The only people who I see putting this argument forward are people who don't have children. You can't be with a kid (especially age 13+) 24 hours a day to monitor them, and even if you teach them well and they're respectful of your wishes and teaching "don't do this," by definition as human beings, they will do it. Thus, the laws of the state exist to protect the child in the void of their parents' oversight and teaching. It's not bad parenting, as you claim - it's reasonable.
I'm not usually one to complain about the age of articles on Slashdot, but I first read about the Long Now project in a Wired cover story published in 1998. Perhaps the article submitter didn't know about it until now, but this is far from a new project.
If you know of an exploitable, real-world weakness in AES, there's a doctorate degree from any university in the world and a high six-figure salary with your name on it. The U. S. Government, in particular, would be interested in learning of a weakness in AES, since it uses AES for many secret and top secret-classified transactions.
If that's his [McNamara's] conclusion, then let's face it, he's a drooling idiot.
Ermm... you do realize this is Bob McNamara, former Secretary of Defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis and one of the last people alive who was in power during that crisis, e.g. one of the only people in the world with first-hand knowledge of this matter. There's a lot of criticism you could have of Mack, but "drooling idiot?" Probably not.
Wonderkid wrote: a) A video iPod, yet sales of portable video devices have not taken off, unlike MP3 players before the iPod was first launched.
There were [meaningful] MP3 player sales before the iPod? Really? Where? Who had them?
The cell phone / mobile phone networks are in a mess and not global, while WiFi is a global standard.
Say it with me: regulations, regulations, regulations. Cell phone networks are a mess and non-global because most countries strictly control which radio frequencies are available to telecom carriers for mobile communications, and many countries license incompatible frequencies. Take something as simple as GSM, for instance. In the United States, GSM is licensed in the 850MHz and 1900MHz bands, while in most of Europe, it's licensed in the 900MHz and 1800MHz bands. Mobile carriers have no control over this: it's the government regulators' decisions. Geographic problems affect network technology also. The U.S. has GSM and CDMA as its major digital technologies; parts of Asia are strongly CDMA, while Europe, Africa, and the Middle East are GSM.
It also isn't true to say that "WiFi is a global standard." Even with WiFi, some areas of the world (think Japan) regulate some of the bands that WiFi occupies differently than other countries. What is true of WiFi is that there isn't a [strong] competing wireless network technology alongside it, e.g. there isn't the CDMA/GSM division in WiFi. That is, until WiMax takes off.
The future lies in VoIP.
Maybe, but that's a more distant future than the next 3-5 years. Decent VoIP transmission requires significant bandwidth; this rules out the cellular network de facto for the next few years. VoIP over WiFi requires something that WiFi lacks: meaningful QoS. Know why you don't see business switching to wireless VoIP by the truckload? QoS. Even without the QoS problem, there are plenty of other still-present deficiencies in WiFi that make it currently unsuitable for VoIP. Security is one of them; we just this year finally got a good, workable, robust wireless security paradigm in the form of 802.11i. So far, I've seen zero wireless VoIP handsets that support WPA2. Most companies won't trust their voice communications to WEP, and rightly so. Conservative estimates give 3 years before 802.11i and its affiliated technologies really bunker down and start to take root.
Syncing with any Mac or PC would be wireless too which would be sweet.
Everybody keeps complaining to Apple about not having any wireless options in the iPod. Well, there's a good reason they don't: speed. It takes 10-15 minutes to fill my 4G iPod mini over FireWire; that's with FireWire's 400Mbps non-peak-throughput speeds. Bluetooth 1.x crawls along at about 1Mbps in really good conditions. The best WiFi we have is the 125Mbps "Super G", although actual throughput is only 30-45Mbps at best. Now, let's say that instead of a 4G iPod mini, I have a 60G iPod with color display. How long is it going to take me to fill up my 60G iPod over my 125Mbps WiFi connection? Long enough for me to decide it's not worth it.
Consider that a music playing PHONE is not original
It's not done really well by anybody yet, in the same way that MP3 wasn't done well by anybody before the iPod (and with the exception of the iPod, still isn't). Sure, many people can "figure out" the current MP3 phones after significant hassle, in the same way many people could "figure out" the early Rios and Nomads, but like the MP3 player market, sales have shown that when it comes to portable entertainment, the public does not want to be hassled. If you disagree, Apple has a US$4B yearly iPod business for you to argue with.
perhaps with a 2MP digicam on the back too.
