Microsoft wants C to die. No one else is cooperating with them on this. As a result, Windows developers are stuck with worse tools for C than developers on almost any other platform. (Yes, there's MinGW, but it's a real pain and does not support many newer Windows APIs at all.)
Currently, Microsoft Visual Studio does not even support the C99 standard. Unfortunately, it's unlikely that this standard will be widely adopted any time soon when Microsoft seems to be content to let standard C wither and die.
I for one don't understand why people get all emotionally attached to their old UI.
Muscle memory.
Once you've gotten used to using a specific UI for years on end, the commands are basically hard-coded into your body. Changing this takes a lot of time and effort and you will often find yourself automatically doing things the old way.
Everyone says this, but it's nonsense. Modern x86 chips have a RISC back-end; the x86 instruction set is really more of an API than anything else. And the amount of silicon needed to do the translation is comparatively tiny. (The oldest and least-used instructions can be shunted off into microcode.)
The Journal suggests that this wasn't anything more than a simple idea that came up at one of the regular meetings between senior executives from all three companies â" perhaps it could have even been just a casual talk â" but one wonders how Microsoft and Nokia executives think there is profit to be made by this take over.
One wonders? Really? It seems pretty obvious to me, and the next sentence spells it out:
Maybe RIM provides a good backdoor entry for MS into the enterprise space for its Windows Phone 7?
Bingo. Blackberry, as hard as they're failing in the consumer space, still owns large parts of the enterprise. And enterprise computing has always been MS's bread and butter. Buying RIM would let MS produce devices that are certified to work securely in a business environment (like the existing Blackberries) but have a UI that doesn't totally suck.
When I first read that the government wanted a scientific journal to bowdlerize their findings, I was naturally appalled. Then I read the article further and I was even more appalled – at the scientists.
Deliberately researching how to spread lethal bird flu to humans and make it more infectious? What the hell were they thinking? How could this possibly be a good idea? Even as a weapon, it's far too dangerous to ever use – once unleashed, it can and probably will spread back to whoever initiated it.
To quote Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
I know that WD announced the acquisition of Hitachi's HDD business back in March of this year. Has this been completed yet? Is Hitachi still using their own factories? Were those factories also in Thailand? The reason I'm wondering is because I'm concerned about quality on the new drives made from reclaimed flooded equipment – and the fact that both WD and Seagate are slashing warranties is definitely not a good sign. Hitachi has a reasonably good reputation and I've been using one of their 2TB drives for about six months with no issues (fingers crossed).
This legislation, combined with the recent domain seizures by ICS, highlights a weakness in the current DNS system: it's far too centralized and way too subject to censorship by governments. Rather than individual, browser-based workarounds, we need a completely new DNS system that is based on some form of distributed computing and lacks a central point of failure. Given the presence of existing protocols like BitTorrent, Tor, and Bitcoin, this should be possible to do.
As someone who has spent a lot of his life around pharmacists, I find this... unfortunate. If he did indeed run a website for banning oxy, that would explain that.
Most pharmacists are very professional and nonjudgmental.
And a lot of pharmacists are judgmental assholes. Many of them want the right to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control or the morning-after pill if their "conscience" forbids it. If you don't want to do your damn job, get out of the way for someone who will. (Can a PETA member work at a butcher shop and refuse to serve anyone since they are opposed to eating meat?) Personally, I don't see why we need every single prescription to be filled by a pharmacist. Most of the time all they're doing is putting pills into a bottle - why can't this be automated? The last time I needed a medicine to actually be compounded (Doxycycline - for my cat!) I had to go to about 5 different pharmacies before I found one who could do compounding. (They all had Doxycycline in pill form, though.) Why do we need expensive, degreed workers to do what amounts to standard retail work? Especially when they start to get ideas about how important they are and how everyone should bow down to their "conscience."
True, and a serious problem with politics in the US today. But what's really baffling is that the Web industry (Google/Facebook/etc), which stands to lose the most from this law, has far more money than the MAFIAA. Google alone could literally buy the entire recording industry without even feeling the pinch. Are the tech companies just really bad at lobbying? Why is the MAFIAA so well connected and able to punch so far above their weight?
