Man, its early in the morning for a slashdot posting. Must be the just get into work and do the reading/posting heh.
That said I tend to agree. The best the banks can hope for is to educate their users not to give out personal information over the net. Drill it into their heads if need be.
A few issues. One, you can't compare this to Linux directly. As Linux is Open Source, people are free to patch the problems themselves if they find them, and continue on.
The second section about gaming companies is valid, but less so with Oracle and business clients. The main stink people have with this is, as you pointed out, with not upgrading IE for Windows 2000. Businesses put quite a bit of investment into 2k and don't want to have to toss their money away for XP which doesn't offer many features businesses need over 2k. (I'd personally argue that 2k is more stable and overall a better OS than XP but that's another matter).
Many people (especially in business) also may have a problem with your last statement. I know plenty of organizations that still use 2k desktops and they're not going to upgrade just because MS needs some way of generating revenue.
The issue is a bit moot though. I doubt they actually mean they'll stop supporting 2k by this, and if they did, they no longer have a monopoly in modern webbrowsers. They'd just be worked around.
I'm using -BETA5 at the moment and well SCHED_4BSD fixed several issues that I was having with ULE and my laptop (it was almost unusable). On my desktop I didn't notice any change between them. PREEMPTION is disabled as of the last cvsup I did but I believe one of the reasons for going to 4BSD was so that PREEMPTION could be turned on again. Judging by some of the MFCs, it looks like they're tring to get PREEMPTION back for the GENERIC 5.3.
As for the the VLC thing, I've heard several people say that -BETA4 had some performance problems though I didn't notice anything.
Am I the only one who thinks they should have named the thing the Scoop 7? I think that would have been much more appropriate given what the thing is doing. Just make sure you're not in the little town where it lands or anything...
Assuming that NATs go away with ipv6, which - despite many people's desires, probably won't happen. I have an ipv6 subnet here that has and ipv4 nat for the ipv4 addresses. The machine running the v4 NAT also filters the v6 packets as they come in. If the infastructure is there, might as well filter out any thing coming in on v6 (which usually is nothing).
Someone has modded you flamebait and I think that's a little unfair, it's just your opinion. Anyway, a popup blocker, yeah thats great and everything but they're still missing some basic functionallity. IE still doesn't render the transparent PNG on my site properly (this is a real pet peeve of mine) and its support for certain CSS functions is non-existant. As even a causal webdeveloper I have to bend over to support IE (The PNG on my site still looks broken but thats my protest). One could argue also about the security holes and such but as I don't use IE, I really don't care. Web standards I do care about.
In the days of Netscape v. IE, there was a constant battle to bring in new features, better support, and better performance. I miss those days.
The User Agent Switcher Extention makes changing the agent as simple as a click. If you set it to IE for all sites you're just bumping up IE's user share which makes it harder to get sites to support standards as opposed to POS software.
I think you're missing a few points. With Diesel, its still coming from non-renewable fossil fuels so you're still releasing carbon into the atmosphere (less of the other nasties - but carbon is still a problem).
As to the second thing, I'm a suburbanite and will probably moving to another suburb of another city by the end of the year. The reasons to live in a suburb are next to endless so I won't even bother. Electric trolley cars were killed off by political pressure from the Auto industry. That and Americans love cars. That aside, you've missed the point with the trolleys I think. An electric trolley still uses electricity. How is that electricity produced? The difference between powering electric trolleys and natural gas buses is probably not that great. And even if we had the trolleys convincing people to use public transportation around here is comically difficult.
Now if you were talking about why people need to drive their urban assualt humvee 2 gallons per mile SUVs around instead of something that gets sensible fuel economy, that I'd support.:)
What someone needs to do is write the firefox extension that simply converts any it.slashdot.org url to slashdot.org and hence kills what is possibly the worst color scheme in history (next to the games.slashdot.org color scheme).
Umm yeah, because we all know that how a patch or program effects the system is always outlined exactly in the white paper. There are never any other issues that pop-up or unforseen consequences.
Most home users know better (the ones that actually know to apply a service pack that is) then to not jump into service packs. Why would a company be any different?
Bruce Schinder's book has a nice section on the differences between Authentication, Identification, and Authorization. You use biometrics for the Identification, and something else for Authentication (like a password).
Its a like a ATM card. The card is your "Identification" (it id's the account) but the PIN is your Authentication.
