Windows 2000, XP, and Vista are all Unicode, through and through. Microsoft's Uniscribe text pipline does not now nor has it ever been unable to handle Chinese characters.
The problem is that Safari on Windows doesn't use Microsoft's text pipleine. It uses its own rendering engine for text, which is why antialiased text in Safari looks so out of place in Windows. It's also why Safari seems unable to handle Unicode properly.
Now, if you don't have the right fonts installed, there's not a whole lot that Unicscribe can do. But if things render properly in IE or Firefox, that's not the problem.
I used to own a T-Mobile Sidekick. I dumped it because I couldn't get the software I wanted.
My Windows Mobile based T-Mobile Dash runs any third party app I want, and there are thousands to choose from. Tired of IE? There's Opera, Opera Mini, Deepfish, and more. Want maps? Google Maps or Live Local - it's your choice. Media? The free TCPMP plays everything from Vorbis to AAC to XVID to H.264. And don't forget Windows Media. GPS? TomTom is there. SSH? You bet.
To those who say that AJAX is enough, consider this - how is an AJAX app going to play music or interface with a Bluetooth GPS? And how is anything at all going to be usable over EDGE, which is marginally faster than 56k and has 600ms+ latency?
To those who say that an SDK is coming, consider this: Danger said the same thing when they launched the Sidekick. And, although the SDK eventually came, the device only ran signed code anyway. Distributing apps on the Sidekick means going through the PDM process, which takes months. Forget having a broad spectrum of apps.
There are over a million Sidekick users. There are maybe 200 apps for the device, 15 of which aren't games, and 5 of which are free.
Maybe the iPhone will be different. But Windows Mobile works today. That's a lot different from "maybe, in the future".
My Dash has the full web, it has Google Maps (and Live Local), it plays music and movies (even Vorbis and XVID), it has Bluetooth (with A2DP), WiFi, and a quadband EDGE phone. It has push IMAP, text messaging, HTML email, photo viewing, and a camera. It has font antialiasing, it multitasks, it has PIM functions, and more.
It also has things that the iPhone doesn't. It has MMS and IM (AIM/Google/Yahoo/MSN/Jabber). It syncs with Exchange. It uses standard miniUSB for sync and charge. It has a removable battery and upgradeable storage. It has a keyboard. It has 10 hours of talk time on a charge. It has real voice dialing - without training voice tags. And, of course, it can run third party apps. You can even write for it using C# and a version of the.NET framework. Or Java, which it has too. Or C++.
My Dash was $125 if you include the $25 2GB microSD card. There is nothing, literally nothing of substance that you can do on an iPhone but not on my device. The iPhone has a better interface, no doubt, but I'd much rather have more functionality and $375 in my pocket.
Oh, by the way - I typed this entire reply on my Dash. So much for the "watered down" internet.
Linux and OSX are inherently more secure due to their architecture design.
Myth. There's nothing inherently secure about Linux.
Why don't you see spyware for Linux? Most software is packaged by the distro, and the distro isn't going to accept crap. When you do "apt-get install pidgin", you know that you're not getting spyware. There is no such official centralized repository of software for Windows.
Why isn't there spyware for Mac OS X? Becuase you don't install software as root, which makes spyware harder to install and easier to remove.
The person that writes an in the wild virus for OSX will get a lot of notoriety
If you don't talk about them, they must not exist, right? Just like Linux boxes never get hacked (why do I see 10,000 failed SSH logins per day on a new Linux box?), Mac OS X has never had a vulnerability. It certainly hasn't had hundreds.
You have provided precisely ZERO facts that indicate that Mac OS or Linux are somehow better. Compared to Mac OS X, Vista has: - Signed kernel modules (drivers) - Signed executables for all system functions, all Microsoft products, and a large percentage of third-party executables - Automatic signature verification before executing downloaded files - Automatic signature verification before elevation - System file protection - Full disk encryption - Built-in antispyware - Security status notification (firewall/updates/antispyware/antivirus/browser settings) - Automatic network profiles (disable services / change firewall settings based on network) - Data execution protection
Now, arguably, Mac OS X doesn't need some of those things. But take signed executables. What's to stop me, as a normal user, from modifying "Disk Utility" in the "System Tools" folder? It's writeable under the default user account, at least in 10.4.8. Moreover, how is the user going to know that the utility has been modified?
I don't see the beef. There's nothing "inherent" about Mac OS X that makes it more secure. My Vista box is connected to the Internet right now, with only the default firewall enabled. The only "security" software I have installed is AVG antivirus.
My IP is 24.6.135.0. Go ahead. Hack my box. There's no NAT. There's no hardware fiewall. Just my PC connected straight to the cable modem. I haven't done anything special to the configuration. I haven't made any security changes at all, except for installing AVG.
But, hey, apparently I'm running "swiss cheese". It shouldn't even be a challenge.
OK. The desktop metaphor; you work with documents, files, folders. That isn't what happens on Windows. On windows, you deal with menus and applications then you have to go search for your documents and folders.
No, you're thinking of Mac OS X. Mac OS X is the operating system that puts different documents together in an "application" on the dock. Mac OS X is the operating system that lets you have applications open with no documents. Mac OS X is the operating system where the menubar is shared by an entire application.
Windows is consistently moving away from this metaphor. It's why Word opens multiple windows for multiple documents instead of using MDI. It's why Windows Explorer doesn't even have a name in its titlebar in Vista. It's why Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer have a similar interface. It's why there is search in the Start Menu. It's why there are special folders for videos, photos, documents, and music.
How does it "hide" your documents away, exactly? Is clicking Start -> Documents so hard?
Re:Why this will never be available ...
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Photosynth Demo
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· Score: 1
Well, there's a demo on Microsoft's website. I don't know if that counts as "commercial".
This is what I HATE most about FOSS
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GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
Stallman is an idiot.
He likes to talk about "freedom", but at the end of the day, what he wants is everyone to play by HIS rules.
Freedom means being able to do what you want with a particular piece of code. Stallman wants us to believe that restricting our rights somehow enhances our freedom.
Most of the restrictions that the GPL imposes benefit the community at the expense of individual freedoms. That's a tradeoff that we can choose to make - in fact, it is a tradeoff that I have chosen to make in multiple cases with my code.
