What is objectionable about existing toilet paper from an "open source" point of view? Plain toilet paper isn't a creative work (specialty paper with artwork on it might be), so it can't be copyrighted. And patents only last about 20 years while toilet paper has been manufactured for much longer than that, so any patents on the manufacturing process or the paper itself would have expired some time ago. Shouldn't he be OK if he just buys a generic store brand without any fancy new features or copyrighted art on the package?
Of course any toilet paper brand name is likely to be covered by a trademark, but if that is enough to make it not "open source", then Firefox is not open source software either.
Yes, a lot of casual users are going to conclude (or already have) that a full-fledged PC is more than they need or can safely handle, and that a tablet makes a better computing platform. For Grandma who only surfs the web and checks her family's Facebook pages, a tablet is a better choice: more intuitive, good enough for the tasks at hand, less likely to catch a worm or virus. It's for more complicated tasks that a PC is required. (My mother, for example, does most of her web-related stuff on the iPad, but she still needs to use a PC to get photos off the camera, edit them, and post listings on eBay – the iPad apps are grossly insufficient for this task.)
But one thing a lot of people are forgetting in their haste to announce a "post-PC era" is the HUGE installed base of existing systems. Up until about 2006, the PC market was still evolving fast enough that users had to upgrade on a fairly regular basis. An average 2001 PC would be pretty bad at running 2006-vintage applications. But for most home and office users, PCs from the Core 2 Duo era onward have been good enough. They can do all the usual stuff (surfing, email, videos, Office, WoW and other simple games) without too much trouble, and multitask reasonably well since they are multi-core. Given that economic times haven't been that great recently, why would home or business users want to switch out perfectly good hardware that still does what they need? This in no way means that the PCs are going away, just that their upgrade cycle has substantially slowed.
I do think that the utter low-end of the PC market – the $300 shitboxes formerly epitomized by such stellar brands as Packard Bell and eMachines – is going to go away. And good riddance. Those users will mostly be better off with tablets. But high-end desktops, gaming PCs, and workstations are here to stay.
It's worth remembering that most of what people here on Slashdot usually actually buy is already niche hardware to some extent. Full ATX motherboards are a niche product. Intel K-series CPUs are a niche product. Discrete graphics cards are a niche product. But despite their low-volume status, we can still get this stuff at fairly reasonable prices. The only exception is the top-end flagships, which are substantially overpriced to lure people with more money than common sense.
"An attacker who successfully exploited a Gadget vulnerability could run arbitrary code in the context of the current user," company officials said in an advisory issued Tuesday. "If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker could take complete control of the affected system." To be successful, they added, "An attacker would have to convince a user to install and enable a vulnerable Gadget."
In other words: Gadgets are just like any other kind of executable code – they run under the user's credentials and can do things the user doesn't necessarily expect.
Part of me (the paranoid part) thinks that this is a prelude to Windows eventually trying to close off all "untrusted" third-party code in newer versions of Windows, and eventually require everything to either go through the App Store or some sort of corporate app repository. They want to get rid of the desktop and general-purpose computing, they just don't think they can get away with it yet. This is a trial balloon and there has to be strong pushback against it.
I won't be applying this patch, however I can't help but wonder if MS is sneakily trying to kill off gadgets partly to promote the Windows 8 tiles and start screen.
How hard is it to evaluate a string for potential danger?
Pretty hard, if you don't want to corrupt user data. A botched attempt to do so is how the bogus word "medireview" was created.
What they really should be doing is using parameterized queries so that the user-input strings cannot be treated as SQL commands, but will always be treated as data.
The fact that climate change took place centuries or even millennia ago doesn't prove that it was not caused by people. Humans have been doing things to affect the climate for a long time.
Charles C. Mann, in his excellent book 1493, discusses a theory that the "Little Ice Age" (a period of cooler than usual temperatures from roughly 1550-1800) was the result of the Columbian Exchange. Basically, the Native Americans had populated large portions of the New World, and in so doing had cleared most of the forest lands. After Columbus and his successors arrived, the Native Americans died at an insane rate from European diseases, and new forests grew across vast swathes of the Americas. This in turn resulted in far lower CO2 levels and consequently lower temperatures.