Apple [fortunately] only does technology that it knows it can do really well. Cameras consist of a lot more than a plastic lens and an OEMed CCD. Apple is very unlikely to get [back] into cameras; there's more in cameras than they know about, and anyway, just about everybody already has a decent (e.g. >2MP) digital camera, plus three or four others in their cell phones, PDAs, shoes, etc. The iPod really doesn't need a camera.
Apple finally fixed one of my biggest complaints with this release: as of 10.4.2, OS X now supports AES encryption for WPA-PSK (a component of WPA2), eliminating the barrier to WPA2 adoption for Mac users. Among vendors whose equipment supports WPA-PSK with AES is Linksys, Belkin, Cisco, and doubtless many others.
Scotland Yard is reporting that it's "only" four bombings - three in the Underground, and one on a double-decker. The BBC UK has many reports, pictures, and extended coverage. Tony Blair was visibly shaken, and said that he is leaving the G8 Summit to survey the situation, but will return to the Summit, and the Summit will continue in his absense. Blair said it was "reasonably clear" there had been a series of terrorist attacks.
BBC is just reporting that "an Islamist website has posted a statement - purportedly from al-Qaeda - claiming it was behind the attacks."
Tony Blair is just preparing a second speech right now, surrounded by the other G8 leaders, saying, "We will not allow violence to change our societies or values" and "the perpetrators of today's attacks are bent on destroying human life...today's bombings will not weaken our resolve to uphold the most deeply-held principles of our societies and defeat those who would impose their fanaticism and extremism on others. We shall prevail, and they shall not."
The nice thing about web forms is that you can put them on any page and they still work. I've had my own "customized" Google homepage for years: http://home.six27.com. It's obviously not quite as elegant as Google's, but I can incorporate all the things I want or use regularly, and if I find something else I want, I can just add it on. Plus, it's completely portable from computer to computer - no need to sign in!
The devs were already working on it before some jerk full-disclosured w/working exploit.
Well double dumbass on the Mozilla developers for knowing about it and not taking steps to mitigate it even without an exploit in the wild. Calling the person who released it a "jerk" just shows that you have no understanding that a security risk is severe, whether or not anybody knows about its existence. It's said time and time again, but nobody ever listens: security through obscurity is not security. The person who posted it wasn't a jerk - that's just blaming somebody else for the Mozilla developers' failures. Stop pointing the finger, fix the damn problem, and release a patch before Monday morning.
[Disclaimer: I'm a Mozilla lover, not a Mozilla hater, but lovers can still have quarrels. I've used Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox exclusively since a week after Phoenix 0.1 was made public, and I've been a heavy advocate for it from day 1.]
With no disrespect to you or the other poster(s) in this thread who've made this argument, a comparison of the Netscape Communications of 5 years ago and the Mozilla Foundation of today is asinine. When Microsoft overtook Netscape, it was because Netscape had left its front door wide open and placed a detailed map of its weaknesses in public view.
The Netscape of yesteryear was shipping a hugely bloated everything-in-one application that didn't work right, needed constant patching, and failed to support some (even then) very basic rendering guidelines. The Netscape 4 series was a web designer's worst nightmare. It was a massive download (20-30M?) in an era where only a small minority of people had access to broadband. And it didn't fit visually and functionally with the rest of Windows. And of course, its primary competition (IE) was already bundled with the OS.
Netscape itself was a for profit company in the dot-com era that, like so many dot-bombs, tried to build a business model out of one niche product when a) comparable or better products existed, and b) an established market presence (Microsoft) could far outstrip it in development and marketing resources. Furthermore, Netscape's focus was divided by its also trying to become a web portal leader and its trying to launch major litigation against a major Fortune 500 company. Bad product + outgunned resources + divided focus = business disaster. The remains of Netscape were eventually scraped off the pavement by AOL.
The Mozilla Foundation, by comparison, is a non-profit community-driven organization that ships only a handful of specialized, well-targetted applications whose features equal and surpass its competition. Its products have a loyal following because of their technical superiority; this manifests itself in a massive grassroots marketing juggernaut whose collective weight is the envy of some marketing firms.
Microsoft may well have strong competition for Firefox with IE7 (although I suspect they won't), but I think it's demonstrably clear that this isn't an instance of history repeating itself. The two major warring are, this time around, very different entities.
Parody is an appropriate tool for social commentary.