But don't think for one second that the GPL is about "freedom". Public domain is about freedom. To a lesser extent, so is BSD. The GPL infringes on our freedoms for very specific resons, and it does so with good intent. But it infringes upon them nevertheless.
Outside a cubicle, there is no such person. Find me a push over like that with a PhD in any scientific field and I'll give you a nickel. "Superior", that cracks me up. These people use Word only when their computer Inferiors demand it. You don't really want to know what they think of journals.
We're not being elitist, are we?
You owe me a nickel. I know several people with various scientific PhDs (mostly in Physics and Chemistry) who use Word on a regular basis. They know and use TeX, too, but that doesn't mean that they don't use Word when it's the best tool for the job.
And, by the way, none of them would ever think of the people they work with as "computer Inferiors" because they don't want to screw with TeX files.
You know what? I'd rather that people not send me either. Don't send me ODF, don't send me DOC. Send me a damn PDF.
Where did you get the insane idea that Microsoft has the right to tell you what kinds of things you can do with your legally purchased property?
Where did you get the insane idea that the FSF has the right to tell you what kinds of things you can do with your legally purchased property?
Or, did you think that because you purchased RedHat, you're free to distribute closed-source binaries without source code?
Copyright restricts your rights. That is not inherently a bad thing. But it does mean that we need to be more careful about which rights copyright holders are allowed to restrict and for how long they are allowed to restrict them. But that doesn't mean that we should just let people do whatever they want because they purchased Windows.
You do not own any Microsoft products, nor have you ever. You probably own a license to use Microsoft products - it might be perpetual, or it might be time-limited. As long as Microsoft was up-front with the terms, there's very little that you can complain about. Some clauses in Microsoft's EULAs are invalid and unenforcable. This may be one of those situations. But neither you nor I can make such a claim without a better understanding of the law.
For almost half a century, the U.S. had a lead in space, almost solely from its efforts in the 1960's. On numerous fronts, this is no longer true. Indeed, it can no longer be true.
Your pointless rant notwithstanding, the leaders in satellite imaging are DigitalGlobe and Space Imaging, both US companies.
Perhaps NASA feels that the money is better spent elsewhre when private comapnies are already providing such a service?
Functional programming is no harder than procedural/OO programming.
That's difficult to say because true functional programming is so vastly different. We have so much time and energy invested in imperative algorithms that it's difficult to know whether or not functional methods are easier or more difficult to design.
In a sense, it's like saying that Hybrid Synergy Drive is simpler than a traditional transmission. It's true on a conceptual level, but Toyota hasn't tried to put HSD everywhere it has put a traditional transmission and therefore we may not fully understand the complexities of trying to extrapolate the results to the entire problem space.
So, I think the bottom line is, functional programming probably wouldn't be any harder if it existed in a world where it was dominant.
Remember, a large part of being an effective programmer is understanding how (and if) your problem has been solved before. It may be far from optimal, but CPUs are largely designed to look like they are executing sequential instructions. Multicore and multithreaded designs are changing that model, but it's not a change that happens overnight.
You are fucking joking ! (no I don't need a reply) Here in the UK cars are seldom above 2 litres, seldom above 4 cylinders, and are almost guaranteed to produce more power than your efforts - (ie. 120BHP/4 cyl/2 Lt) . and they are running unleaded and meet EU emission standards. Get off your high horse !
A typical V8 of that size in the US produces around 270HP.
And I gurantee that you have engines like that in the UK. They are used for the same kind of vehciles that they are used for in the US - light trucks. Your little 2 liter straight-4 is rediculously underpowered for even a moderate size pickup truck.
Now, whether or not people need light trucks to go to the foodstore is an entirely different matter. But most of the people who own pickup trucks actually use them. Whether you're hauling a big trailer on a ranch or taking lumber to a construction site, being able to move 1000kg is a very useful thing.
But then we aren't running AC and a massive stereo system
A/C and the alternator use a negligable amount of power in a modern vehicle.
we don't commute 500 miles a day
A very long commute in the US is 200 miles a day. A 500 mile commute would be at least 8 hours - you'd be commuting 100% of the time that you're not at work or asleep!
Mind you, I drive a 1.5 liter straight-4 Prius. I neither need nor desire a larger vehicle. Small vehicles are fine for many people, but pretending they are right for everyone is simply stupid. The only reason your vehicles are so much smaller and less powerful is because you pay so much more for gas.
OK, point taken. You're not a good assembler programmer.
While I am certainly no assembly-slinging master, I have programmed useful systems in assembly (M68000 and x86 - everything from basic math to I/O and memory management), I've written a compiler, and I know my way around the machine.
Ummm, aren't you missing some logic here? What is it about the fact that you can't code assembler well that makes you a better programmer than someone (whom, by the way, you know nothing about) who writes assembler extremely well?
It's not the fact that you can write assembly that makes you a poor coder. If anything, it makes you a better coder. It's the attitude that's the problem.
Look at yourself. You're jealous because someone described his father as a "70 year old x86 assembler hack" and here you're doing everything but applying for a job. You're obviously very, very unhappy with your life.
Fuck you. I'm a 2nd year university student working for Aglient on their PLC system - I already HAVE a job (two actually).
You want to piss on me for what I say? Fine. But don't piss on my reputation or standing because you know nothing of either.
why can't be just deal with the good old food we're used to and know isn't going to do anything bizarre to our bodies
You mean like alcohol, saturated fats, or tobacco?
Or, maybe you'd rather be hurt by mold or bacteria than by the preservatives that prevent them?
When you've got beverages being made in ways to minimise only cost and maximise only the positive reaction with our taste buds then you're going to get stuff like this.
You mean like stuff that one scientist claims is dangerous and is rightfully being investigated?
The fact is, we're living longer and healthier with all of this "processed crap" than we ever did with "good old food". We should take health issues seriously, and Sodium Benzoate needs to be further tested.
So, yeah, go eat your organic non-GMO veggies and "free range" chicken. But not all of us can afford to pay 5x as much for our food. This is what gets me about GMO opponents - they fail to understand that there is a significant proportion of the world that would kill for ANY semblence of nutrition. It's GMO crops and "factory farms" that are feeding most the world.