MO we should have a system where - say you are browsing your web site and you spot a spelling mistake on it at http://www.i-like-kibble.org/about.html you should just be able to click an edit button in your browser, be asked to supply a username and password and then have it open webdav://www.i-like-kibble.org/about.html either in a built in editor or it should ask you to select an editor (such as notepad, gedit or even MS Word). When the page is 'saved' in the editor, the changes should be uploaded to the site automatically by the browser. If they had been even remotely competant and argued for this from day one (and hacked up a couple of functional implimentations) we could all have that functionality today.
My webpage does exactly this. It's a wiki. I designed the template, someone much more talented wrote the php backend but just about anybody (with the password) can edit it. You mentioned blogs and its pretty much the same idea. And frankly, I think that's where the web is headed. PHP, ASP, Python, Zope or whatever backends that will spit out XML to send the data. Pages get edited though a program, a web interface, or (for the hardcore) edited by hand. This, of course, provided MS doesn't poison the well with they XAML stuff.
As for CSS I'd tend to agree its a headache. Its time to move off to full fledged DTDs and have nice programs that help in their creation. As for scripting languages, there's no shortage of those. The rectange and circle is coming if SVG ever gets anywhere.
The web is getting better but you can't exactly blame the w3c for all of its shortcomings. The largest shareholder of webbrowsers can't even display a transparent PNG properly. Even if the w3c created new Uber-XML 5.0 Non-transitional tomorrow no web-developer could use it as IE doesn't support it.
Ironically I'm a gentoo user, and considered making a statement like that when I submitted the article (but didn't want to be that guy). I actually got the news of the new version by watching the converstation in #gentoo-dev about work on the updated ebuild.
Quick correction: Finland doesn't appear to be in NATO proper but is in the EAPC and according to the NATO chart has some miliary relationship with the alliance. The Baltic States are also in NATO so attacking them is also bad news.
And the most basic question: Why would Russia do this?
Well, the USSR no longer exists - you probably mean Russia. I seriously doubt the Russia has any desire to attack Europe but lets look at this.
The port argument I don't buy. There are Russian Ports in the North like Murmansk. As to "seaports useable in the depths of winter" they're probably better off using the Black Sea and attacking from the Med or sacking the Baltic States. Finland is a NATO country so attacking it would pull in that alliance. Attacking the UK would involve an invasion and frankly, there'd be a nuclear exchange before it got that far. If you're going to invade Europe from the North (as there is a western border I really don't see this happening) you're going to have to move troops across the Baltic or North Sea. If there was really a desire to do that I think Russia would invade the Baltic States before they invaded Finland (smaller borders, smaller countries and the USSR subjugated those countries before).
Frankly, I don't think your scenario would have been played out during the Cold War and I think its even less likely now. Too many nuclear weapons in play and today, too many people with the desire to get rich through trade in the region.
Umm, maybe thats how it is there but here on Verizon I'm quite capable of sending out on my local mailserver. I've stopped doing that though due to RBLs. I send email out with the return address of my domain and this works fine if you enable smtp authentication and can put in the verizon password.
Dropline Gnome comes with both "redhat-artwork" and "ximian-artwork". You can install that version (or just install the redhat artwork package) and you'll have Bluecurve. I'm typing this from my slackware laptop running the bluecuve theme.
Well if you actually bought the distro, SUSE used to come with a pretty nice book that had all of the commands you could ever want in it. There are also sections of Debian's website and the Gentoo website that document it. While we're at it, I can also mention the O'reilly Running Linux book. I could also go on about this search engine called google.
Frankly, the sections in the book that come with the distro and the man pages can get someone started and good use of a search engine or IRC or mailing list can help you figure out those other problems.
But that whole scenario is a false saving. It's a great learning exercise, and has value that way, but it's not a magic bullet to "performance" and efficiency.
This I agree with. I spend some time in #gentoo arguing with people new to game that -march=blah -O2 -pipe is fine. The use -fobliterate-regparms-nstacks-nstuff isn't really going to benefit anyone. Of course the same people have their boxes overclocked and then wonder why gcc can't compile programs.
Some people like gentoo, others don't want to be bothered trying to keep the system up to date and move off to slackware or somesuch. If nothing else the install procedure gives them some idea how everything runs.
Slashdot Mirror
Useless lump of plastic sold for $200K
I tried a similar line with the girlfriend in a jewlery store when we were buying useless lumps of rock. It didn't take then either.
I'd have to agree with the other guy; this is funny not flamebait. I got a smirk out of it anyway.
Man, its early in the morning for a slashdot posting. Must be the just get into work and do the reading/posting heh.