The problem is that globally this just isn't true. Very much like in many countries cell phones were there before some sane coverage with landlines, there are huge populations and even businesses who will just go straight into smartphones and tablets without bothering with PCs.
Smartphones and tablets are media consumption devices. They aren't suitable for anyone who does any actual work – you need a PC for that. They aren't suitable for producing anything more elaborate than an email reply or a blog comment.
Frankly, I don't even want Microsoft to be "innovative." At this point, they're pretty much like a public utility – I prefer when they're doing their work in the background, and I mostly only notice if they screw something up.
The fundamental problem is that Microsoft should be transitioning from a high-growth company to a stable, mature company – from a financial perspective, less emphasis on stock appreciation and more on dividends. People – and more importantly, businesses – rely on Microsoft for un-sexy features like backwards compatibility, familiarity, installed base, and stability (some of the older Slashdotters may laugh, but Windows 7 really is a rock-stable OS, and even a fully patched XP isn't bad.) The fact is that Windows became "good enough" for most users years ago, and everything since then has been either incremental improvements or actual degradation. There hasn't been any major positive "paradigm shift" on the desktop and there won't be. Some users will find that they don't need a full-fledged PC and will transition to tablets, but many, perhaps a majority, still need the power and/or flexibility that only a complete desktop OS can offer. This is Microsoft's niche. They need to focus on it and stop chasing phantoms.
I understand that X11 is obsolete crap and has to go, but why are they using Wayland instead of, say, DirectFB? From what I can tell (please correct me if I'm wrong, Linux really isn't my thing) DirectFB is much better supported and a more mature product.
Good god - how idiotic does an OS have to be, to run executables from any media you happen to insert?
Not idiotic, just outdated. When Windows XP was released, way back in 2001, the assumption was that removable media was going to be a pressed CD or DVD and that these sources could be trusted. This assumption started to break down with the advent of cheap CD/DVD writers, and became completely absurd when inexpensive flash drives proliferated.
As a result, Microsoft removed Autorun from USB drives as part of a Windows XP update in 2011. (Probably a bit late, but still, they did fix it.) On Windows 7, Autorun for USB drives was never included. The user would have to run the malware manually (and if it wants admin permissions, you'd also have to click through the UAC warning).
If your company has it, if not, and you have a spare Win2K8R2 machine laying around you can just install the free version.
SharePoint is a horror show and is nearly impossible to maintain unless you've got a dedicated team of people with a PhD in SharePoint. Just one example of weird/problematic behavior: all files in document libraries are stored as database records. Yes, no matter how big they are. So if you want to post an install disc ISO to your SharePoint site so your techs can all access it? Have fun waiting all day for SQL Express to write or read a 600MB record. There are ways of doing "stubbing" to get around this, so only a pointer to the actual file is kept in the database and the file is stored in a filesystem – but none of them are built-in, they all require expensive third-party solutions. Why was something this straightforward not included as basic functionality?
Why are people posting about their very specific needs, and overstating the impact those needs have for everyone else? Your vertical market is the minority.
There are a lot of people with "very specific needs." Each particular need alone makes up a small minority, but collectively they are a sizable portion of the market. And that's where the PC shines: it can be pretty much whatever you need it to be. Legacy business software alone guarantees that the PC isn't going away any time soon.
There aren't really any non-niche replacement options for ThunderBird or Outlook since Eudora was killed by Qualcomm. I've tried several of the better ones, and they're universally painful to use.
How many people use stand-alone desktop email clients any more? (I'm not talking about Outlook, since that is really as much a shared-calendar program as it is an email app.)
I'm generally not a big fan of web apps and "the cloud" as a substitute for native apps, but unless you host your own email server, you're relying on someone else to store your email anyway. Why not use the web interface? Email is simple enough that in my experience there really isn't a lot that a native app can do that a good webmail interface can't.