We live in a world of risks. Sometimes our chemistry screws up and we end up killing some people. But we rarely kill very many. We live in a world of chemicals, some of which are safe, some of which we know are harmful, and some of which we think are safe but are actually (somewhat) harmful. The vast majority are in either of the first two categories. Some are in the third. We will find more as time goes on. That's a good thing.
So, don't look at this discovery as, "OMG we need to throw out 50 years of food science". Look at it as, "well, we screwed up, but at least we know now".
If you want to go after anything, attack our high-fat high-calorie low-excersize lifestyle.
Google can quickly change to accomodate any revolutionary new idea in the computer industry. Their business model is not tied to how computers work. If somebody found a new way to make computers and systems that made the old way obsolete, Google would just switch to the new way.
Google isn't about software. They aren't about search, they aren't about mail, they aren't about videos, maps, blogs, or any of the numerous client-oriented services they offer.
Google is an advertising company. Period. Nothing else they have ever done has ever made a significant amount of money (at least not significant from the standpoint of a $150 billion company). Their only true product is AdWords.
EVERYTHING else about Google is just a way to get people to click on their ads. But that's OK, because Google makes money every time someone clicks a Google ad. And they make a LOT of money - as much as $30 for the more lucrative terms and $1-$10 for everything else. And they have a LOT of clicks.
Unfortunately, google is tied to the way that online advertising works. Their advantage comes from the fact that they have technology to match the right advertiser to the right search or AdSense page.
I use AdSense. I make a LOT of money considering how little traffic my site gets. That's because Google's ads are incredibly well targeted.
If, however, someone else finds a different way to do online advertising, Google could be in big trouble. What if someone found a better way to match advertisers to sites or searches? What if there were a more lucrative program than AdSense? What if someone integrated conversion rates into advertising?
The online advertising market is new. It sucked before Google. Now it doesn't. But that doesn't mean that it's as good as it's going to get.
Google needs to focus less on buying more eyeballs and more on improving their advertising technology. AdSense is good, but it's not excellent. There are so many places on my site where I could be making money, and where AdSense is just plain useless. One of my pages has a CTR of around 5%, but all of the others were around 0.2%. I eventually pulled AdSense from every page except the one that drove clicks.
I'm waiting for someone to deliver revenue on the rest of my site. Google had better be working to make it them.
Likeiwse, MS is starting downwards as well. Apple and Linux are finally eating into their desktop. To really see it, step out of America.
To see how wrong you are, step into any enterprise environment. At my organization, we're running more Windows now than we have ever run. Windows has changed from a joke in the server space to the standard server platform we run everything on. 15 years ago, you couldn't have deployed anything but UNIX. Today, to deploy anything but Windows means that you support it alone.
Linux has made some big wins. So has OOo. I don't know what the hell you're talking about with Google Office (no real IT department takes stuff like that seriously, it's far too dangerous to have company docs residing on 3rd-party servers).
But, guess what? MS has pretty much the highest market share they have ever had in every segment they operate in. Windows Mobile sales are up 35% from a year ago, and it's finally starting to be a threat to BlackBerry. There are still more XBOX 360s than Wii's and PS3s combined. SQL Server continues to eat away at Oracle's market share, particularly as companies like SAP grow increasingly wary of Oracle's acquisitions of their competitors.
There are more PCs out there running Windows Vista than there are Macs running Mac OS X.
And, guess what? Nobody cares that MSIE only has 80% marketshare. Microsoft ignored the product for FIVE YEARS. And it's still at 80%! Phoenix (Firefox) didn't even exist five years ago!
So, yeah. Microsoft is making record profits on record revenue and their platforms are either near market saturation or growing strongly. Sounds like a company in decline to me.
Apple's notebooks are currently in 5th place, behind HP, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo, and Gateway.
Apple's notebooks constantly lag behind in feature set and performance. Consider:
PC notebooks from HP, Dell, Sony, and Lenovo have been available with integrated WWAN (CDMA 1xEV-DO or UMTS/EDGE) for over a year now
PC notebooks commonly have fingerprint readers, smartcard readers, and other authentication methods
Most PC notebooks have media card readers - at least SD and possibly other formats (my notebook has SD and Memory Stick)
Newer PC notebooks are available with hardware encryption on their hard drives
Intel TurboCache. Increases disk performance with 1GB of flash memory right on the PCIe bus
Auxiliary displays (SideShow)
TrackPoint (eraser mouse)
Docking stations
Integrated Wacom digitizer (tablet PC)
Whether or not you think these features are useful, many, many people do. I use the media reader on my notebook all the time, and I don't have to bring around a USB or ExpressCard reader. I dock my other (business) laptop daily at work, hooking me up to power, USB (keyboard/mouse), DVI, audio (headphones), and the network in one step.
Not to mention the features that Apple now has, but was just late with. Sudden motion sensor (ThinkPad had it first). Camera (Sony notebooks, HP notebooks, my cheap 2-year-old generic Compal notebook). Multi-finger scroll (Alps drivers circa 1998). Lighted keyboard (ThinkLight). Remote control (Dell/HP notebooks circa 2003).
The list goes on. I'm not saying that Apple doesn't innovate. MagSafe is a very cool idea (although there doesn't seem to be sufficient stress relief on the cable). But there is plenty of innovation in the notebook space, coming from many different companies in many different parts of the world.
You know what? The ThinkPad T61 looks like crap compared to the 15" MacBook Pro. But it's faster (800MHz FSB, Turbo cache, NVIDIA Quadro graphics), beefier (magnesium protection for the screen, shock mounted HDD cage), has better battery life (5 hours with the 7-cell battery), lighter (about half a pound lighter with the 7-cell), cooler and quieter, smaller, easier to secure (smartcard reader / fingerprint scanner, full drive encryption), and much, much cheaper (2.2GHz/1GB/DVD-RW/120GB/WSXGA+/NVIDIA/11n/Bluetoo th/7-cell = $1440, $560 cheaper than the base MacBook pro).
NPR covered some of the human aspects of the gold farming story a while ago. Audio Link for your listening pleasure.
12 hours a day playing Warcraft, getting beaten up by higher level players. It's sounds like a pretty ugly life.
Compared to subsistance level agriculture, coal mining, or a million other jobs, it's pretty damned cushy. That's why people do it.
I don't go and kill farmers. I understand why they are there.
