I have not checked this, but I suspect the charitable donations from every Linux distro CEO combined would fall well short of this.
I'd say the best measure of the man's charity would be to figure out the percentage of his income that he gives to charitable causes. I don't want to knock the charity that BG has done, because it is clearly considerable... but it's not quite fair to say he's a better man for giving 1% of whatever billions than someone giving 20% of a few million (note: invented statistics).
This is exactly what I thought of first -- why encrypt the password when you can hash it? You store the hash, you don't store the password (and it's impossible to generate the password from a hash, which is basically a one-way encryption).
This is pretty standard procedure for storing passwords -- even if an attacker sees the hash you stored, the password is still safe. When the user logs in, you hash the pw they type, and compare it to the hash you have stored.
Even more secure (if an attacker might be able to edit the hash stored on the drive) is the parent post's suggestion; don't store the hash, use it as a basis for the key you encrypt the data with. Bingo, secure.
So why wouldn't they do this? Well, what options do they offer if you lose your password? I can't find much at all on their website, but my bet is that they are sacrificing security in the name of customer support. Maybe they're worried about customers who misremember their password (and didn't bother with the hint mechanism) who send back the drive and say "fix it"... and they can! That's just good customer support! Maybe it designed like that originally for debugging purposes, and then the ship date arrived.
My bet is that at least one of the developers knew full well about the security issue, and either didn't care enough about the company to insist it was fixed, was pressured by a boss, or had "that good, lucky feeling" that the curious techies of the world wouldn't notice the flaw and, say, get it onto the Slashdot front page.
By the way, feel free to ask Lexar about it: here's the page for talking to a real live customer service rep.
Badnarik has principles, and he's damn proud to live by them.
Wow, gotta appreciate that. I'd be damned glad if the mainstream candidates had, you know, at least one principle besides that dedication to tricking the electorate and licking the hands that feed them. I wish I agreed with Badnarik more, because I hate voting for mystery meat; have to this year, though... swing state. I figure if I elect Kerry he won't get a damned thing done while in office (since the house and senate will still be packed with Republicans), so he'll do less active damage to the country and the world than Bush has been doing.
Sad state of affairs. Ah, well. Back to sweet, logical code!
Bush was a drunk, a cocaine-sniffer, morally dubious character. Kerry has a record of political untrustworthiness and his Vietnam record leaves much to be desired...
Far be it from me to point out that the media focus isn't always on the most important aspects of the candidates -- but most of the things listed about Badnarik are things he *currently* advocates, and things he has done recently because of beliefs he still holds, not things he did or did not do back in the 70's or earlier.
Bush got elected partly because he *did* have mistakes in his past (which people could relate to) but he seemed to have successfully abandoned his evil ways and found God. Or something.
Modern components however are made to face a dishwasher, and can withstand it nicely, unless the components are defective to begin with (like some bad electrolytics on motherboards).
Darn it, looks like my iBook was defective. Oh wait -- did you say dishwasher, or washing machine? I thought the spin cycle would really shake loose any remaining dirt...
::: whoosh whoosh::: KIT: Michael, I couldn't help but notice...
Knight: What's that, Kit? Speak up, now -- we've got a busy day ahead of us!
KIT: Well, Michael, you seem to be getting quite a lot of unusual spam lately. Perhaps --::: whoosh whoosh:::
KIT: Perhaps you've been spending a little too much of the Foundation's research funding on, well, unorthodox internet research?
Knight: Oh, come on now --
KIT: Let me be completely honest with you, Michael -- I've been doing some research of my own, thanks to the new wireless module you installed last week. First of all, let me say that my infrared sensors inform me that your genitalia is within the parameters of normality for a man of your size, according to recent medical databases. Second, I happened to run across some photos of a stripped-down '79 Thunderbird that... well, raised some questions about the programming of my human emotion emulation chip. I experienced a... startling reaction to the graphical data, Michael.::: whoosh whoosh:::
Well, everyone keeps saying 5%. That's pretty freaking low--a theoretical maximum of 20 candidates.
Okay, I know math, too, and you seem to be claiming that it's *likely* that we'll have 20 candidates, each with precisely 5% of the vote. Huh? Check some actual polls -- once you cut Bush and Kerry voters out of the numbers, you only have somewhere between 3-11% left, including undecideds (most of whom are deciding between Bush/Kerry). In the 2000 election, candidate #3 (Nader) got 2.75% of the vote. Candidate #4 (Buchanan) got 0.42%. So... we're going to get 20 debate candidates? We might not even get 3.
