computers either. Especially because it is so flexible, the parser has to be written very generically. This has the benefit of only having to write one generic parser (which is good), but something still has to drive that parser to interpret the information, and that can get compilcated if the XML document structure is complicated.
If you want something that is easy for humans and computers to parse, look no further than the text configuration files in your/etc directory. Sure, there are some bad ones (like sendmail.cf), but most are easy for humans to read and edit, and most are pretty easy for the programs to read. Now, compare that to the XML junk in your ~/.gconf directory. That's much harder to read and modify.
Sure, XML is more flexible, but that flexibility makes it much harder to work with than simpler formats.
The information blub in the article noted that it was 3 bands at 16 bpp (per band). Most likely those bands are RGB. I'd be surprised, though, if they really got 16 full bits of range for each pixel. It's probably something less than that, at least for the red and blue bands, but still more than 8. Maybe 11-12 bits.
I wonder what file format they're storing the image data in. Most file formats can't handle images that big. TIFF has an upper limit of 4G, for example (I've heard of 64 bit TIFF versions, but I've never seen a definite spec for that and I don't think libtiff supports that). Of course, there are many formats that can support images that large, or they could have made their own simple format.
On the other hand an RTG powered rover would be really heavy, for about the same amount of power you would get from solar cells (assuming illumination is available).
[emphasis added]
I don't know how well RTGs compare to solar cells for power production (I would expect they produce more, but maybe not), but the crucial point is that there isn't sufficient illumination on many parts of Mars for solar power to be workable. There is only a narrow latitude band near the Martian equator that can support the solar powered rovers. Using an RTG, much more of Mars would be open to exploration.
Sadly, Microsoft won't have much trouble at all selling Vista. I'm sure every OEM out there will begin putting it on all their computers as soon as MS relases it. The exact same way with XP. And in five years time, Vista will be the dominent OS, simply by people getting new machines. Sure, there won't be a mad rush to go buy Vista like there was for Windows 95, but really there hasn't been a rush like that since Windows 95. Microsoft is in a very good position. I know I'd like to get $40-$100 for every new PC sold in the US (and most of the rest of the world) without having to do much actual work.
Though from a pure ROI viewpoint, I think Microsoft made a mistake developing Vista at all. They spent who knows how many millions of dollars developing Vista, and I doubt they're going to get much more revenue out of Vista than they would have from continuing sales of XP over the next 5-10 years. Sure, they might loose some marketshare, but they'd still be getting billions in revenue with very little expenses.
That may be accurate for televion broadcasts, but it isn't so for Microsoft. Customers are people who pay for services. AOL and the media companies aren't paying MS anything, other than licensing fees for the services they use from Microsoft (i.e., their Windows PCs). Microsoft is paid by the guy at the keyboard of the Windows box (or his employer).
Microsoft may be able to leverage all those customers into a product for another customer (such as advertising or licensing DRM solutions), just like the movie theater leverages their movie watching customers into a product for advertising. Until Windows is free (as in beer), the guy using Windows is a still a customer.
Or xemacs if you prefer. I work on a large software system written in C++ and runs on various unixes (Solaris, Linux, SGI) and attempts to run on Windows (Windows usually doesn't agree with it). The system has thousands of source files and is built with make (the Makefiles are generated with imake!). Generally, I use xemacs to for editing. I love vi, but I tend to use (x)emacs because I find the buffer management (the ability to open multiple files) better than in vim. It's entirely possible I just don't know how to use vim right (vim's buffers seem to require that I save the file before switching to another buffer).
Emacs also offers easy access to our source control system (by corporate mandate, we use ClearCase, which I do not recommend to anyone wishing to maintain their sanity).
Finally, emacs allows me to open two (or more) windows in the same session. I generally put two windows next to each other so I can edit two files at once. This lets me open up files as I need them in either window, and then switch to that buffer in the other window if I need to get to it later.