That said, I will never buy gold for WoW. I earn enough money to buy the 5000g I would need for an epic flying mount in about 8 hours. It would take at least 50 hours for me to earn that gold in game. But, you know what? At the end of the 50 hours, the epic flying mount would mean something to me. It's a bit like using a walkthrough when playing Zelda - you'll beat the game faster, but it's a hollow victory.
Re:The Relief and Visceral Joy of a Hard Drive Cra
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Is Email 'Bankrupt'?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Why do people keep all that old stuff? Email to me is pretty much throw away conversations 99% of the time. I guess some people are packrats with physical stuff, others with electronic stuff.
Because you'll never know when you'll need it. Perhaps I'll need that CD key from 2 years ago. Or the phone number of the client who I forgot to add to my contacts. Or perhaps I want to know when I started a project, got an account, or switched jobs. Perhaps I'll wnat that paper I wrote two years ago.
There are hundreds of reasons that I can think of why I might need some email from two years ago. But, mostly, it's the reasons I can't think of.
It costs me nothing to keep my email permanently. It's on the server, it's someone else's problem.
They could delay the inevitable by reallocating existing IPv4 space more efficiently. Many old/historical allocations are inefficient. Apple Computer, for example, has all of the 17.x.x.x space, comprising 256^3 = more than 16 million addresses, which is just plain absurd in this day and age.
Don't complain about Apple. HP has all of 15.x.x.x and all of 16.x.x.x, because they purchased DEC who also had a class-A.
Interestingly, HP is the only company that effectively has a/7 because their block is contiguous.
Free Speech does not give you the right to violate station policy
Sure it does. Now, you may be disciplined or fired for doing so, but it is not illegal.
nor does it give you the right to avoid social norms or insult groups of people with
It absolutely, positively does. That's the entire point of Free Speech. It's easy to let people say what they want when you agree with what they are saying. It is much harder to do so when they say something that is against social norms. Freedom of speech means that people say things that you don't like.
It is about time that people are held accountable for what they say, instead of getting away with murder.
We are held accountable for what we say. If I tell my boss that he sucks, I'll be fired. If I am racist, there's a pretty good chance that I will be damaged - look at what happens to politicians or celebrities when they make a racist remark.
But it's not the government's job to decide what our norms are. It's not the government's job to decide whether what we say is OK or not. Free speech means that you have the right to say what you want - and the responsibility to accept the consequences.
This isn't a free speech issue. It is a corporation censoring one of its employees - something that corporations do all the time. I can't say bad things about my employer without being fired.
Unfortunately, XM promised its subscribers that it wouldn't censor. You can't say "uncut and uncensored" and then turn around and tell your employees what they can and cannot say on the air. XM is trying to run an edgy, over-the-top show. They just aren't willing to take the heat that comes with that.
I think that this idea could really work, but these kids need to learn what I learned in my current job as a web programmer - to look like a professional, you need to rely on other professionals.
These kids have a concept. Now they need people. Hand-drawn art and crude bitmap editing may cut it when you're making a game for your friends, but if you want to look professional, you need someone who knows what they are doing. You need someone who knows how to use a vector graphics program (probably Adobe Illustrator), you need someone who knows how to use a page layout program, and you need someone with artistic talent. In other words, you need a graphic designer.
I don't go it alone when I'm working on a major site. I have a graphic designer creating compositions and producing the final images for the site. I have a layout designer who takes the graphic designer's vision and converts it to CSS. I have a copyeditor to make sure that the text is clear and concise. I have a (white hat) SEO professional analyzing link structure, page layout, and code structure, to ensure that the site is properly indexed. And, in some cases, I have a human factors professional doing user testing to ensure that users will be able to find what they are looking for.
Now, I know quite a bit about graphic design. I can use Illustrator and Photoshop. I also know plenty about CSS and XHTML - I can hack together a website just fine. I'm decently good at copyediting, I know the basics of SEO, and I have an eye for UI design as well. But I'm not as good at any of those things as the people I rely on. They are more effective, more efficent, and make fewer mistakes.
They make me look professional. I make them look professional.
When you're 13 (that was only 6 years ago for me!), the desire is to do everything yourself. But that's the last thing you want to do. Maybe you've picked up a copy of Photoshop. Maybe you can scan photos into your PC and make graphics. What you lack, however, is the experience that's necessary to look professional.
That's OK if you're starting a business. Most of our clients have no idea how to run a website. That's fine, because that's not what their business is. If you're big, you can have dedicated professionals who will work on your website. If you aren't, there are companies like mine who will do it for you. We can make you look as good as the big guys because we are as good as the big guys. This is our whole business - just like the professionals who work for lare companies, we practice our trade every day.
So, my advice to these kids would be - hire people who know what they are doing. At a minimum, they are going to need the services of a copyeditor (to ensure that card and instructional text is clear, concise, and free of grammatical and spelling errors), a graphic designer (to prepare print-ready, professional graphics for the cards), and an accountant (business = accounting and taxes, two things that 13-year-olds tend not to be very good at).
Find people you can trust. Find people you can count on. Their professionalism will make you look professional.
To be honest, I threw that line in because I know Slashdot editors like bullshit anti-MS hypothetical rhetoric. Apparently I was right.
I admit that I pander to the community. Wouldn't that make me a pro?
Oddly enough, both articles I've gotten on Slashdot have to do with Microsoft's new file formats. I didn't want it to turn out that way, it just happened.
You should know better than to equate hacking skill with programming skill.
There are people who can run circles around me with assembly. I couldn't even begin to understand 1/2 the entries in the IOCCC, let alone write one.
But I still write better code than most of those people. Good code is code that is well documented, easy to understand, easy to verify, and easy to maintain.
I'm sure your father can do amazing things with code. But he doesn't sound like the kind of person I would ever hire to work on a real system.
So, don't feel bad. You may not be an "advanced" programmer compared to him, but I bet you write code that is far more consistent, far better documented, and, ultimately, far more useful.
But mostly because they don't know how generating capacity works... we need enough generators online for peak load, regardless of whether your broadband router is turned off or not. As long as all those generators are running to meet peak load, you're burning the exact same amount of fuel and releasing the exact same amount of carbon.
Perhaps you don't understand how generating capacity works. Yes, there is a certain amount of "baseload" power that operates at a reasonably constant power level (Coal and Nuclear fit into this category, because they cannot change power output quickly). However, there are also a significant number of variable output plants (most natural gas plants are in this category) which adjust their output to meet actual demand.