That said I tend to agree. The best the banks can hope for is to educate their users not to give out personal information over the net. Drill it into their heads if need be.
It's like someone breaking into your house and taking out the garbage for you...
...
One person's treasure is another's garbage
A few issues. One, you can't compare this to Linux directly. As Linux is Open Source, people are free to patch the problems themselves if they find them, and continue on.
The second section about gaming companies is valid, but less so with Oracle and business clients. The main stink people have with this is, as you pointed out, with not upgrading IE for Windows 2000. Businesses put quite a bit of investment into 2k and don't want to have to toss their money away for XP which doesn't offer many features businesses need over 2k. (I'd personally argue that 2k is more stable and overall a better OS than XP but that's another matter).
Many people (especially in business) also may have a problem with your last statement. I know plenty of organizations that still use 2k desktops and they're not going to upgrade just because MS needs some way of generating revenue.
The issue is a bit moot though. I doubt they actually mean they'll stop supporting 2k by this, and if they did, they no longer have a monopoly in modern webbrowsers. They'd just be worked around.
I'm using -BETA5 at the moment and well SCHED_4BSD fixed several issues that I was having with ULE and my laptop (it was almost unusable). On my desktop I didn't notice any change between them. PREEMPTION is disabled as of the last cvsup I did but I believe one of the reasons for going to 4BSD was so that PREEMPTION could be turned on again. Judging by some of the MFCs, it looks like they're tring to get PREEMPTION back for the GENERIC 5.3.
As for the the VLC thing, I've heard several people say that -BETA4 had some performance problems though I didn't notice anything.
Am I the only one who thinks they should have named the thing the Scoop 7? I think that would have been much more appropriate given what the thing is doing. Just make sure you're not in the little town where it lands or anything ...
Assuming that NATs go away with ipv6, which - despite many people's desires, probably won't happen. I have an ipv6 subnet here that has and ipv4 nat for the ipv4 addresses. The machine running the v4 NAT also filters the v6 packets as they come in. If the infastructure is there, might as well filter out any thing coming in on v6 (which usually is nothing).
Someone has modded you flamebait and I think that's a little unfair, it's just your opinion. Anyway, a popup blocker, yeah thats great and everything but they're still missing some basic functionallity. IE still doesn't render the transparent PNG on my site properly (this is a real pet peeve of mine) and its support for certain CSS functions is non-existant. As even a causal webdeveloper I have to bend over to support IE (The PNG on my site still looks broken but thats my protest). One could argue also about the security holes and such but as I don't use IE, I really don't care. Web standards I do care about.
In the days of Netscape v. IE, there was a constant battle to bring in new features, better support, and better performance. I miss those days.
Anyone else a little nervous that they haven't gotten around to writing a privacy policy? That seems a bit disturbing, to say the least.
TODO:
Conspiracy theory goes here.
so that makes 1PetaByte 1024*$2,500 or about 2.56 MILLION bucks
:).
Actually I'd be willing to start for a measely 2 Million
The User Agent Switcher Extention makes changing the agent as simple as a click. If you set it to IE for all sites you're just bumping up IE's user share which makes it harder to get sites to support standards as opposed to POS software.
I think you're missing a few points. With Diesel, its still coming from non-renewable fossil fuels so you're still releasing carbon into the atmosphere (less of the other nasties - but carbon is still a problem).
:)
As to the second thing, I'm a suburbanite and will probably moving to another suburb of another city by the end of the year. The reasons to live in a suburb are next to endless so I won't even bother. Electric trolley cars were killed off by political pressure from the Auto industry. That and Americans love cars. That aside, you've missed the point with the trolleys I think. An electric trolley still uses electricity. How is that electricity produced? The difference between powering electric trolleys and natural gas buses is probably not that great. And even if we had the trolleys convincing people to use public transportation around here is comically difficult.
Now if you were talking about why people need to drive their urban assualt humvee 2 gallons per mile SUVs around instead of something that gets sensible fuel economy, that I'd support.
What someone needs to do is write the firefox extension that simply converts any it.slashdot.org url to slashdot.org and hence kills what is possibly the worst color scheme in history (next to the games.slashdot.org color scheme).
Umm yeah, because we all know that how a patch or program effects the system is always outlined exactly in the white paper. There are never any other issues that pop-up or unforseen consequences.
Most home users know better (the ones that actually know to apply a service pack that is) then to not jump into service packs. Why would a company be any different?
Bruce Schinder's book has a nice section on the differences between Authentication, Identification, and Authorization. You use biometrics for the Identification, and something else for Authentication (like a password).