You (and I) are an edge case. You really need to think about the millions of people for whom Excel is the most complicated program. That's really 99% of the user base.
A majority? Maybe. 99%? No way. There are a lot more of these "edge cases" out there than you think. Anyone who does serious work in Photoshop won't be satisfied with a tablet, even if it does have a keyboard/mouse/monitor hooked up. Too slow, not enough RAM. Anyone who's at all serious about PC gaming won't be satisfied with a tablet; 3D graphics aren't nearly up to par. Anyone who does programming won't be satisfied with a tablet (hint: compile times will absolutely suck). And there are literally hundreds of other specific applications that need real PCs, each of which may have "only" thousands or tens of thousands of users, but that adds up.
There has to be a real desktop OS and real PC hardware. The "average" (lowest common denominator) home user may ditch their PC for a tablet, but people who do real work can't.
The problem isn't with predictable low-speed conditions, it's with drivers accustomed to cars which drive themselves under low-speed conditions who are suddenly thrown into an unpredictable situation.
But this kind of thing already happens. If you're driving a commute you've made 1000 times before, your brain is probably mostly on autopilot, your mind far away from the task at hand. If something strange happens, you can only hope you regain concentration quickly enough to avoid a crash.
This may be a stupid question, but isn't there a way to collect massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, compress the carbon into some sort of solid composite, and store it somewhere where it's land-locked (similar to how trees store carbon in wood)?
Wouldn't it be much easier just to grow a crapload of fast-growing trees (since as you noted, they already do this very thing) and then bury or sink whatever wood isn't needed for housing and furniture?
I'm familiar with the basic concept of adaptive cruise control – automatically speeding up or slowing down to keep pace with other vehicles in the same lane – but I'm still unclear on how it works when multiple vehicles are using it, or how it reacts to out-of-range conditions. What happens if four people in a line are using ACC? How is it decided how fast they should go? What happens if you're using ACC and the person ahead of you slams down the gas? Will your car automatically cause you to keep pace with him and therefore break the speed limit? I'm sure they've thought of these things, but I'm not quite sure how they are being resolved.
If you run NoScript, essentially every web site in existence is broken by default and has to be whitelisted. If you get into the habit of auto-allowing everything, you're no safer than you would be without it installed, and if you don't, then you have to manually spend 5 minutes picking and choosing which scripts you have to enable for the page to work.
Sure there is: If a block of memory doesn't contain a null-terminator--as expected by the library functions--then the item in question isn't a c string. If you're saying C-strings don't exist because it's purely a standard-library concept, then we'll still have to disagree: The standard libraries make the language as much as the syntax and base-types, and this is even more true for established languages.
It depends on how you define a string. Sure, you can refer to a null-terminated character array in C as a string. But it doesn't contain the features you see in languages that have strings as a ground-up, first-class concept. You can't concatentate with the standard "+" operator (you have to use strcat or its equivalents) and more importantly there is no built-in protection against buffer overflow or other such issues. This is why I made my original statement: if you start thinking that C's null-terminated character arrays are "strings" in the high-level language sense of the term, you will get too complacent and get bitten by errors and security vulnerabilities.
Then there are deadly designs such as C-strings and even worse inconsistencies within the string functions (think null terminator).
There is no such thing as a string in C. There are standard library functions that let you pretend there is, but neither the language nor the compiler know the semantics of these. As far as the language itself is concerned, it's all just pointers to memory.
When you don't understand something, it's easy to say it has no purpose. It sounds just like kids in high school whining about algebra when they don't see how they will use it in "real" life.
Guess what? The vast majority of them never will use algebra in real life. Most jobs simply don't require it.
Slashdot Mirror
What is objectionable about existing toilet paper from an "open source" point of view? Plain toilet paper isn't a creative work (specialty paper with artwork on it might be), so it can't be copyrighted. And patents only last about 20 years while toilet paper has been manufactured for much longer than that, so any patents on the manufacturing process or the paper itself would have expired some time ago. Shouldn't he be OK if he just buys a generic store brand without any fancy new features or copyrighted art on the package?