Moreover, our energy usage is growing. Conservation (e.g. efficent lighting, HVAC, and other technologies) can slow down or perhaps even reverse this trend - which means we need to build fewer (or no) new plants and may even be able to shut down some of the worst existing plants.
But as long as you're asking me to unplug my router which won't make a whit of difference except to annoy me, then it's just not going to happen.
Agreed. People who complain about a couple of watts need to get a clue. Running a 1W power brick for an entire year uses 31.5MJ. You probably used more energy driving to work today, even if you drive a hybrid (a gallon of gas has about 132MJ of energy).
Turn on a single 60W light bulb for 30 minutes and you've used more energy than that hypothetical 1W load will use all day.
I am so fucking tired about hearing how Vista is a failure on Slashdot. Vista is here, it's here to stay, and most of us will probably be running it at home or at work in 3 years.
It gets old. Really old. It doesn't matter how much you hate the product. I don't fucking care what you think, I use the product on multiple systems every day and it gets the job done.
Don't like Vista? Use Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, XP, 2000, 98, or whatever else you want. But the product has been in development for over 5 years and it has been on the market for over three months. Stop bitching.
Windows Me failed because it used the crappy old Windows 98 kernel and was released at the same time as the much more reliable Windows 2000. It was on the market for a total of 13 months before XP was released. You may think Me was a flop, but it wasn't by any relaistic metric. Me was a stopgap product designed to fill the gap between 98 and XP, and Microsoft made plenty of money on what was essentially a warmed-over Windows 98.
There's no OS that's coming out in 10 months to supplant Vista. There's no new "business" OS that it's competing against. It's only real competititon is Windows XP, and XP sales to OEMs end at the end of 2007. Like it or not, if you want to buy a PC with Windows, soon it will only be available with Vista.
Trash the numbers all you want. But when was the last time that another software company sold 40 million copies of ANYTHING in 3 months?
Slashdot Mirror
Windows 2000, XP, and Vista are all Unicode, through and through. Microsoft's Uniscribe text pipline does not now nor has it ever been unable to handle Chinese characters.
The problem is that Safari on Windows doesn't use Microsoft's text pipleine. It uses its own rendering engine for text, which is why antialiased text in Safari looks so out of place in Windows. It's also why Safari seems unable to handle Unicode properly.
Now, if you don't have the right fonts installed, there's not a whole lot that Unicscribe can do. But if things render properly in IE or Firefox, that's not the problem.
No SDK rules out the iPhone for me.
.NET framework. Or Java, which it has too. Or C++.
I used to own a T-Mobile Sidekick. I dumped it because I couldn't get the software I wanted.
My Windows Mobile based T-Mobile Dash runs any third party app I want, and there are thousands to choose from. Tired of IE? There's Opera, Opera Mini, Deepfish, and more. Want maps? Google Maps or Live Local - it's your choice. Media? The free TCPMP plays everything from Vorbis to AAC to XVID to H.264. And don't forget Windows Media. GPS? TomTom is there. SSH? You bet.
To those who say that AJAX is enough, consider this - how is an AJAX app going to play music or interface with a Bluetooth GPS? And how is anything at all going to be usable over EDGE, which is marginally faster than 56k and has 600ms+ latency?
To those who say that an SDK is coming, consider this: Danger said the same thing when they launched the Sidekick. And, although the SDK eventually came, the device only ran signed code anyway. Distributing apps on the Sidekick means going through the PDM process, which takes months. Forget having a broad spectrum of apps.
There are over a million Sidekick users. There are maybe 200 apps for the device, 15 of which aren't games, and 5 of which are free.
Maybe the iPhone will be different. But Windows Mobile works today. That's a lot different from "maybe, in the future".
My Dash has the full web, it has Google Maps (and Live Local), it plays music and movies (even Vorbis and XVID), it has Bluetooth (with A2DP), WiFi, and a quadband EDGE phone. It has push IMAP, text messaging, HTML email, photo viewing, and a camera. It has font antialiasing, it multitasks, it has PIM functions, and more.
It also has things that the iPhone doesn't. It has MMS and IM (AIM/Google/Yahoo/MSN/Jabber). It syncs with Exchange. It uses standard miniUSB for sync and charge. It has a removable battery and upgradeable storage. It has a keyboard. It has 10 hours of talk time on a charge. It has real voice dialing - without training voice tags. And, of course, it can run third party apps. You can even write for it using C# and a version of the
My Dash was $125 if you include the $25 2GB microSD card. There is nothing, literally nothing of substance that you can do on an iPhone but not on my device. The iPhone has a better interface, no doubt, but I'd much rather have more functionality and $375 in my pocket.
Oh, by the way - I typed this entire reply on my Dash. So much for the "watered down" internet.
Myth. There's nothing inherently secure about Linux.
Why don't you see spyware for Linux? Most software is packaged by the distro, and the distro isn't going to accept crap. When you do "apt-get install pidgin", you know that you're not getting spyware. There is no such official centralized repository of software for Windows.
Why isn't there spyware for Mac OS X? Becuase you don't install software as root, which makes spyware harder to install and easier to remove.
If you don't talk about them, they must not exist, right? Just like Linux boxes never get hacked (why do I see 10,000 failed SSH logins per day on a new Linux box?), Mac OS X has never had a vulnerability. It certainly hasn't had hundreds.
You have provided precisely ZERO facts that indicate that Mac OS or Linux are somehow better. Compared to Mac OS X, Vista has:
- Signed kernel modules (drivers)
- Signed executables for all system functions, all Microsoft products, and a large percentage of third-party executables
- Automatic signature verification before executing downloaded files
- Automatic signature verification before elevation
- System file protection
- Full disk encryption
- Built-in antispyware
- Security status notification (firewall/updates/antispyware/antivirus/browser settings)
- Automatic network profiles (disable services / change firewall settings based on network)
- Data execution protection
Now, arguably, Mac OS X doesn't need some of those things. But take signed executables. What's to stop me, as a normal user, from modifying "Disk Utility" in the "System Tools" folder? It's writeable under the default user account, at least in 10.4.8. Moreover, how is the user going to know that the utility has been modified?