Its a like a ATM card. The card is your "Identification" (it id's the account) but the PIN is your Authentication.
MO we should have a system where - say you are browsing your web site and you spot a spelling mistake on it at http://www.i-like-kibble.org/about.html you should just be able to click an edit button in your browser, be asked to supply a username and password and then have it open webdav://www.i-like-kibble.org/about.html either in a built in editor or it should ask you to select an editor (such as notepad, gedit or even MS Word). When the page is 'saved' in the editor, the changes should be uploaded to the site automatically by the browser. If they had been even remotely competant and argued for this from day one (and hacked up a couple of functional implimentations) we could all have that functionality today.
My webpage does exactly this. It's a wiki. I designed the template, someone much more talented wrote the php backend but just about anybody (with the password) can edit it. You mentioned blogs and its pretty much the same idea. And frankly, I think that's where the web is headed. PHP, ASP, Python, Zope or whatever backends that will spit out XML to send the data. Pages get edited though a program, a web interface, or (for the hardcore) edited by hand. This, of course, provided MS doesn't poison the well with they XAML stuff.
As for CSS I'd tend to agree its a headache. Its time to move off to full fledged DTDs and have nice programs that help in their creation. As for scripting languages, there's no shortage of those. The rectange and circle is coming if SVG ever gets anywhere.
The web is getting better but you can't exactly blame the w3c for all of its shortcomings. The largest shareholder of webbrowsers can't even display a transparent PNG properly. Even if the w3c created new Uber-XML 5.0 Non-transitional tomorrow no web-developer could use it as IE doesn't support it.
No but if I still ran Windows I'd love to be able to uninstall that "Browser" you call IE ...
Ironically I'm a gentoo user, and considered making a statement like that when I submitted the article (but didn't want to be that guy). I actually got the news of the new version by watching the converstation in #gentoo-dev about work on the updated ebuild.
Quick correction: Finland doesn't appear to be in NATO proper but is in the EAPC and according to the NATO chart has some miliary relationship with the alliance. The Baltic States are also in NATO so attacking them is also bad news.
And the most basic question: Why would Russia do this?
Well, the USSR no longer exists - you probably mean Russia. I seriously doubt the Russia has any desire to attack Europe but lets look at this.
The port argument I don't buy. There are Russian Ports in the North like Murmansk. As to "seaports useable in the depths of winter" they're probably better off using the Black Sea and attacking from the Med or sacking the Baltic States. Finland is a NATO country so attacking it would pull in that alliance.
Attacking the UK would involve an invasion and frankly, there'd be a nuclear exchange before it got that far. If you're going to invade Europe from the North (as there is a western border I really don't see this happening) you're going to have to move troops across the Baltic or North Sea. If there was really a desire to do that I think Russia would invade the Baltic States before they invaded Finland (smaller borders, smaller countries and the USSR subjugated those countries before).
Frankly, I don't think your scenario would have been played out during the Cold War and I think its even less likely now. Too many nuclear weapons in play and today, too many people with the desire to get rich through trade in the region.
Umm, maybe thats how it is there but here on Verizon I'm quite capable of sending out on my local mailserver. I've stopped doing that though due to RBLs. I send email out with the return address of my domain and this works fine if you enable smtp authentication and can put in the verizon password.
YMMV.
Dropline Gnome comes with both "redhat-artwork" and "ximian-artwork". You can install that version (or just install the redhat artwork package) and you'll have Bluecurve. I'm typing this from my slackware laptop running the bluecuve theme.
Well if you actually bought the distro, SUSE used to come with a pretty nice book that had all of the commands you could ever want in it. There are also sections of Debian's website and the Gentoo website that document it. While we're at it, I can also mention the O'reilly Running Linux book. I could also go on about this search engine called google.
Frankly, the sections in the book that come with the distro and the man pages can get someone started and good use of a search engine or IRC or mailing list can help you figure out those other problems.
But that whole scenario is a false saving. It's a great learning exercise, and has value that way, but it's not a magic bullet to "performance" and efficiency.
This I agree with. I spend some time in #gentoo arguing with people new to game that -march=blah -O2 -pipe is fine. The use -fobliterate-regparms-nstacks-nstuff isn't really going to benefit anyone. Of course the same people have their boxes overclocked and then wonder why gcc can't compile programs.
Some people like gentoo, others don't want to be bothered trying to keep the system up to date and move off to slackware or somesuch. If nothing else the install procedure gives them some idea how everything runs.