Of course any toilet paper brand name is likely to be covered by a trademark, but if that is enough to make it not "open source", then Firefox is not open source software either.
Why not just send out a patch that prevents Windows from executing code entirely since, you know, it COULD be dangerous.. :|
It's called Windows RT.
Yes, a lot of casual users are going to conclude (or already have) that a full-fledged PC is more than they need or can safely handle, and that a tablet makes a better computing platform. For Grandma who only surfs the web and checks her family's Facebook pages, a tablet is a better choice: more intuitive, good enough for the tasks at hand, less likely to catch a worm or virus. It's for more complicated tasks that a PC is required. (My mother, for example, does most of her web-related stuff on the iPad, but she still needs to use a PC to get photos off the camera, edit them, and post listings on eBay – the iPad apps are grossly insufficient for this task.)
But one thing a lot of people are forgetting in their haste to announce a "post-PC era" is the HUGE installed base of existing systems. Up until about 2006, the PC market was still evolving fast enough that users had to upgrade on a fairly regular basis. An average 2001 PC would be pretty bad at running 2006-vintage applications. But for most home and office users, PCs from the Core 2 Duo era onward have been good enough. They can do all the usual stuff (surfing, email, videos, Office, WoW and other simple games) without too much trouble, and multitask reasonably well since they are multi-core. Given that economic times haven't been that great recently, why would home or business users want to switch out perfectly good hardware that still does what they need? This in no way means that the PCs are going away, just that their upgrade cycle has substantially slowed.
I do think that the utter low-end of the PC market – the $300 shitboxes formerly epitomized by such stellar brands as Packard Bell and eMachines – is going to go away. And good riddance. Those users will mostly be better off with tablets. But high-end desktops, gaming PCs, and workstations are here to stay.
It's worth remembering that most of what people here on Slashdot usually actually buy is already niche hardware to some extent. Full ATX motherboards are a niche product. Intel K-series CPUs are a niche product. Discrete graphics cards are a niche product. But despite their low-volume status, we can still get this stuff at fairly reasonable prices. The only exception is the top-end flagships, which are substantially overpriced to lure people with more money than common sense.
In other words: Gadgets are just like any other kind of executable code – they run under the user's credentials and can do things the user doesn't necessarily expect.
Part of me (the paranoid part) thinks that this is a prelude to Windows eventually trying to close off all "untrusted" third-party code in newer versions of Windows, and eventually require everything to either go through the App Store or some sort of corporate app repository. They want to get rid of the desktop and general-purpose computing, they just don't think they can get away with it yet. This is a trial balloon and there has to be strong pushback against it.
I won't be applying this patch, however I can't help but wonder if MS is sneakily trying to kill off gadgets partly to promote the Windows 8 tiles and start screen.
Judging from the message they've posted on the closed Gadgets Gallery page, it certainly looks that way"
Translation: nothing to see here, Windows 7 is yesterday's news, throw away your real PCs and embrace the tabletness of Windows 8!
How hard is it to evaluate a string for potential danger?
Pretty hard, if you don't want to corrupt user data. A botched attempt to do so is how the bogus word "medireview" was created.
What they really should be doing is using parameterized queries so that the user-input strings cannot be treated as SQL commands, but will always be treated as data.
The fact that climate change took place centuries or even millennia ago doesn't prove that it was not caused by people. Humans have been doing things to affect the climate for a long time.
Charles C. Mann, in his excellent book 1493, discusses a theory that the "Little Ice Age" (a period of cooler than usual temperatures from roughly 1550-1800) was the result of the Columbian Exchange. Basically, the Native Americans had populated large portions of the New World, and in so doing had cleared most of the forest lands. After Columbus and his successors arrived, the Native Americans died at an insane rate from European diseases, and new forests grew across vast swathes of the Americas. This in turn resulted in far lower CO2 levels and consequently lower temperatures.