I don't see the beef. There's nothing "inherent" about Mac OS X that makes it more secure. My Vista box is connected to the Internet right now, with only the default firewall enabled. The only "security" software I have installed is AVG antivirus.
My IP is 24.6.135.0. Go ahead. Hack my box. There's no NAT. There's no hardware fiewall. Just my PC connected straight to the cable modem. I haven't done anything special to the configuration. I haven't made any security changes at all, except for installing AVG.
But, hey, apparently I'm running "swiss cheese". It shouldn't even be a challenge.
No, you're thinking of Mac OS X. Mac OS X is the operating system that puts different documents together in an "application" on the dock. Mac OS X is the operating system that lets you have applications open with no documents. Mac OS X is the operating system where the menubar is shared by an entire application.
Windows is consistently moving away from this metaphor. It's why Word opens multiple windows for multiple documents instead of using MDI. It's why Windows Explorer doesn't even have a name in its titlebar in Vista. It's why Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer have a similar interface. It's why there is search in the Start Menu. It's why there are special folders for videos, photos, documents, and music.
How does it "hide" your documents away, exactly? Is clicking Start -> Documents so hard?
Well, there's a demo on Microsoft's website. I don't know if that counts as "commercial".
Stallman is an idiot.
He likes to talk about "freedom", but at the end of the day, what he wants is everyone to play by HIS rules.
Freedom means being able to do what you want with a particular piece of code. Stallman wants us to believe that restricting our rights somehow enhances our freedom.
Most of the restrictions that the GPL imposes benefit the community at the expense of individual freedoms. That's a tradeoff that we can choose to make - in fact, it is a tradeoff that I have chosen to make in multiple cases with my code.
But don't think for one second that the GPL is about "freedom". Public domain is about freedom. To a lesser extent, so is BSD. The GPL infringes on our freedoms for very specific resons, and it does so with good intent. But it infringes upon them nevertheless.
We're not being elitist, are we?
You owe me a nickel. I know several people with various scientific PhDs (mostly in Physics and Chemistry) who use Word on a regular basis. They know and use TeX, too, but that doesn't mean that they don't use Word when it's the best tool for the job.
And, by the way, none of them would ever think of the people they work with as "computer Inferiors" because they don't want to screw with TeX files.
You know what? I'd rather that people not send me either. Don't send me ODF, don't send me DOC. Send me a damn PDF.
Where did you get the insane idea that the FSF has the right to tell you what kinds of things you can do with your legally purchased property?
Or, did you think that because you purchased RedHat, you're free to distribute closed-source binaries without source code?
Copyright restricts your rights. That is not inherently a bad thing. But it does mean that we need to be more careful about which rights copyright holders are allowed to restrict and for how long they are allowed to restrict them. But that doesn't mean that we should just let people do whatever they want because they purchased Windows.
You do not own any Microsoft products, nor have you ever. You probably own a license to use Microsoft products - it might be perpetual, or it might be time-limited. As long as Microsoft was up-front with the terms, there's very little that you can complain about. Some clauses in Microsoft's EULAs are invalid and unenforcable. This may be one of those situations. But neither you nor I can make such a claim without a better understanding of the law.
Your pointless rant notwithstanding, the leaders in satellite imaging are DigitalGlobe and Space Imaging, both US companies.
Perhaps NASA feels that the money is better spent elsewhre when private comapnies are already providing such a service?
That's difficult to say because true functional programming is so vastly different. We have so much time and energy invested in imperative algorithms that it's difficult to know whether or not functional methods are easier or more difficult to design.
In a sense, it's like saying that Hybrid Synergy Drive is simpler than a traditional transmission. It's true on a conceptual level, but Toyota hasn't tried to put HSD everywhere it has put a traditional transmission and therefore we may not fully understand the complexities of trying to extrapolate the results to the entire problem space.
So, I think the bottom line is, functional programming probably wouldn't be any harder if it existed in a world where it was dominant.
Remember, a large part of being an effective programmer is understanding how (and if) your problem has been solved before. It may be far from optimal, but CPUs are largely designed to look like they are executing sequential instructions. Multicore and multithreaded designs are changing that model, but it's not a change that happens overnight.
A typical V8 of that size in the US produces around 270HP.
And I gurantee that you have engines like that in the UK. They are used for the same kind of vehciles that they are used for in the US - light trucks. Your little 2 liter straight-4 is rediculously underpowered for even a moderate size pickup truck.
Now, whether or not people need light trucks to go to the foodstore is an entirely different matter. But most of the people who own pickup trucks actually use them. Whether you're hauling a big trailer on a ranch or taking lumber to a construction site, being able to move 1000kg is a very useful thing.
A/C and the alternator use a negligable amount of power in a modern vehicle.
A very long commute in the US is 200 miles a day. A 500 mile commute would be at least 8 hours - you'd be commuting 100% of the time that you're not at work or asleep!
Mind you, I drive a 1.5 liter straight-4 Prius. I neither need nor desire a larger vehicle. Small vehicles are fine for many people, but pretending they are right for everyone is simply stupid. The only reason your vehicles are so much smaller and less powerful is because you pay so much more for gas.
While I am certainly no assembly-slinging master, I have programmed useful systems in assembly (M68000 and x86 - everything from basic math to I/O and memory management), I've written a compiler, and I know my way around the machine.
It's not the fact that you can write assembly that makes you a poor coder. If anything, it makes you a better coder. It's the attitude that's the problem.
Fuck you. I'm a 2nd year university student working for Aglient on their PLC system - I already HAVE a job (two actually).
You want to piss on me for what I say? Fine. But don't piss on my reputation or standing because you know nothing of either.
You mean like alcohol, saturated fats, or tobacco?
Or, maybe you'd rather be hurt by mold or bacteria than by the preservatives that prevent them?
You mean like stuff that one scientist claims is dangerous and is rightfully being investigated?
The fact is, we're living longer and healthier with all of this "processed crap" than we ever did with "good old food". We should take health issues seriously, and Sodium Benzoate needs to be further tested.
So, yeah, go eat your organic non-GMO veggies and "free range" chicken. But not all of us can afford to pay 5x as much for our food. This is what gets me about GMO opponents - they fail to understand that there is a significant proportion of the world that would kill for ANY semblence of nutrition. It's GMO crops and "factory farms" that are feeding most the world.