That's why I called straw man. I'm not saying the Democratic primary debates were "imaginary" -- I'm saying it's disingenuous to claim that's what we'll get if we try to make any changes to the current presidential debate system.
It's not unfair that you roar out to the front, what's unfair is that you only had single digits and you expected equal debate time with other candidates running 30, 40, or 50 or 60 percent.
I don't agree, because I think the system's weighted from the start against the smaller candidates (and the debates is finally a place where your facetime doesn't depend on how much you pay!), but I understand your point here.
It sounds like you want a much more complicated, time consuming debate--which is cool, but if that's the case, it sounds to me like all the more reason we need to exclude single-digit candidates.
Well, see above re. the "much more complicated, time consuming" bit... but there are other arguments for the 5% bar. Another poster made a good point that seems relevant here -- your party can get federal money to support your campaign if you got more than 5% in the previous election. If our money is paying for these campaigns, shouldn't we get to hear them speak on even ground, even if only for a couple of hours out of the entire campaign?
Insightful? This isn't a yes/no question. And comparing *one* aspect of the idea, lowering the current bar (which would only allow two candidates) to the Democratic primary debates, which had, yes FIFTEEN people, is nonsense. No one except your straw man is arguing for lowering the bar *that* low.
I'm wondering about your last remark, too: I mean, they don't invite every single baseball team to the World Series, do they? It's not fair to rely on the debates at the end of the election season to boost yourself out of single-digit territory.
Not fair? Do you think politics works anything like baseball? Imagine a baseball game where the team against the Yankees wasn't even allowed to take the field at most games, because they couldn't afford the turfing fees. And instead of competing, the teams would each broadcast their own, grossly conflicting accounts of the game, over competing (and very expensive) loudspeakers, and at the end of the World Series the spectators would pick the champions based on who has the coolest uniforms, whose faces they remember more, and which loudspeaker they were sitting next to most often.
But hey, that's politics for you. 95% of the time it's the candidate who spent the most money who wins the election. 99% of the electorate is going to vote based on what their friends/family say, plus vague ill feelings from smear ads with blatant falsehoods in them, and vague good feelings because candidate A or B kind of reminded them of a frat brother, or an uncle, or whatever.
So if we wanted to make this *more* fair, instead of less fair, a few changes even in the limited realm of the debates would be a step forward.
I want to see someone point it out, right away, when a candidate is asked a question and provides an answer that is pure fluff set on high spin. I want the question to be asked multiple times if necessary, until an answer is provided.
What did Kennedy do after the Bay of Pigs fiasco? He was no god among men, but he said "how could I have been so stupid?" He called it a "colossal mistake". Is there some magic involved? Why does no politician even admit to changing an opinion, nowadays? I just want to smack 'em, all of them, and say "grow up". Whoa, sorry - ranting.
So yes, I want debates where hard questions are asked, and where citizens get to hear more than just the same plastic answers, unquestioned. I want an army of fact checkers working in the back room who will provide clarifications to misleading or just false statements that are made, all while the candidates are still there (not the next day, on a website somewhere). I don't think this will fix everything, but it's a step in the right direction.
And if a candidate comes roaring out from the wee digits in the polls after the debates... isn't that a glorious thing? How is that in any way unfair? I'd see that as a rare sign of fairness in the system -- they got to say their piece, they answered the hard questions, and people liked what they had to say.
Whew; sorry for the harsh tone, but the political nonsense really pisses me off. Anyone up for a drink? Raise your glass and clink the monitor with me now -- to a better world for our children. Or, you know, maybe their grandkids.
Excellent advice. One quibble: "...he'll use your childishness to justify his assholedness."
Assholedness? I think the proper term is "assholism". It's a disease, and the sooner you can force your boss to acknowledge his addiction to being an asshole (see parent post for tips), the sooner he can seek help.
...but MS will beat their dead horse until its a threat.
Eh -- your actual argument is okay, but drop the metaphor. The whole point of the phrase is that dead horses stay dead. Beating them is an entirely useless exercise.
MS, on the other hand, may be able to create enough hype to get users for its service, and (like many other MS products) even if it sucks initially, it will start catching up in features. Maybe the 'cool' people won't like it -- but hey, most people aren't cool, and they don't always want to be like the cool people -- they want to be like everybody else.