Even though I consider myself a vi person, I've found emacs to be a very good environment for editing source files. It is very customizable and powerful. It adapts to how you want to use it (other people use it in vastly different ways), and generally gets out of your way to let you get your work done.
It's called Trusted Computing and only allowing applications to be run that are signed by Microsoft. That's pretty much the only way to prevent most malware (since most malware today is of the Trojan Horse variety -- stuff that users explicitly or implicitly run). If you want that fine, but I suspect most people here (and hopefully most people everywhere, but I'm not so sure about that) like their general purpose computers. If you really want such a locked down system, I suggest you buy a gaming console.
The reason there's no anti-malware tool for Mac OSX is the same reason there isn't one for Linux. It isn't that it isn't possible to write spyware for either system, it's that there aren't any existing programs to look for. If that ever changes (and it probably will, at least on Linux as it gains more marketshare over the next 10-20 years), expect to see anti-malware tools quickly spring up.
Re:Flash as an Application Development Platform? N
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The Future of Flash
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· Score: 1
The only reason that YouTube, Google Video et al adopted Flash as their video player client was because Flash is pretty much universal, and it's easier to convert videos into a Flash video file than to deal with all the compatibility issues that come with embedding a Windows Media / Quicktime / RealVideo file. Nothing wrong with that, because Flash was designed to be an animation / movie player, and moving to full motion video isn't that big of a step.
Except of course the fact that Flash always seems to have audio-visual sync issues (the audio usually falls behind the video). This is OK for stupid YouTube clips, but is annoying. Even animations like JibJab seem to sometimes have these timing issues. I don't know what the problem is, but it always makes me unhappy when I see the flash plugin start.
At least it doesn't crash my browser as much anymore.
You certainly can set that preference in Gnome. Under the Window preferences, where it says "select windows when the mouse moves over them", there is an option "raise selected windows after an interval" (text is as appears in Gnome 2.14, but I know that this option goes as far back as Gnome 2.0, since that's what is shipped with the Solaris 9 I use at work).
Still can't have different backgrounds for different virtual desktops (er, "workspaces") though. Not sure what's holding that simple option up.
btw, under most circumstances, your software shouldn't be trying to dictate how it interacts with the other windows (such as calling raise() on all clicks). That is the domain of the window manager. It would be very annoying if I had not set autoraise and some apps decided they wanted to raise themselves anyway all the time.
Yes, forward slashes work in CMD in general, but two forward slashes for a UNC path don't work I think because they begin the argument, so it tries to interpret it as a switch.
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Do what I do -- protest DST. I grew up in Indiana where they didn't participate in the DST silliness (Indiana recently caved to the peer pressure and now does do the switch). I've since moved to another state that does practice DST. For a few years, I went along with it, but last summer I decided to try not switching. I just got up earlier and mentally subtracted an hour from other people's times. It's a little confusing at times (especially when others send meeting notices that clearly say standard time but they mean daylight time), but otherwise it works very well. At work, I set my TZ variable correctly, and 90% of all the times I see on clocks are as I expect them. I plan on doing the same with this year's summer time.
The thing I learned most from my experiment, however, is that it takes a lot of will power to get up earlier. Most people simply do not have the will power to get up and be in bed an hour earlier. And sadly, that's the reason we spend so much time, money, and effort on DST. Just to trick lazy people into getting out of bed an hour earlier. It's also the reason why a permanent year round DST (which I've seen some people advocate) is doomed to fail. People would just adjust and do everything an hour later (and then we'd need a 2 hour DST). Only the constant switching keeps them in line.
So, while I personally despise DST as a ridiculous concept, it does have its uses.
using .Net allows us to hire cheap workforce that can do 'Brains-Free Programming!'.
[Emphasis mine]
That's about the scariest thing I've ever heard. Assuming that BFSI is "Business, Financial Services, and Insurance" (the first link on a Google search for "BFSI"), at least you're (probably) not writing code that's directly dealing with life and death situations, but I can't imagine the kinds of WTFs are being produced by your cheap, "brains free" workforce. Even monotonous coding requires some thought, or you're going to end up with an unmaintainable pile of crap.