Nope, sorry Bruce, I disagree with you here. It's not appropriate when it's used within a context that might be construed as news reporting. In that case, it's extremely irresponsible journalism for the writer to slip it in there - even if it's disclaimed as being false. It leads to confusion on the readers' part, which in turn leads to confusion when the story is repeated. "Social commentary" is fine in a context where it's clear that an editorial position is being taken; even then, however, there needs to be clear delineation between what is "fact" and what is "commentary."
It's certainly arguable that The Register is a source of either news or worthwhile commentary, but that point notwithstanding, the article's composition was flawed, and should be removed by both The Register and Slashdot.
(NB: Linus would also be perfectly fine complaining to OSDN that Slashdot has libeled him.)
As about 50 other people have said, DBAN, Darik's Boot and Nuke. It far exceeds HIPAA Security Rule guidelines for secure deletion of media containing ePHI. It's about as close to a truly secure disk wiping system as you can get.
What the article doesn't make clear is whether or not this means that any of these three publications will make plain-vanilla RSS readily available. If they will, they'll have a hard time convincing people to use their own branded software. If not (e.g. if their RSS feeds are somewhat proprietary), they're shooting themselves in the foot. RSS is an established, working standard. The main complaint of many content providers over RSS is that it's not quite as ad-friendly as regular HTML content (this is a feature, not a bug, if you're a reader).
The Denver Post hasn't had an RSS feed all this time; if they finally post one, I might start reading them more regularly. If, on the other hand, I have to use their proprietary software for their proprietary RSS feed (which almost certainly will be a Windows 2K/XP only application), they'll see my readership decline 100%.
Better idea for content providers: give your readers Firefox and Sage to read your feeds. You'll be giving them a great RSS feeder and be doing them a favor by also providing them with a secure, standards-compliant web browser.
as well as any loss in value of the product because the warrantee is invalid if you send away the original UPC or purchase slip or whatever to get the rebate
The original UPC is of no consequence to your warranty, once you're past the 14- or 30-day return policy of the store. If a company ever requests the UPC to fulfill a product warranty, ask to speak to their head of counsel. As for the original purchase slip (receipt), it's acceptable to send in a photocopy. If you're denied because you send a facsimile, drop a short letter to your state Attorney General and explain the situation. They'll handle it from there.
Domino client won't run. Neither is a Sametime client available. Both were in heavy use in IBM Global Services, at least.
That's assuming that IBM intends to keep up development of Domino; rumors have circulated for a while that there isn't going to be a Domino 7 (6.5.x is the latest). I've also gotten the impression from other IBM workers that Domino and Notes are as hated at IBM as they are everywhere else in the world; and Domino is definetely a monolithic, ugly beast. Sametime is perhaps its one redeeming feature.
Ideally, IBM would take what they learned from Domino and develop an open source groupware platform (badly needed) for Linux. I've never quite figured out why nobody has bothered to challenge the groupware market more. Currently, you can choose from Exchange, GroupWare, or Domino - all equally awful in their own unique ways. Surely IBM could lend some sanity to this mess?
Mozilla (Camaro, Firebird, whatever the hell they're calling themselves this week) just sucks compared to Safari.
You had me until here; Gecko (the Mozilla rendering engine) is generally regarded as the best rendering engine available. It's not the fastest, mind you, but it's the most developed with regards to web standards. Safari isn't far off, but some of it's quirks can get a bit annoying at times. Just ask Gmail users what they thought of Safari up until about 2 months ago.
As a web developer, I'm generally pretty happy with how Safari renders websites, but I really do wish that Apple had forked Gecko instead of KHTML. Given the popularity of Firefox, the Gecko engine has some serious momentum behind it from web developers; twiddling with a 3rd major rendering engine (KHTML) just adds to testing time. And at this point, Firefox and its brethren run as fast as Safari, even though they're not Cocoa applications.
I know that Apple wants to bring as many applications in house as possible, but as a Mac user, at this point I question the value of Apple continuing to sink resources into its own browser when a clearly equal if not superior peer product exists in Firefox (and even moreso after Firefox 1.1 with Mac-specific tweaks is released). Firefox isn't Cocoa, but not everything has to be, either.
There is no such thing as a "stable" "job" anywhere in the United States today. [...] But the 1950s career ladder is gone.