So it's not even entering a half-dead horse in the race, then buying the best doctors and trainers in the world for it (my next thought), because the horse that "wins" and collects the prize money isn't even usually the one that finishes the course the fastest.
Plus don't forget that part of Microsoft's success actually is wrapped up in creating useful and functional software/services. If their software really was useless they would have no customers. And people tend to forget this, but in Microsoft's ideal world everyone would love them because XP really did make the company/internet/whatever 100x more efficient. Customers would be loyal without requiring sneaky lock-ins, and expensive hype and marketing, and funded research on the dangers of competitors. MS does hire a lot of competent developers... but they play the game hard, software is a finnicky thing to get right, and sometimes they make dicey decisions for short-term gains, so they are where they are today. You can't deny they've played the game pretty successfully.
If the compiler performace better optimizations on the java byte-code generated.
That's a bigger "if" than you might think. I'm not ruling it out until someone checks in with some stats... but most Java optimizations happen at runtime (since that's where it's turned into actual machine code).
Obviously most Java compilers do dead code removal, constant folding, inlining, etc., but from what I understand there aren't any huge differences, and javac -O is pretty good.
...researchers hope to use this procedure to grow hair, skin, and even sebaceous glands in humans.
ALL NEW! You can have the skin you did as a teenager! Just a simple surgery, and your skin can be 30 years younger... unwrinkled, supple, and as spotty as a flesh-colored cheetah.
Exactly -- and I'd also point out that no large site that I know of would be affected by this performance-wise, though faster compilation of JSPs will be nice for development. How often do you make a JSP change that will be seen first by the end user?
JSPs can be easily precompiled, or just hit by the developer before linking them on the site, to force compilation. Even if compilation is faster than it was, that doesn't mean it's as fast as when the user hits a page that's already been compiled.
Either way, Tomcat is a great app -- funny that it started as just a simple "reference" implementation of the servlet/JSP APIs....
Leaving a nuclear reactor in a developing country which can potentially become unstable during the 30 years of service of the reactor doesn't seem to be terribly safe.
Heh... I think you're misunderestimating the usefulness of this device. If we'd given Iraq one of these during the 70s, all this hubbub now about "we can't find the WMDs" wouldn't be a problem! Look, it's right there!
(sorry, couldn't resist the joke) Oh wait -- did they mean the *reactor* could become unstable, or the *country* could become unstable? Either one makes sense.
I can see you've never had a customer responsible for 50% of your revenue before:) Pay enough money and you get a developer on site.
You're right in those cases -- but I'm thinking of the people without that kind of pull (i.e., most of them). From what I understand, embedded Linux has all kinds of shortcomings... but because it drastically lowers the barrier to entry, and because it's open (for you to work on the shortcomings as needed for your product), it's starting to get a lot of use.
More use means a better product, as developers feed fixes and improvements back into the base.
Putting an OS on a small device is a task that tends to require a lot of tweaking... when you're making it small, you tend to make a lot of compromises, and small devices tend to be much more diverse than personal computers and servers (well, duh).
So -- what OS is better suited to this kind of application? The open source one with plenty of developers out there, tweaking it as we speak, where the developers of your hardware can be shaping the embedded OS as they build the prototype?...Or the one written and managed by a single company who, yes, has talented developers, but none of whom are on-site working with you?
Not that I'm the only one saying this, of course, but this is a great chance for the Linux model to shine.
EFF hurts us all again I understand (to some degree, at least) what you're complaining about, and what the EFF did and did NOT achieve... but it's ludicrous to say they they've *hurt* us in their actions.
Um... didn't they take up JibJab's case? I didn't see you offering them a free legal defense. And didn't they, at a minimum, successfully defend JibJab's right to use this particular song? Maybe the battle wasn't decided here, but a skirmish was won. As in all causes working with limited funding and time, the EFF must choose their battles carefully. Perhaps they felt refusing the settlement wouldn't actually help (see other posts about how "precedent" really works), and might actually result in a negative outcome. I don't know the details behind their decision, and I respectfully submit that *you* don't know, either.
Let's at least recognize what they *did* achieve, and be a little smarter when we talk about what this settlement didn't accomplish.
The archeologist (vs. the grave robber) is there because the treasure belongs in a museum, where everyone can study it and learn from it, instead of locked away in a private collection where only one person can see it... plus if the Nazis get to this treasure first, they'll try to use it to take over the world!