Saying "copy this directory to your hard drive -- it contains all the apps and libraries you will need" may be a fine way of installing software. But it's no more a package management system than saying "run this setup.exe -- it will copy all the apps and libraries you will need". Package management involves managing packages and (implicitly) their dependencies.
There's certainly no reason why someone couldn't ship software for Linux in the OS X way. Just have a shell script that sets the PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc to the application's directory (maybe plus a "bin" or a "lib" where necessary) and then run the main app. Mozilla has been doing that sort of thing for a while, though most people choose to install their distro's version of the software. There are disadvantages, however, as be-fan pointed out. Either the program assumes certain libraries are installed (like Gnome or KDE) or it ships them with it (causing bloat and perhaps other incompatibilities).
Package management is something that Linux is superior in compared to most proprietary operating systems like Windows and OS X. There are still problems and ways to make it better, but no one who uses Linux really wants to go back to the "setup.exe" way of installing applications.
"Human readability"? Have you ever actually looked at a suitably complex XML document? It's very difficult to really read and understand. It's really just one step up from a binary format because it does make it easier for a developer to figure out what's going on. It's certainly not something you'd want to look at often.
Frankly, XML is hard to parse for both humans and computers (though certainly [large] general purpose parsers have been written for XML). XML generally works and there are some neat things you can do with it using XSLT. I'm not saying we should throw it out, but neither should we sing its praises either. It's really a terrible format that many developers have put many years into making work.
A MacBook doesn't violate the concept of a free market because Apple makes and sells both the hardware and software. The laptop/OS X combo is in fact a single product developed by a single company.
So, if Microsoft developed and manufactured all the Windows computers and laptops in use today, that would somehow be better? Not having Dell, HP, Compaq, Gateway, and hundreds of other manufacturers would make a better free market? Apple is actually a worse proposition than the Windows world, because Apple is the single source for both the hardware and the software. At least in the Microsoft world, you have a choice of various hardware providers. True, most of them impose the Microsoft tax, but there are many (mostly smaller shops) that do not.
Personally, I prefer the Linux world, where the is a choice (and a free market) in both hardware and software. I can choose from a number of different software solutions, ranging from Free (like Debian) to expensive (like RedHat Enterprise) depending on my needs. Sure, the Apple way is simpler because there are no choices, and even looks appealing because they have nice hardware and software, but I prefer the free market way.
Just imagine if Apple had 90+% of the market share in the 90s. Would there be a MacOSX today? I doubt it. People would be cursing Jobs the way the curse Gates now, and telling people to switch from the oppressive Apple systems (and the "Apple Tax") to the more free Microsoft underdogs. Part of that would be the "grass is always greener" mentality, but products with incredibly large market shares tend to stagnate (for example, IE before Mozilla/Firefox became popular).
If you want a free market with choice and continued innovation, choose Linux. If you want to get locked into a proprietary solution, choose Apple or Microsoft.
(I may have been overly critical of Apple in this post. While the Apple system is proprietary, Apple has made strides in the last decade to be more open and to use more open standards. Though this is mostly because they have to to compete with MS, it is good to see more systems support greater interoperability.)
".NET" may have meant something specific in the past (though I'm pretty sure it had nothing to do with the already existing and widely known ".net" top level domain), but I agree with the GP that MS squandered that by going around and putting it on every MS product. I think there might have even been an office.net at one point (though maybe that was just a potential name of some version). What does writing a document have to do with running code in a virtual machine?
Which is why all laws (even the most sane ones prohibiting theft and murder and such) need to have expiration dates. If every law needed to be renewed every 10 years or so, that would (a) get rid of the old laws no one cares about any more and (b) keep the lawmakers busy so they don't have time to make up new worthless laws, while at the same time making them look like they're doing something important to their constituents.