The problem is that globally this just isn't true. Very much like in many countries cell phones were there before some sane coverage with landlines, there are huge populations and even businesses who will just go straight into smartphones and tablets without bothering with PCs.
Smartphones and tablets are media consumption devices. They aren't suitable for anyone who does any actual work – you need a PC for that. They aren't suitable for producing anything more elaborate than an email reply or a blog comment.
Frankly, I don't even want Microsoft to be "innovative." At this point, they're pretty much like a public utility – I prefer when they're doing their work in the background, and I mostly only notice if they screw something up.
The fundamental problem is that Microsoft should be transitioning from a high-growth company to a stable, mature company – from a financial perspective, less emphasis on stock appreciation and more on dividends. People – and more importantly, businesses – rely on Microsoft for un-sexy features like backwards compatibility, familiarity, installed base, and stability (some of the older Slashdotters may laugh, but Windows 7 really is a rock-stable OS, and even a fully patched XP isn't bad.) The fact is that Windows became "good enough" for most users years ago, and everything since then has been either incremental improvements or actual degradation. There hasn't been any major positive "paradigm shift" on the desktop and there won't be. Some users will find that they don't need a full-fledged PC and will transition to tablets, but many, perhaps a majority, still need the power and/or flexibility that only a complete desktop OS can offer. This is Microsoft's niche. They need to focus on it and stop chasing phantoms.
I understand that X11 is obsolete crap and has to go, but why are they using Wayland instead of, say, DirectFB? From what I can tell (please correct me if I'm wrong, Linux really isn't my thing) DirectFB is much better supported and a more mature product.
Good god - how idiotic does an OS have to be, to run executables from any media you happen to insert?
Not idiotic, just outdated. When Windows XP was released, way back in 2001, the assumption was that removable media was going to be a pressed CD or DVD and that these sources could be trusted. This assumption started to break down with the advent of cheap CD/DVD writers, and became completely absurd when inexpensive flash drives proliferated.
As a result, Microsoft removed Autorun from USB drives as part of a Windows XP update in 2011. (Probably a bit late, but still, they did fix it.) On Windows 7, Autorun for USB drives was never included. The user would have to run the malware manually (and if it wants admin permissions, you'd also have to click through the UAC warning).
If your company has it, if not, and you have a spare Win2K8R2 machine laying around you can just install the free version.
SharePoint is a horror show and is nearly impossible to maintain unless you've got a dedicated team of people with a PhD in SharePoint. Just one example of weird/problematic behavior: all files in document libraries are stored as database records. Yes, no matter how big they are. So if you want to post an install disc ISO to your SharePoint site so your techs can all access it? Have fun waiting all day for SQL Express to write or read a 600MB record. There are ways of doing "stubbing" to get around this, so only a pointer to the actual file is kept in the database and the file is stored in a filesystem – but none of them are built-in, they all require expensive third-party solutions. Why was something this straightforward not included as basic functionality?
Why are people posting about their very specific needs, and overstating the impact those needs have for everyone else? Your vertical market is the minority.
There are a lot of people with "very specific needs." Each particular need alone makes up a small minority, but collectively they are a sizable portion of the market. And that's where the PC shines: it can be pretty much whatever you need it to be. Legacy business software alone guarantees that the PC isn't going away any time soon.
There aren't really any non-niche replacement options for ThunderBird or Outlook since Eudora was killed by Qualcomm. I've tried several of the better ones, and they're universally painful to use.
How many people use stand-alone desktop email clients any more? (I'm not talking about Outlook, since that is really as much a shared-calendar program as it is an email app.)
I'm generally not a big fan of web apps and "the cloud" as a substitute for native apps, but unless you host your own email server, you're relying on someone else to store your email anyway. Why not use the web interface? Email is simple enough that in my experience there really isn't a lot that a native app can do that a good webmail interface can't.
So Gates is wrong in his prognistications of the future, but he can rest assured that Windows 7 will continue to sell nonetheless.