I have a feeling that if I had a wound that would *require* this kind of bandage, I'd be incapacitated enough that I wouldn't be able to get to the glove box.
On the other hand, I might be able to save someone else's life. We've all heard about the staggering numbers of deaths in auto accidents... I wonder if a percentage of those might not have been fatalities if the EMT's (or other drivers) had materials like this.
It might also be worth it for people with blood clotting problems, who (without proper care) could bleed to death from a bad papercut. Does it work for them?
Do you think it's ready for non-technical users yet?
I got scared off a bit by the website's warnings like "it's really only a prototype" and "As this is a development project, NeoOffice/J is intended for software engineers and is not yet complete enough for regular users." (emphasis theirs).
Personally, I don't mind working around some bugs and crashes here and there in exchange for cool new features, but my wife doesn't work that way.
I was trying about 6 months ago to get OpenOffice working properly on my wife's iBook, so she could have something better than AppleWorks (without me paying MS anything)... it was *not* easy. She ended up sticking with AppleWorks despite its flaws and limitations. X-11 apps are really tough to integrate properly into OSX (Jaguar, at least - haven't tried Panther), even using nice windows managers like OroborosX.
I think I'm going to give it another shot -- this guy really walks through all of the nitty gritty details clearly, and comes up with something that looks pretty usable. He might be using Panther, though... I remember reading somewhere that Apple's X-11 wasn't going to be available for earlier versions of OSX; I installed XonX (XFree86 for Darwin), not Apple's version.
Anyway, he's going specifically for the goal of creating PDFs with bookmarks (which we don't really need), but you get all the details of setting up a workable install of OOo along the way.
Todd *did* jump the queue (as far as I can tell) -- but at the same time, the publicity he gave to organ donation resulted in people signing up as organ donors. By using his own story (and a handsome, innocent face) to publicise a much larger problem, he has saved a lot more lives than just his own.
Even posting this story to slashdot has probably reminded some of us to make sure we're properly registered as organ donors. Overall, it's a good thing (though yeah, I'm also a little jumpy about letting anyone jump the queue).
I've run into the same problem as the questioner... I don't have Adobe Acrobat (and don't really want to buy it for personal use, at $250+), and making locked forms in Word can be irritating to get working right, and many people can't fill in the form.
Sure, I can create PDFs with no problem using various software (it's built-in to OpenOffice, for one)... but I haven't seen free or open-source software that will let me create PDF *forms*, where the user can fill in the fields before printing it out.
Actually, that brings up another issue -- even if I had Acrobat, would it let me generate PDF forms that could be saved? Most of the ones I see (I'm thinking tax forms here, actually) only let you fill in the fields and print out the result, not save your modified document with the field data.
This really strikes me as a hole in available software (proprietary or not!).
Here's my personal example: For a recent school reunion, we wanted to build a "face book", where people could fill out and return (via email) a form with a photo, current name and contact info, recent history, etc... and it was a real pain to do. I ended up sending out a Word doc, with *parts* of the document locked (with form fields) and parts unlocked (for inserting photos and giving users font control in parts). Then I also sent out an OpenOffice-generated PDF, for people to print out, fill-in by hand, scan, and email back as an image. Some people who had Acrobat installed managed to edit this file and send it back.
Needless to say, there were plenty of people who had a hard time with either format. Some just emailed me back the text they wanted to enter and attached photos to the email, since they couldn't get them properly into the Word doc. Some people gave up, and didn't get a page in the book. And this is ignoring all the hoops *I* had to jump through to open the attachments from people using Outlook (winmail.dat, anyone?). [well, that last complaint is a rant for another day]
Why should this be so complicated? Yes, I considered setting up a simple webapp to collect the info. But of course every entry needed to fit on a single page... and HTML is not at all designed for specific control over that kind of thing. Plus I'd need at least some control over what I'd let people upload as a "photo", for security reasons, and have to automate cropping or at least resizing of the image... it got way too ugly way too fast.
I could have given people the password to unlock the Word doc. But I'd have to warn them that once you unlock the document, you can't edit the form fields anymore. Oh, and if you re-lock it, it kindly deletes everything you previously entered in those form fields. Ugh.
Slashdot Mirror
I have not checked this, but I suspect the charitable donations from every Linux distro CEO combined would fall well short of this.