Too bad that they're still not backporting IE9 to XP, which continues to have a massive market share, especially on the corporate desktop. This really annoys me as a web developer, since it means that until after 2014 (when XP support officially ends) we cannot use CSS3 features and SVG images and expect them to work for everyone.
*Yes, I know, graceful degradation. But management wants those nice rounded corners and drop-shadows to appear in IE8, not just Firefox and Chrome. Using css3pie helps a bit, but it's not bug-free, and in many cases special debugging still needs to be done for IE. And I don't know of any effective workaround to display SVGs in IE8 without making everyone download a plugin.
That is allowed?No one should email or bring flash drives to work.
Part of the problem is that you can't tell doctors what to do. Thanks to the AMA cartel, there are always fewer doctors than we need, so the result is that they hold the whip hand in employment relationships. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it gets annoying when they have that kind of privilege and no one else does.
IE8 and IE9 are fairly secure, especially if paired with Vista or Windows 7, which support protected mode. Now, if they're still using IE6 on XP, then they're screwed.
If I had 100k friends, that would still be only a tiny fraction of the number of votes needed for federal office of any kind.
Actually, if you look at the 2010 election results, 100K votes is just about the number you'd need to win a seat in the House of Representatives. Of course, this requires that all of the friends in question are in the same congressional district.
Virtually every video card, whether discrete or integrated, sold in the past 5 years supports full H.264 bitstream decoding in hardware. This means the hardware vendor already paid the license fee. Why can't Firefox just use this feature (accessible via DXVA on Windows, and I believe VA-API on Linux) to stream H.264 in HTML5?
I know many of the patents in H.264 are on specific equations used for the integer DCT equivalent, Hadamard transform, and so on. My question is, does a patent cover an equation that is not specifically written in the patent but is mathematically equivalent? If not, couldn't some of the patent encumbrances be worked around in this fashion?
Problem is, Windows' lockdown depends on Windows users being idiots.
That was true on Windows 9x (which more or less didn't have any such thing as security to begin with), but not on modern NT-based versions of Windows.
A previous employer of mine asked the I.T. department to lock down the internet. The solution to that problem was to install Firefox. Then I.T. got smart and also banned that.
Google "Software Restriction Policies." On all modern versions of Windows (including XP), you can set up a whitelist where only permissible programs are allowed to run. It then wouldn't be necessary to play whack-a-mole. Of course, if an employer decides to implement a draconian "no Internet" policy, then that employer is unlikely to get the best people, which explains why this IT department couldn't do anything right.
Multiple servers for remote desktop sessions. Have to have it. Receive secure documents all the time for markup and endorsements and Foxit can't even open it. Let's not even talk about 3rd party PDF support for electronic signatures from capture pads.
99% of users don't need any of that crap.
And let's face it, if Adobe had never incorporated these "features" into Acrobat in the first place, you wouldn't really be missing them either.
That is not actually true. Adobe Reader is a "conforming implementation" of the ISO 32000 PDF specification. As such, it must support features that your 8.4 MB reader cannot possibly see (such as the ability to pull from CRL's when encountering a digital signature).
And who was it that wrote the ISO 32000 specification in the first place?
From the article: "Philip Lieberman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Lieberman Software said: âoeOur survey shows that senior management at some of the largest organisations are still not taking the management of privileged access to their most sensitive information seriously. [... blah blah blah...] These organisations have to learn from the example of their peers who have taken this situation seriously and introduced Privileged Identity Management software to add a layer of automated security that dishonest staff cannot bypass."
From Lieberman Software's website (http://www.liebsoft.com/Products/): "Lieberman Software's privileged identity management and security management products help large organizations mitigate complex IT security, reporting and auditing operations."
Think there might be an ulterior motive here? Maybe we should ask how the survey was worded. Or how many different surveys they had to run before they got the results they wanted.
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Microsoft wants C to die. No one else is cooperating with them on this. As a result, Windows developers are stuck with worse tools for C than developers on almost any other platform. (Yes, there's MinGW, but it's a real pain and does not support many newer Windows APIs at all.)
Currently, Microsoft Visual Studio does not even support the C99 standard. Unfortunately, it's unlikely that this standard will be widely adopted any time soon when Microsoft seems to be content to let standard C wither and die.