You're right, and even more so, the constitution of the United States does not regulate the PEOPLE of the United States, it regulates the GOVERNMENT of the United States. And it doesn't regulate it just by saying what it cannot do, it explicitly says what it IS empowered to do. In other words, the (Federal) government can only make laws (restricting the people) if the constitution grants it the power to do so and doesn't forbid it. The constitution grants no rights to the people -- the people are assumed to have all those rights. The constitution merely limits what kinds of laws the government can enact.
For example, there is no federal law setting the minimum drinking age. So, why is there a minimum drinking age in the United States? Because the federal government refuses to give highway money to any state that doesn't set a minimum drinking age of 21. Today, all the states have capitulated, but that does not make it a federal law, because the federal government is not granted that power.
Of course, that doesn't stop legislators from passing all kinds of unconstitutional laws, or even the courts from upholding them (somehow, interstate commerce can be used to justify anything in some judge's minds). But in the end, as you said, the people possess their rights inherently. They are not granted by the government.
Some might argue that the Habeas Corpus is not really a right -- the constitution even calls it a privilege. It is more like a procedure to protect against unlawful imprisonment. Even so, the AG is on thin ice (i.e., full of sh*t), since the constitution says that it shall not be suspended. If the procedure is not allowed, then it is, by definition, suspended.
We often speak of whole countries as "our enemies", so why not companies? IMHO, it makes more sense to speak of a company as an enemy than a specific member of that company. After all, individual to individual, members of the groups are not really enemies. Enemies want to destroy each other. Bill Gates isn't my enemy -- I don't (really) want to destroy him. Neither is Steve Ballmer. Or any other Microsoft employee. Microsoft the company isn't an enemy of me the individual, and the Linux community isn't an enemy to individual Microsoft employees (neither group wants to destroy the individuals of the other group). Individuals in either group may consider the other group as a whole as enemies, as the OP considered Microsoft an enemy and how people like Bill Gates consider the Linux community an enemy. Also as a whole, Microsoft is an enemy of the Linux community, as a whole.
Groups of people, like companies or countries, can very easily be enemies, even if individual members of each group don't necessarily consider each other enemies.
Also, the security industry as a whole preys on the fears of Windows users to keep them paying for various security products. While many of these products are useful, I don't think I've ever had an anti-virus tool correctly identify a piece of malware before infection (the only time I've ever had a legitmate infection was a decade ago before virus scanning was common place). Of course, I haven't really used Windows (or anti-malware tools) in many years, so the state of things may be different today. But in talking to other people, it seems that the Nortons and McAfees of the world cause more problems for most people than they solve.
:)
I don't think the security industry is malicious, per se, but they do continue the idea (myth?) that everyone needs their products or they won't be safe. It's funny talking to some Windows people at work who think that we need to virus scan the data our own custom software will be reading (not executing) on non-Windows platforms. I'd suggest the Mythbusters should look into this, but they'd probably just blow up the computer
It's not really a Windows technical problem (what comScore did could probably be done on Linux), but more of a Windows culture problem. I don't know about you, but I get nervous when I download source code for a program and run it without looking over the code. I get doubly nervous if I download a binary and run it. Back when I ran Windows (many years ago), I had no problems downloading and running programs from the Internet. If I happen to use Windows today, I still do that (though I'm pretty selective of the sources of the binaries).
Of course, the question is if people migrated en mass to Linux, would they bring their bad Windows habits with them? Probably. Most people don't understand computers and don't really know why running binaries from the Internet is a bad thing. They do it all the time, and really they have no choice since most MS computers have no compilers on them.
Technically, it's possibly to have spyware on Linux. Culturally and socially, it's much less likely.
The discourse in this country over the last several years makes it seem as if we are more intent on feeding money to private schools (vouchers, vouchers, vouchers...) than actually getting serious about fixing public education.
IMHO, vouchers are the way to fix public education. Because of their virtual monopoly position, current public schools have way too much power over parents and students. Competition is one of the best ways to fix this. It's much more efficient than trying to legislate every little thing to "fix" public schools.