I'd say the best measure of the man's charity would be to figure out the percentage of his income that he gives to charitable causes. I don't want to knock the charity that BG has done, because it is clearly considerable... but it's not quite fair to say he's a better man for giving 1% of whatever billions than someone giving 20% of a few million (note: invented statistics).
This is exactly what I thought of first -- why encrypt the password when you can hash it? You store the hash, you don't store the password (and it's impossible to generate the password from a hash, which is basically a one-way encryption).
This is pretty standard procedure for storing passwords -- even if an attacker sees the hash you stored, the password is still safe. When the user logs in, you hash the pw they type, and compare it to the hash you have stored.
Even more secure (if an attacker might be able to edit the hash stored on the drive) is the parent post's suggestion; don't store the hash, use it as a basis for the key you encrypt the data with. Bingo, secure.
So why wouldn't they do this? Well, what options do they offer if you lose your password? I can't find much at all on their website, but my bet is that they are sacrificing security in the name of customer support. Maybe they're worried about customers who misremember their password (and didn't bother with the hint mechanism) who send back the drive and say "fix it"... and they can! That's just good customer support! Maybe it designed like that originally for debugging purposes, and then the ship date arrived.
My bet is that at least one of the developers knew full well about the security issue, and either didn't care enough about the company to insist it was fixed, was pressured by a boss, or had "that good, lucky feeling" that the curious techies of the world wouldn't notice the flaw and, say, get it onto the Slashdot front page.
By the way, feel free to ask Lexar about it: here's the page for talking to a real live customer service rep.
Badnarik has principles, and he's damn proud to live by them.
Wow, gotta appreciate that. I'd be damned glad if the mainstream candidates had, you know, at least one principle besides that dedication to tricking the electorate and licking the hands that feed them. I wish I agreed with Badnarik more, because I hate voting for mystery meat; have to this year, though... swing state. I figure if I elect Kerry he won't get a damned thing done while in office (since the house and senate will still be packed with Republicans), so he'll do less active damage to the country and the world than Bush has been doing.
Sad state of affairs. Ah, well. Back to sweet, logical code!
Bush was a drunk, a cocaine-sniffer, morally dubious character. Kerry has a record of political untrustworthiness and his Vietnam record leaves much to be desired...
Far be it from me to point out that the media focus isn't always on the most important aspects of the candidates -- but most of the things listed about Badnarik are things he *currently* advocates, and things he has done recently because of beliefs he still holds, not things he did or did not do back in the 70's or earlier.
Bush got elected partly because he *did* have mistakes in his past (which people could relate to) but he seemed to have successfully abandoned his evil ways and found God. Or something.
Modern components however are made to face a dishwasher, and can withstand it nicely, unless the components are defective to begin with (like some bad electrolytics on motherboards).
Darn it, looks like my iBook was defective. Oh wait -- did you say dishwasher, or washing machine? I thought the spin cycle would really shake loose any remaining dirt...
::: whoosh whoosh :::
::: whoosh whoosh :::
::: whoosh whoosh :::
KIT: Michael, I couldn't help but notice...
Knight: What's that, Kit? Speak up, now -- we've got a busy day ahead of us!
KIT: Well, Michael, you seem to be getting quite a lot of unusual spam lately. Perhaps --
KIT: Perhaps you've been spending a little too much of the Foundation's research funding on, well, unorthodox internet research?
Knight: Oh, come on now --
KIT: Let me be completely honest with you, Michael -- I've been doing some research of my own, thanks to the new wireless module you installed last week. First of all, let me say that my infrared sensors inform me that your genitalia is within the parameters of normality for a man of your size, according to recent medical databases. Second, I happened to run across some photos of a stripped-down '79 Thunderbird that... well, raised some questions about the programming of my human emotion emulation chip. I experienced a... startling reaction to the graphical data, Michael.
Well, everyone keeps saying 5%. That's pretty freaking low--a theoretical maximum of 20 candidates.
Okay, I know math, too, and you seem to be claiming that it's *likely* that we'll have 20 candidates, each with precisely 5% of the vote. Huh? Check some actual polls -- once you cut Bush and Kerry voters out of the numbers, you only have somewhere between 3-11% left, including undecideds (most of whom are deciding between Bush/Kerry). In the 2000 election, candidate #3 (Nader) got 2.75% of the vote. Candidate #4 (Buchanan) got 0.42%. So... we're going to get 20 debate candidates? We might not even get 3.