We live in a world of risks. Sometimes our chemistry screws up and we end up killing some people. But we rarely kill very many. We live in a world of chemicals, some of which are safe, some of which we know are harmful, and some of which we think are safe but are actually (somewhat) harmful. The vast majority are in either of the first two categories. Some are in the third. We will find more as time goes on. That's a good thing.
So, don't look at this discovery as, "OMG we need to throw out 50 years of food science". Look at it as, "well, we screwed up, but at least we know now".
If you want to go after anything, attack our high-fat high-calorie low-excersize lifestyle.
Google isn't about software. They aren't about search, they aren't about mail, they aren't about videos, maps, blogs, or any of the numerous client-oriented services they offer.
Google is an advertising company. Period. Nothing else they have ever done has ever made a significant amount of money (at least not significant from the standpoint of a $150 billion company). Their only true product is AdWords.
EVERYTHING else about Google is just a way to get people to click on their ads. But that's OK, because Google makes money every time someone clicks a Google ad. And they make a LOT of money - as much as $30 for the more lucrative terms and $1-$10 for everything else. And they have a LOT of clicks.
Unfortunately, google is tied to the way that online advertising works. Their advantage comes from the fact that they have technology to match the right advertiser to the right search or AdSense page.
I use AdSense. I make a LOT of money considering how little traffic my site gets. That's because Google's ads are incredibly well targeted.
If, however, someone else finds a different way to do online advertising, Google could be in big trouble. What if someone found a better way to match advertisers to sites or searches? What if there were a more lucrative program than AdSense? What if someone integrated conversion rates into advertising?
The online advertising market is new. It sucked before Google. Now it doesn't. But that doesn't mean that it's as good as it's going to get.
Google needs to focus less on buying more eyeballs and more on improving their advertising technology. AdSense is good, but it's not excellent. There are so many places on my site where I could be making money, and where AdSense is just plain useless. One of my pages has a CTR of around 5%, but all of the others were around 0.2%. I eventually pulled AdSense from every page except the one that drove clicks.
I'm waiting for someone to deliver revenue on the rest of my site. Google had better be working to make it them.
To see how wrong you are, step into any enterprise environment. At my organization, we're running more Windows now than we have ever run. Windows has changed from a joke in the server space to the standard server platform we run everything on. 15 years ago, you couldn't have deployed anything but UNIX. Today, to deploy anything but Windows means that you support it alone.
Linux has made some big wins. So has OOo. I don't know what the hell you're talking about with Google Office (no real IT department takes stuff like that seriously, it's far too dangerous to have company docs residing on 3rd-party servers).
But, guess what? MS has pretty much the highest market share they have ever had in every segment they operate in. Windows Mobile sales are up 35% from a year ago, and it's finally starting to be a threat to BlackBerry. There are still more XBOX 360s than Wii's and PS3s combined. SQL Server continues to eat away at Oracle's market share, particularly as companies like SAP grow increasingly wary of Oracle's acquisitions of their competitors.
There are more PCs out there running Windows Vista than there are Macs running Mac OS X.
And, guess what? Nobody cares that MSIE only has 80% marketshare. Microsoft ignored the product for FIVE YEARS. And it's still at 80%! Phoenix (Firefox) didn't even exist five years ago!
So, yeah. Microsoft is making record profits on record revenue and their platforms are either near market saturation or growing strongly. Sounds like a company in decline to me.
Apple's notebooks are currently in 5th place, behind HP, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo, and Gateway.
Apple's notebooks constantly lag behind in feature set and performance. Consider:
Whether or not you think these features are useful, many, many people do. I use the media reader on my notebook all the time, and I don't have to bring around a USB or ExpressCard reader. I dock my other (business) laptop daily at work, hooking me up to power, USB (keyboard/mouse), DVI, audio (headphones), and the network in one step.
Not to mention the features that Apple now has, but was just late with. Sudden motion sensor (ThinkPad had it first). Camera (Sony notebooks, HP notebooks, my cheap 2-year-old generic Compal notebook). Multi-finger scroll (Alps drivers circa 1998). Lighted keyboard (ThinkLight). Remote control (Dell/HP notebooks circa 2003).
The list goes on. I'm not saying that Apple doesn't innovate. MagSafe is a very cool idea (although there doesn't seem to be sufficient stress relief on the cable). But there is plenty of innovation in the notebook space, coming from many different companies in many different parts of the world.
You know what? The ThinkPad T61 looks like crap compared to the 15" MacBook Pro. But it's faster (800MHz FSB, Turbo cache, NVIDIA Quadro graphics), beefier (magnesium protection for the screen, shock mounted HDD cage), has better battery life (5 hours with the 7-cell battery), lighter (about half a pound lighter with the 7-cell), cooler and quieter, smaller, easier to secure (smartcard reader / fingerprint scanner, full drive encryption), and much, much cheaper (2.2GHz/1GB/DVD-RW/120GB/WSXGA+/NVIDIA/11n/Blueto
Winning indeed.
Compared to subsistance level agriculture, coal mining, or a million other jobs, it's pretty damned cushy. That's why people do it.
I don't go and kill farmers. I understand why they are there.
That said, I will never buy gold for WoW. I earn enough money to buy the 5000g I would need for an epic flying mount in about 8 hours. It would take at least 50 hours for me to earn that gold in game. But, you know what? At the end of the 50 hours, the epic flying mount would mean something to me. It's a bit like using a walkthrough when playing Zelda - you'll beat the game faster, but it's a hollow victory.
Because you'll never know when you'll need it. Perhaps I'll need that CD key from 2 years ago. Or the phone number of the client who I forgot to add to my contacts. Or perhaps I want to know when I started a project, got an account, or switched jobs. Perhaps I'll wnat that paper I wrote two years ago.
There are hundreds of reasons that I can think of why I might need some email from two years ago. But, mostly, it's the reasons I can't think of.
It costs me nothing to keep my email permanently. It's on the server, it's someone else's problem.
Don't complain about Apple. HP has all of 15.x.x.x and all of 16.x.x.x, because they purchased DEC who also had a class-A.
Interestingly, HP is the only company that effectively has a
Sure it does. Now, you may be disciplined or fired for doing so, but it is not illegal.