Personally, I believe that we need separation of education and state (kind of like separation of church and state). Schools should not be run by the state. That will inevitably cause indoctrination and conformity instead of education, much like this case.
Of course, most people are already indoctrinated and don't understand why we need freedoms like the freedoms of speech, religion, assembly and the press. Most people don't really understand why need the 4th or 2nd amendments, or any of the other amendments. Most people don't understand that the constitution of the United States gives the federal government power to do things (as opposed to being able to do anything except a certain few things).
So, for most people, it's a difficult battle to convince them that the state should not run the education system, because they see nothing wrong with it.
If you use a smartcard, the crypto happens on the card itself. The private key never leaves the card. Simply speaking, a request is made to the card to sign something, and it gives back the signature. This means that no one listening on the computer can duplicate the authentication (assuming there is nothing else wrong with the protocol, such as replay attacks, any sort of man in the middle, etc).
In essence, the smartcard idea is assuming that your machine could be compromised, and is moving the authentication to another machine (the smartcard) which is much harder to compromise.
Why not use PGP (or gpg) to sign the emails? That is a good, standard way of authenticating emails. What you're talking about is authenticating the the email server, which, while useful, isn't the same as authenticating the sender. Put it another way -- if everyone signed their emails, then we could all run open relay mail servers without an increase in spam. The server wouldn't matter -- only the individual messages.
Also, when you authenticate a server, only the server is trusted, not the messages. So, a trusted server could still be used to send out spam.
Any moderately complicated XML document is very difficult for humans to parse. Sure, they can read it, but it's often hard to understand. See, for example, this post on this article.
/etc directory. Sure, there are some bad ones (like sendmail.cf), but most are easy for humans to read and edit, and most are pretty easy for the programs to read. Now, compare that to the XML junk in your ~/.gconf directory. That's much harder to read and modify.
Also, parsing XML isn't exactly easy for computers either. Especially because it is so flexible, the parser has to be written very generically. This has the benefit of only having to write one generic parser (which is good), but something still has to drive that parser to interpret the information, and that can get compilcated if the XML document structure is complicated.
If you want something that is easy for humans and computers to parse, look no further than the text configuration files in your
Sure, XML is more flexible, but that flexibility makes it much harder to work with than simpler formats.
Because if one HP printer works, they all must, right? Man, I wish the world worked that way.
The information blub in the article noted that it was 3 bands at 16 bpp (per band). Most likely those bands are RGB. I'd be surprised, though, if they really got 16 full bits of range for each pixel. It's probably something less than that, at least for the red and blue bands, but still more than 8. Maybe 11-12 bits.
I wonder what file format they're storing the image data in. Most file formats can't handle images that big. TIFF has an upper limit of 4G, for example (I've heard of 64 bit TIFF versions, but I've never seen a definite spec for that and I don't think libtiff supports that). Of course, there are many formats that can support images that large, or they could have made their own simple format.
On the other hand an RTG powered rover would be really heavy, for about the same amount of power you would get from solar cells (assuming illumination is available).
[emphasis added]
I don't know how well RTGs compare to solar cells for power production (I would expect they produce more, but maybe not), but the crucial point is that there isn't sufficient illumination on many parts of Mars for solar power to be workable. There is only a narrow latitude band near the Martian equator that can support the solar powered rovers. Using an RTG, much more of Mars would be open to exploration.
Sadly, Microsoft won't have much trouble at all selling Vista. I'm sure every OEM out there will begin putting it on all their computers as soon as MS relases it. The exact same way with XP. And in five years time, Vista will be the dominent OS, simply by people getting new machines. Sure, there won't be a mad rush to go buy Vista like there was for Windows 95, but really there hasn't been a rush like that since Windows 95. Microsoft is in a very good position. I know I'd like to get $40-$100 for every new PC sold in the US (and most of the rest of the world) without having to do much actual work.
Though from a pure ROI viewpoint, I think Microsoft made a mistake developing Vista at all. They spent who knows how many millions of dollars developing Vista, and I doubt they're going to get much more revenue out of Vista than they would have from continuing sales of XP over the next 5-10 years. Sure, they might loose some marketshare, but they'd still be getting billions in revenue with very little expenses.