That's why I called straw man. I'm not saying the Democratic primary debates were "imaginary" -- I'm saying it's disingenuous to claim that's what we'll get if we try to make any changes to the current presidential debate system.
It's not unfair that you roar out to the front, what's unfair is that you only had single digits and you expected equal debate time with other candidates running 30, 40, or 50 or 60 percent.
I don't agree, because I think the system's weighted from the start against the smaller candidates (and the debates is finally a place where your facetime doesn't depend on how much you pay!), but I understand your point here.
It sounds like you want a much more complicated, time consuming debate--which is cool, but if that's the case, it sounds to me like all the more reason we need to exclude single-digit candidates.
Well, see above re. the "much more complicated, time consuming" bit... but there are other arguments for the 5% bar. Another poster made a good point that seems relevant here -- your party can get federal money to support your campaign if you got more than 5% in the previous election. If our money is paying for these campaigns, shouldn't we get to hear them speak on even ground, even if only for a couple of hours out of the entire campaign?
Insightful? This isn't a yes/no question. And comparing *one* aspect of the idea, lowering the current bar (which would only allow two candidates) to the Democratic primary debates, which had, yes FIFTEEN people, is nonsense. No one except your straw man is arguing for lowering the bar *that* low.
I'm wondering about your last remark, too:
I mean, they don't invite every single baseball team to the World Series, do they? It's not fair to rely on the debates at the end of the election season to boost yourself out of single-digit territory.
Not fair? Do you think politics works anything like baseball? Imagine a baseball game where the team against the Yankees wasn't even allowed to take the field at most games, because they couldn't afford the turfing fees. And instead of competing, the teams would each broadcast their own, grossly conflicting accounts of the game, over competing (and very expensive) loudspeakers, and at the end of the World Series the spectators would pick the champions based on who has the coolest uniforms, whose faces they remember more, and which loudspeaker they were sitting next to most often.
But hey, that's politics for you. 95% of the time it's the candidate who spent the most money who wins the election. 99% of the electorate is going to vote based on what their friends/family say, plus vague ill feelings from smear ads with blatant falsehoods in them, and vague good feelings because candidate A or B kind of reminded them of a frat brother, or an uncle, or whatever.
So if we wanted to make this *more* fair, instead of less fair, a few changes even in the limited realm of the debates would be a step forward.
I want to see someone point it out, right away, when a candidate is asked a question and provides an answer that is pure fluff set on high spin. I want the question to be asked multiple times if necessary, until an answer is provided.
What did Kennedy do after the Bay of Pigs fiasco? He was no god among men, but he said "how could I have been so stupid?" He called it a "colossal mistake". Is there some magic involved? Why does no politician even admit to changing an opinion, nowadays? I just want to smack 'em, all of them, and say "grow up". Whoa, sorry - ranting.
So yes, I want debates where hard questions are asked, and where citizens get to hear more than just the same plastic answers, unquestioned. I want an army of fact checkers working in the back room who will provide clarifications to misleading or just false statements that are made, all while the candidates are still there (not the next day, on a website somewhere). I don't think this will fix everything, but it's a step in the right direction.
And if a candidate comes roaring out from the wee digits in the polls after the debates... isn't that a glorious thing? How is that in any way unfair? I'd see that as a rare sign of fairness in the system -- they got to say their piece, they answered the hard questions, and people liked what they had to say.
Whew; sorry for the harsh tone, but the political nonsense really pisses me off. Anyone up for a drink? Raise your glass and clink the monitor with me now -- to a better world for our children. Or, you know, maybe their grandkids.
Excellent advice. One quibble:
"...he'll use your childishness to justify his assholedness."
Assholedness? I think the proper term is "assholism". It's a disease, and the sooner you can force your boss to acknowledge his addiction to being an asshole (see parent post for tips), the sooner he can seek help.
...but MS will beat their dead horse until its a threat.
Eh -- your actual argument is okay, but drop the metaphor. The whole point of the phrase is that dead horses stay dead. Beating them is an entirely useless exercise.
MS, on the other hand, may be able to create enough hype to get users for its service, and (like many other MS products) even if it sucks initially, it will start catching up in features. Maybe the 'cool' people won't like it -- but hey, most people aren't cool, and they don't always want to be like the cool people -- they want to be like everybody else.
So it's not even entering a half-dead horse in the race, then buying the best doctors and trainers in the world for it (my next thought), because the horse that "wins" and collects the prize money isn't even usually the one that finishes the course the fastest.