Fixed that for you. Consider how many businesses are still on XP, today. Then consider that Windows 7 has extended support through 2020.
You (and I) are an edge case. You really need to think about the millions of people for whom Excel is the most complicated program. That's really 99% of the user base.
A majority? Maybe. 99%? No way. There are a lot more of these "edge cases" out there than you think. Anyone who does serious work in Photoshop won't be satisfied with a tablet, even if it does have a keyboard/mouse/monitor hooked up. Too slow, not enough RAM. Anyone who's at all serious about PC gaming won't be satisfied with a tablet; 3D graphics aren't nearly up to par. Anyone who does programming won't be satisfied with a tablet (hint: compile times will absolutely suck). And there are literally hundreds of other specific applications that need real PCs, each of which may have "only" thousands or tens of thousands of users, but that adds up.
There has to be a real desktop OS and real PC hardware. The "average" (lowest common denominator) home user may ditch their PC for a tablet, but people who do real work can't.
The problem isn't with predictable low-speed conditions, it's with drivers accustomed to cars which drive themselves under low-speed conditions who are suddenly thrown into an unpredictable situation.
But this kind of thing already happens. If you're driving a commute you've made 1000 times before, your brain is probably mostly on autopilot, your mind far away from the task at hand. If something strange happens, you can only hope you regain concentration quickly enough to avoid a crash.
This may be a stupid question, but isn't there a way to collect massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, compress the carbon into some sort of solid composite, and store it somewhere where it's land-locked (similar to how trees store carbon in wood)?
Wouldn't it be much easier just to grow a crapload of fast-growing trees (since as you noted, they already do this very thing) and then bury or sink whatever wood isn't needed for housing and furniture?
TJA only adds the ability to track the car ahead and steer with it.
What happens if the person ahead of you is drunk? What happens if they swerve off the road into a ditch?
Google's fully autonomous tech seems like a better bet than this.
I'm familiar with the basic concept of adaptive cruise control – automatically speeding up or slowing down to keep pace with other vehicles in the same lane – but I'm still unclear on how it works when multiple vehicles are using it, or how it reacts to out-of-range conditions. What happens if four people in a line are using ACC? How is it decided how fast they should go? What happens if you're using ACC and the person ahead of you slams down the gas? Will your car automatically cause you to keep pace with him and therefore break the speed limit? I'm sure they've thought of these things, but I'm not quite sure how they are being resolved.
Will this version of VLC support hardware acceleration for H.264 and other video formats on those devices where the hardware supports it?
If you run NoScript, essentially every web site in existence is broken by default and has to be whitelisted. If you get into the habit of auto-allowing everything, you're no safer than you would be without it installed, and if you don't, then you have to manually spend 5 minutes picking and choosing which scripts you have to enable for the page to work.
Sure there is: If a block of memory doesn't contain a null-terminator--as expected by the library functions--then the item in question isn't a c string. If you're saying C-strings don't exist because it's purely a standard-library concept, then we'll still have to disagree: The standard libraries make the language as much as the syntax and base-types, and this is even more true for established languages.
It depends on how you define a string. Sure, you can refer to a null-terminated character array in C as a string. But it doesn't contain the features you see in languages that have strings as a ground-up, first-class concept. You can't concatentate with the standard "+" operator (you have to use strcat or its equivalents) and more importantly there is no built-in protection against buffer overflow or other such issues. This is why I made my original statement: if you start thinking that C's null-terminated character arrays are "strings" in the high-level language sense of the term, you will get too complacent and get bitten by errors and security vulnerabilities.
Then there are deadly designs such as C-strings and even worse inconsistencies within the string functions (think null terminator).
There is no such thing as a string in C. There are standard library functions that let you pretend there is, but neither the language nor the compiler know the semantics of these. As far as the language itself is concerned, it's all just pointers to memory.
When you don't understand something, it's easy to say it has no purpose. It sounds just like kids in high school whining about algebra when they don't see how they will use it in "real" life.
Guess what? The vast majority of them never will use algebra in real life. Most jobs simply don't require it.