That may be accurate for televion broadcasts, but it isn't so for Microsoft. Customers are people who pay for services. AOL and the media companies aren't paying MS anything, other than licensing fees for the services they use from Microsoft (i.e., their Windows PCs). Microsoft is paid by the guy at the keyboard of the Windows box (or his employer).
Microsoft may be able to leverage all those customers into a product for another customer (such as advertising or licensing DRM solutions), just like the movie theater leverages their movie watching customers into a product for advertising. Until Windows is free (as in beer), the guy using Windows is a still a customer.
Or xemacs if you prefer. I work on a large software system written in C++ and runs on various unixes (Solaris, Linux, SGI) and attempts to run on Windows (Windows usually doesn't agree with it). The system has thousands of source files and is built with make (the Makefiles are generated with imake!). Generally, I use xemacs to for editing. I love vi, but I tend to use (x)emacs because I find the buffer management (the ability to open multiple files) better than in vim. It's entirely possible I just don't know how to use vim right (vim's buffers seem to require that I save the file before switching to another buffer).
Emacs also offers easy access to our source control system (by corporate mandate, we use ClearCase, which I do not recommend to anyone wishing to maintain their sanity).
Finally, emacs allows me to open two (or more) windows in the same session. I generally put two windows next to each other so I can edit two files at once. This lets me open up files as I need them in either window, and then switch to that buffer in the other window if I need to get to it later.
Even though I consider myself a vi person, I've found emacs to be a very good environment for editing source files. It is very customizable and powerful. It adapts to how you want to use it (other people use it in vastly different ways), and generally gets out of your way to let you get your work done.
Just my opinion.
It's called Trusted Computing and only allowing applications to be run that are signed by Microsoft. That's pretty much the only way to prevent most malware (since most malware today is of the Trojan Horse variety -- stuff that users explicitly or implicitly run). If you want that fine, but I suspect most people here (and hopefully most people everywhere, but I'm not so sure about that) like their general purpose computers. If you really want such a locked down system, I suggest you buy a gaming console.
The reason there's no anti-malware tool for Mac OSX is the same reason there isn't one for Linux. It isn't that it isn't possible to write spyware for either system, it's that there aren't any existing programs to look for. If that ever changes (and it probably will, at least on Linux as it gains more marketshare over the next 10-20 years), expect to see anti-malware tools quickly spring up.
The only reason that YouTube, Google Video et al adopted Flash as their video player client was because Flash is pretty much universal, and it's easier to convert videos into a Flash video file than to deal with all the compatibility issues that come with embedding a Windows Media / Quicktime / RealVideo file. Nothing wrong with that, because Flash was designed to be an animation / movie player, and moving to full motion video isn't that big of a step.
Except of course the fact that Flash always seems to have audio-visual sync issues (the audio usually falls behind the video). This is OK for stupid YouTube clips, but is annoying. Even animations like JibJab seem to sometimes have these timing issues. I don't know what the problem is, but it always makes me unhappy when I see the flash plugin start.
At least it doesn't crash my browser as much anymore.
You certainly can set that preference in Gnome. Under the Window preferences, where it says "select windows when the mouse moves over them", there is an option "raise selected windows after an interval" (text is as appears in Gnome 2.14, but I know that this option goes as far back as Gnome 2.0, since that's what is shipped with the Solaris 9 I use at work).
Still can't have different backgrounds for different virtual desktops (er, "workspaces") though. Not sure what's holding that simple option up.
btw, under most circumstances, your software shouldn't be trying to dictate how it interacts with the other windows (such as calling raise() on all clicks). That is the domain of the window manager. It would be very annoying if I had not set autoraise and some apps decided they wanted to raise themselves anyway all the time.
Yes, forward slashes work in CMD in general, but two forward slashes for a UNC path don't work I think because they begin the argument, so it tries to interpret it as a switch.