Plus don't forget that part of Microsoft's success actually is wrapped up in creating useful and functional software/services. If their software really was useless they would have no customers. And people tend to forget this, but in Microsoft's ideal world everyone would love them because XP really did make the company/internet/whatever 100x more efficient. Customers would be loyal without requiring sneaky lock-ins, and expensive hype and marketing, and funded research on the dangers of competitors. MS does hire a lot of competent developers... but they play the game hard, software is a finnicky thing to get right, and sometimes they make dicey decisions for short-term gains, so they are where they are today. You can't deny they've played the game pretty successfully.
If the compiler performace better optimizations on the java byte-code generated.
That's a bigger "if" than you might think. I'm not ruling it out until someone checks in with some stats... but most Java optimizations happen at runtime (since that's where it's turned into actual machine code).
Obviously most Java compilers do dead code removal, constant folding, inlining, etc., but from what I understand there aren't any huge differences, and javac -O is pretty good.
Anyone with more info?
...researchers hope to use this procedure to grow hair, skin, and even sebaceous glands in humans.
ALL NEW! You can have the skin you did as a teenager! Just a simple surgery, and your skin can be 30 years younger... unwrinkled, supple, and as spotty as a flesh-colored cheetah.
Exactly -- and I'd also point out that no large site that I know of would be affected by this performance-wise, though faster compilation of JSPs will be nice for development. How often do you make a JSP change that will be seen first by the end user?
JSPs can be easily precompiled, or just hit by the developer before linking them on the site, to force compilation. Even if compilation is faster than it was, that doesn't mean it's as fast as when the user hits a page that's already been compiled.
Either way, Tomcat is a great app -- funny that it started as just a simple "reference" implementation of the servlet/JSP APIs....
Leaving a nuclear reactor in a developing country which can potentially become unstable during the 30 years of service of the reactor doesn't seem to be terribly safe.
Heh... I think you're misunderestimating the usefulness of this device. If we'd given Iraq one of these during the 70s, all this hubbub now about "we can't find the WMDs" wouldn't be a problem! Look, it's right there!
(sorry, couldn't resist the joke)
Oh wait -- did they mean the *reactor* could become unstable, or the *country* could become unstable? Either one makes sense.
I can see you've never had a customer responsible for 50% of your revenue before :) Pay enough money and you get a developer on site.
You're right in those cases -- but I'm thinking of the people without that kind of pull (i.e., most of them). From what I understand, embedded Linux has all kinds of shortcomings... but because it drastically lowers the barrier to entry, and because it's open (for you to work on the shortcomings as needed for your product), it's starting to get a lot of use.
More use means a better product, as developers feed fixes and improvements back into the base.
Putting an OS on a small device is a task that tends to require a lot of tweaking... when you're making it small, you tend to make a lot of compromises, and small devices tend to be much more diverse than personal computers and servers (well, duh).
...Or the one written and managed by a single company who, yes, has talented developers, but none of whom are on-site working with you?
So -- what OS is better suited to this kind of application? The open source one with plenty of developers out there, tweaking it as we speak, where the developers of your hardware can be shaping the embedded OS as they build the prototype?
Not that I'm the only one saying this, of course, but this is a great chance for the Linux model to shine.
EFF hurts us all again
I understand (to some degree, at least) what you're complaining about, and what the EFF did and did NOT achieve... but it's ludicrous to say they they've *hurt* us in their actions.
Um... didn't they take up JibJab's case? I didn't see you offering them a free legal defense. And didn't they, at a minimum, successfully defend JibJab's right to use this particular song? Maybe the battle wasn't decided here, but a skirmish was won. As in all causes working with limited funding and time, the EFF must choose their battles carefully. Perhaps they felt refusing the settlement wouldn't actually help (see other posts about how "precedent" really works), and might actually result in a negative outcome. I don't know the details behind their decision, and I respectfully submit that *you* don't know, either.
Let's at least recognize what they *did* achieve, and be a little smarter when we talk about what this settlement didn't accomplish.
The archeologist (vs. the grave robber) is there because the treasure belongs in a museum, where everyone can study it and learn from it, instead of locked away in a private collection where only one person can see it... plus if the Nazis get to this treasure first, they'll try to use it to take over the world!
Gash yourself, then pour salt and cayenne on the wound, and get back to us, ok?