I for one don't understand why people get all emotionally attached to their old UI.
Muscle memory.
Once you've gotten used to using a specific UI for years on end, the commands are basically hard-coded into your body. Changing this takes a lot of time and effort and you will often find yourself automatically doing things the old way.
Letting someone talk you into installing Safari also constitutes a Social Engineering exploit. So you might be right after all.
Apple attempts this "exploit" every time someone installs or updates iTunes for Windows.
Everyone says this, but it's nonsense. Modern x86 chips have a RISC back-end; the x86 instruction set is really more of an API than anything else. And the amount of silicon needed to do the translation is comparatively tiny. (The oldest and least-used instructions can be shunted off into microcode.)
The Journal suggests that this wasn't anything more than a simple idea that came up at one of the regular meetings between senior executives from all three companies â" perhaps it could have even been just a casual talk â" but one wonders how Microsoft and Nokia executives think there is profit to be made by this take over.
One wonders? Really? It seems pretty obvious to me, and the next sentence spells it out:
Maybe RIM provides a good backdoor entry for MS into the enterprise space for its Windows Phone 7?
Bingo. Blackberry, as hard as they're failing in the consumer space, still owns large parts of the enterprise. And enterprise computing has always been MS's bread and butter. Buying RIM would let MS produce devices that are certified to work securely in a business environment (like the existing Blackberries) but have a UI that doesn't totally suck.
When I first read that the government wanted a scientific journal to bowdlerize their findings, I was naturally appalled. Then I read the article further and I was even more appalled – at the scientists.
Deliberately researching how to spread lethal bird flu to humans and make it more infectious? What the hell were they thinking? How could this possibly be a good idea? Even as a weapon, it's far too dangerous to ever use – once unleashed, it can and probably will spread back to whoever initiated it.
To quote Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
I know that WD announced the acquisition of Hitachi's HDD business back in March of this year. Has this been completed yet? Is Hitachi still using their own factories? Were those factories also in Thailand? The reason I'm wondering is because I'm concerned about quality on the new drives made from reclaimed flooded equipment – and the fact that both WD and Seagate are slashing warranties is definitely not a good sign. Hitachi has a reasonably good reputation and I've been using one of their 2TB drives for about six months with no issues (fingers crossed).
Were the actual plants flooded? Or was it a lack of power(impassable roads, etc.) due to the flooding that caused the shutdown?
Based on the photo in this NYT article it certainly looks like the WD buildings themselves were flooded.
This legislation, combined with the recent domain seizures by ICS, highlights a weakness in the current DNS system: it's far too centralized and way too subject to censorship by governments. Rather than individual, browser-based workarounds, we need a completely new DNS system that is based on some form of distributed computing and lacks a central point of failure. Given the presence of existing protocols like BitTorrent, Tor, and Bitcoin, this should be possible to do.
As someone who has spent a lot of his life around pharmacists, I find this... unfortunate. If he did indeed run a website for banning oxy, that would explain that. Most pharmacists are very professional and nonjudgmental.
And a lot of pharmacists are judgmental assholes. Many of them want the right to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control or the morning-after pill if their "conscience" forbids it. If you don't want to do your damn job, get out of the way for someone who will. (Can a PETA member work at a butcher shop and refuse to serve anyone since they are opposed to eating meat?) Personally, I don't see why we need every single prescription to be filled by a pharmacist. Most of the time all they're doing is putting pills into a bottle - why can't this be automated? The last time I needed a medicine to actually be compounded (Doxycycline - for my cat!) I had to go to about 5 different pharmacies before I found one who could do compounding. (They all had Doxycycline in pill form, though.) Why do we need expensive, degreed workers to do what amounts to standard retail work? Especially when they start to get ideas about how important they are and how everyone should bow down to their "conscience."
Money is considered free speech in the US.
True, and a serious problem with politics in the US today. But what's really baffling is that the Web industry (Google/Facebook/etc), which stands to lose the most from this law, has far more money than the MAFIAA. Google alone could literally buy the entire recording industry without even feeling the pinch. Are the tech companies just really bad at lobbying? Why is the MAFIAA so well connected and able to punch so far above their weight?
I'm sure the MAFIAA has a VIP list of people who aren't to be threatened or sued, and that this list includes the family members of Reps and Senators.