It absolutely, positively does. That's the entire point of Free Speech. It's easy to let people say what they want when you agree with what they are saying. It is much harder to do so when they say something that is against social norms. Freedom of speech means that people say things that you don't like.
It is about time that people are held accountable for what they say, instead of getting away with murder.
We are held accountable for what we say. If I tell my boss that he sucks, I'll be fired. If I am racist, there's a pretty good chance that I will be damaged - look at what happens to politicians or celebrities when they make a racist remark.
But it's not the government's job to decide what our norms are. It's not the government's job to decide whether what we say is OK or not. Free speech means that you have the right to say what you want - and the responsibility to accept the consequences.
This isn't a free speech issue. It is a corporation censoring one of its employees - something that corporations do all the time. I can't say bad things about my employer without being fired.
Unfortunately, XM promised its subscribers that it wouldn't censor. You can't say "uncut and uncensored" and then turn around and tell your employees what they can and cannot say on the air. XM is trying to run an edgy, over-the-top show. They just aren't willing to take the heat that comes with that.
I think that this idea could really work, but these kids need to learn what I learned in my current job as a web programmer - to look like a professional, you need to rely on other professionals.
These kids have a concept. Now they need people. Hand-drawn art and crude bitmap editing may cut it when you're making a game for your friends, but if you want to look professional, you need someone who knows what they are doing. You need someone who knows how to use a vector graphics program (probably Adobe Illustrator), you need someone who knows how to use a page layout program, and you need someone with artistic talent. In other words, you need a graphic designer.
I don't go it alone when I'm working on a major site. I have a graphic designer creating compositions and producing the final images for the site. I have a layout designer who takes the graphic designer's vision and converts it to CSS. I have a copyeditor to make sure that the text is clear and concise. I have a (white hat) SEO professional analyzing link structure, page layout, and code structure, to ensure that the site is properly indexed. And, in some cases, I have a human factors professional doing user testing to ensure that users will be able to find what they are looking for.
Now, I know quite a bit about graphic design. I can use Illustrator and Photoshop. I also know plenty about CSS and XHTML - I can hack together a website just fine. I'm decently good at copyediting, I know the basics of SEO, and I have an eye for UI design as well. But I'm not as good at any of those things as the people I rely on. They are more effective, more efficent, and make fewer mistakes.
They make me look professional. I make them look professional.
When you're 13 (that was only 6 years ago for me!), the desire is to do everything yourself. But that's the last thing you want to do. Maybe you've picked up a copy of Photoshop. Maybe you can scan photos into your PC and make graphics. What you lack, however, is the experience that's necessary to look professional.
That's OK if you're starting a business. Most of our clients have no idea how to run a website. That's fine, because that's not what their business is. If you're big, you can have dedicated professionals who will work on your website. If you aren't, there are companies like mine who will do it for you. We can make you look as good as the big guys because we are as good as the big guys. This is our whole business - just like the professionals who work for lare companies, we practice our trade every day.
So, my advice to these kids would be - hire people who know what they are doing. At a minimum, they are going to need the services of a copyeditor (to ensure that card and instructional text is clear, concise, and free of grammatical and spelling errors), a graphic designer (to prepare print-ready, professional graphics for the cards), and an accountant (business = accounting and taxes, two things that 13-year-olds tend not to be very good at).
Find people you can trust. Find people you can count on. Their professionalism will make you look professional.
To be honest, I threw that line in because I know Slashdot editors like bullshit anti-MS hypothetical rhetoric. Apparently I was right.
I admit that I pander to the community. Wouldn't that make me a pro?
Oddly enough, both articles I've gotten on Slashdot have to do with Microsoft's new file formats. I didn't want it to turn out that way, it just happened.
You should know better than to equate hacking skill with programming skill.
There are people who can run circles around me with assembly. I couldn't even begin to understand 1/2 the entries in the IOCCC, let alone write one.
But I still write better code than most of those people. Good code is code that is well documented, easy to understand, easy to verify, and easy to maintain.
I'm sure your father can do amazing things with code. But he doesn't sound like the kind of person I would ever hire to work on a real system.
So, don't feel bad. You may not be an "advanced" programmer compared to him, but I bet you write code that is far more consistent, far better documented, and, ultimately, far more useful.
Perhaps you don't understand how generating capacity works. Yes, there is a certain amount of "baseload" power that operates at a reasonably constant power level (Coal and Nuclear fit into this category, because they cannot change power output quickly). However, there are also a significant number of variable output plants (most natural gas plants are in this category) which adjust their output to meet actual demand.
Moreover, our energy usage is growing. Conservation (e.g. efficent lighting, HVAC, and other technologies) can slow down or perhaps even reverse this trend - which means we need to build fewer (or no) new plants and may even be able to shut down some of the worst existing plants.
But as long as you're asking me to unplug my router which won't make a whit of difference except to annoy me, then it's just not going to happen.
Agreed. People who complain about a couple of watts need to get a clue. Running a 1W power brick for an entire year uses 31.5MJ. You probably used more energy driving to work today, even if you drive a hybrid (a gallon of gas has about 132MJ of energy).
Turn on a single 60W light bulb for 30 minutes and you've used more energy than that hypothetical 1W load will use all day.
I am so fucking tired about hearing how Vista is a failure on Slashdot. Vista is here, it's here to stay, and most of us will probably be running it at home or at work in 3 years.
It gets old. Really old. It doesn't matter how much you hate the product. I don't fucking care what you think, I use the product on multiple systems every day and it gets the job done.
Don't like Vista? Use Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, XP, 2000, 98, or whatever else you want. But the product has been in development for over 5 years and it has been on the market for over three months. Stop bitching.
Windows Me failed because it used the crappy old Windows 98 kernel and was released at the same time as the much more reliable Windows 2000. It was on the market for a total of 13 months before XP was released. You may think Me was a flop, but it wasn't by any relaistic metric. Me was a stopgap product designed to fill the gap between 98 and XP, and Microsoft made plenty of money on what was essentially a warmed-over Windows 98.
There's no OS that's coming out in 10 months to supplant Vista. There's no new "business" OS that it's competing against. It's only real competititon is Windows XP, and XP sales to OEMs end at the end of 2007. Like it or not, if you want to buy a PC with Windows, soon it will only be available with Vista.
Trash the numbers all you want. But when was the last time that another software company sold 40 million copies of ANYTHING in 3 months?