Ah... I'd be glad to, but that wouldn't follow the scientific process, now would it? We'll need to set up a double-blind study. Any volunteers?
Boy, this thread is making me hungry. Shrimp, potatoes... how about some Cajun seasoning? Will that stop bleeding?
I have a feeling that if I had a wound that would *require* this kind of bandage, I'd be incapacitated enough that I wouldn't be able to get to the glove box.
On the other hand, I might be able to save someone else's life. We've all heard about the staggering numbers of deaths in auto accidents... I wonder if a percentage of those might not have been fatalities if the EMT's (or other drivers) had materials like this.
It might also be worth it for people with blood clotting problems, who (without proper care) could bleed to death from a bad papercut. Does it work for them?
Do you think it's ready for non-technical users yet?
I got scared off a bit by the website's warnings like "it's really only a prototype" and "As this is a development project, NeoOffice/J is intended for software engineers and is not yet complete enough for regular users." (emphasis theirs).
Personally, I don't mind working around some bugs and crashes here and there in exchange for cool new features, but my wife doesn't work that way.
I was trying about 6 months ago to get OpenOffice working properly on my wife's iBook, so she could have something better than AppleWorks (without me paying MS anything)... it was *not* easy. She ended up sticking with AppleWorks despite its flaws and limitations. X-11 apps are really tough to integrate properly into OSX (Jaguar, at least - haven't tried Panther), even using nice windows managers like OroborosX.
I think I'm going to give it another shot -- this guy really walks through all of the nitty gritty details clearly, and comes up with something that looks pretty usable. He might be using Panther, though... I remember reading somewhere that Apple's X-11 wasn't going to be available for earlier versions of OSX; I installed XonX (XFree86 for Darwin), not Apple's version.
Anyway, he's going specifically for the goal of creating PDFs with bookmarks (which we don't really need), but you get all the details of setting up a workable install of OOo along the way.
Todd *did* jump the queue (as far as I can tell) -- but at the same time, the publicity he gave to organ donation resulted in people signing up as organ donors. By using his own story (and a handsome, innocent face) to publicise a much larger problem, he has saved a lot more lives than just his own.
Even posting this story to slashdot has probably reminded some of us to make sure we're properly registered as organ donors. Overall, it's a good thing (though yeah, I'm also a little jumpy about letting anyone jump the queue).
I've run into the same problem as the questioner... I don't have Adobe Acrobat (and don't really want to buy it for personal use, at $250+), and making locked forms in Word can be irritating to get working right, and many people can't fill in the form.
Sure, I can create PDFs with no problem using various software (it's built-in to OpenOffice, for one)... but I haven't seen free or open-source software that will let me create PDF *forms*, where the user can fill in the fields before printing it out.
Actually, that brings up another issue -- even if I had Acrobat, would it let me generate PDF forms that could be saved? Most of the ones I see (I'm thinking tax forms here, actually) only let you fill in the fields and print out the result, not save your modified document with the field data.
This really strikes me as a hole in available software (proprietary or not!).
Here's my personal example: For a recent school reunion, we wanted to build a "face book", where people could fill out and return (via email) a form with a photo, current name and contact info, recent history, etc... and it was a real pain to do. I ended up sending out a Word doc, with *parts* of the document locked (with form fields) and parts unlocked (for inserting photos and giving users font control in parts). Then I also sent out an OpenOffice-generated PDF, for people to print out, fill-in by hand, scan, and email back as an image. Some people who had Acrobat installed managed to edit this file and send it back.
Needless to say, there were plenty of people who had a hard time with either format. Some just emailed me back the text they wanted to enter and attached photos to the email, since they couldn't get them properly into the Word doc. Some people gave up, and didn't get a page in the book. And this is ignoring all the hoops *I* had to jump through to open the attachments from people using Outlook (winmail.dat, anyone?). [well, that last complaint is a rant for another day]
Why should this be so complicated? Yes, I considered setting up a simple webapp to collect the info. But of course every entry needed to fit on a single page... and HTML is not at all designed for specific control over that kind of thing. Plus I'd need at least some control over what I'd let people upload as a "photo", for security reasons, and have to automate cropping or at least resizing of the image... it got way too ugly way too fast.
I could have given people the password to unlock the Word doc. But I'd have to warn them that once you unlock the document, you can't edit the form fields anymore. Oh, and if you re-lock it, it kindly deletes everything you previously entered in those form fields. Ugh.