Too bad that they're still not backporting IE9 to XP, which continues to have a massive market share, especially on the corporate desktop. This really annoys me as a web developer, since it means that until after 2014 (when XP support officially ends) we cannot use CSS3 features and SVG images and expect them to work for everyone.
*Yes, I know, graceful degradation. But management wants those nice rounded corners and drop-shadows to appear in IE8, not just Firefox and Chrome. Using css3pie helps a bit, but it's not bug-free, and in many cases special debugging still needs to be done for IE. And I don't know of any effective workaround to display SVGs in IE8 without making everyone download a plugin.
That is allowed?No one should email or bring flash drives to work.
Part of the problem is that you can't tell doctors what to do. Thanks to the AMA cartel, there are always fewer doctors than we need, so the result is that they hold the whip hand in employment relationships. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it gets annoying when they have that kind of privilege and no one else does.
Perhaps, but IE is a major security hole.
IE8 and IE9 are fairly secure, especially if paired with Vista or Windows 7, which support protected mode. Now, if they're still using IE6 on XP, then they're screwed.
If I had 100k friends, that would still be only a tiny fraction of the number of votes needed for federal office of any kind.
Actually, if you look at the 2010 election results, 100K votes is just about the number you'd need to win a seat in the House of Representatives. Of course, this requires that all of the friends in question are in the same congressional district.
Virtually every video card, whether discrete or integrated, sold in the past 5 years supports full H.264 bitstream decoding in hardware. This means the hardware vendor already paid the license fee. Why can't Firefox just use this feature (accessible via DXVA on Windows, and I believe VA-API on Linux) to stream H.264 in HTML5?
I know many of the patents in H.264 are on specific equations used for the integer DCT equivalent, Hadamard transform, and so on. My question is, does a patent cover an equation that is not specifically written in the patent but is mathematically equivalent? If not, couldn't some of the patent encumbrances be worked around in this fashion?
Problem is, Windows' lockdown depends on Windows users being idiots.
That was true on Windows 9x (which more or less didn't have any such thing as security to begin with), but not on modern NT-based versions of Windows.
A previous employer of mine asked the I.T. department to lock down the internet. The solution to that problem was to install Firefox. Then I.T. got smart and also banned that.
Google "Software Restriction Policies." On all modern versions of Windows (including XP), you can set up a whitelist where only permissible programs are allowed to run. It then wouldn't be necessary to play whack-a-mole. Of course, if an employer decides to implement a draconian "no Internet" policy, then that employer is unlikely to get the best people, which explains why this IT department couldn't do anything right.
Multiple servers for remote desktop sessions. Have to have it. Receive secure documents all the time for markup and endorsements and Foxit can't even open it. Let's not even talk about 3rd party PDF support for electronic signatures from capture pads.
99% of users don't need any of that crap.
And let's face it, if Adobe had never incorporated these "features" into Acrobat in the first place, you wouldn't really be missing them either.
That is not actually true. Adobe Reader is a "conforming implementation" of the ISO 32000 PDF specification. As such, it must support features that your 8.4 MB reader cannot possibly see (such as the ability to pull from CRL's when encountering a digital signature).
And who was it that wrote the ISO 32000 specification in the first place?
From the article: "Philip Lieberman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Lieberman Software said: âoeOur survey shows that senior management at some of the largest organisations are still not taking the management of privileged access to their most sensitive information seriously. [... blah blah blah ...] These organisations have to learn from the example of their peers who have taken this situation seriously and introduced Privileged Identity Management software to add a layer of automated security that dishonest staff cannot bypass."
From Lieberman Software's website (http://www.liebsoft.com/Products/): "Lieberman Software's privileged identity management and security management products help large organizations mitigate complex IT security, reporting and auditing operations."
Think there might be an ulterior motive here? Maybe we should ask how the survey was worded. Or how many different surveys they had to run before they got the results they wanted.
Ever since Deng's administration, China has been communist in name only.
The Bulldozer release showed AMD's commitment to low-end computers.
In what way? The Bulldozer architecture is transistor-heavy and uses lots of power, just the opposite of what you want in a low-end computer.
If anything shows AMD's commitment to low-end x86 computers, it's Bobcat.