It is, however, ignoble of modern day corporations to assume that the career ladder and career-for-life workplace won't return. Currently the trend is [as you noted] three to five years per job. Ultimately, I think, businesses are going to realize that cyclical employment costs them a lot more money than retaining employees for several decade. Oh sure, pensions aren't cheap, but neither is training new employees, unemployment insurance, and dealing with your five year employee taking your trade secrets to your direct competitor.
The career ladder didn't just arise out of nowhere - the great businessmen of yore knew that it was as good for the business as it was for the employee. Unfortunately, "modern" business practice seems to have forgetten that. The old adage about those who forget history are doomed to repeat it seems appropriate here...
Re:Education no longer matters
on
Who Needs Harvard?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Education has now become accepted as being acquired through experience and higher learning - not just the next step/next grade level of yesteryear.
Only in certain fields, which (judging from your responses elsewhere) you're a part of. In most of the world, it's still accepted that education gives students a few valuable things that they cannot and will not learn outside of an academic setting. These are things such as a holistic sense of how their particular field of study is interrelated with all others, how history has shaped their field and the world around them (useful for avoiding historical repetition, a nasty disease), and drawing from the first two points, how they can take their own skills in their field and make a tangible difference in their communities.
It's also worth pointing out that you said, "Education has been found to be less desirable than motivation and work ethic." Although not universally true, it's generally the case that getting even a bachelor's degree requires a healthy amount of motivation and work ethic. That gets progressively more true the higher up in education you go.
It's sometimes retorted, "Well, look at all those people who never graduated college/high school/elementary school and went on to invent or do some brilliant thing." Such arguments are true enough - education isn't a prerequisite to success or skill. But you'd be hard pressed - in fact, it's impossible - to go through a day and not encounter all sorts of things in your world made possible by people who put their time in in the classroom. For every Steve Jobs (a college dropout) there are 100 people working around him with college degrees that make the bigger work possible.
Re:Seriously... Why would you use this?
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GIMP 2.2 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The only reason Adobe charges so damn much [for Photoshop] is because they know a certain number of people will buy it regardless.
Sorry, but this is a patently false argument. There's a lot of really incredible engineering and mathematics that has gone into Photoshop. Consider the optical kerning engine - simply the best typographical kerning mechanism ever invented. It analyzes the shape of every letter and determines on a per-character basis what degree of kerning is necessary to prevent collisions and preserve a consistent look. Brought to you by years of analytical geometry. Or consider the cloning brush - a tool in Photoshop that blends dischordant pieces of an image with its surroundings. Brought to you by lots of doctoral-level calculus. The list goes on.
The expertise that produces the engineering and math marvels found in Adobe products does not come cheap. You can criticize Adobe for spending too much on marketing or unnecessary litigation, but you can't claim that Adobe charges a lot of money "just because." They have a very high salary line in their annual budget, and the quality of their products reflects this.
EA is there to make money, not take care of people. If they are treating their employees poorly who cares? If the game is good I'll buy it, if it's not I won't.
Regular life in the real world disagrees with you. EA does have an ethical imperative to treat their workers fairly, humanely, and to put the lives of the employees before business. Only libertarians and high school juniors think that capitalism means, "Do whatever it takes to get money, and let the course of business take its toll." (Libertarianism is, by the way, the carrying out of fascism by other means; the one thing libertarianism precisely does not grant is liberty.)
The employees shouldn't have to quit if they're being if they're being treated poorly; government agencies, unions, and consumers should take proactive measures to stop the poor treatment. That may involve monetary fines, forced arbitration between an employees' union and the company, and if warranted criminal proceedings being taken against the company's officers. No, that isn't very laissez faire, but neither is real life.
Wow, I wish I could assign all five of my mod points to your post here. Thanks for compiling a level-headed and wise posting for people to read. You're entirely right that the process is too complicated for a conspiracy theory of some sort to hand one candidate or the other the vote. As you also rightly point out, the simple fact that voting discrepancies are being discovered is proof that the auditing trail works.
I doubt this will put some people's minds at rest, finally, and conspiracy theories will continue to be traded about. What would be better would be for the people who backed Kerry (such as myself) to take a long and discerning look at why Bush was able to win the election, rather than lobbing venomous allegations across the political aisle. I think that the results of the election provide more than enough material for the Democrats and non-Republicans to scrutinize during the next four years. Doing so will certainly be far more advantageous in the long run than worrying ad nauseum about shadow conspiracies.
I will grant, however, that the idea of shadow conspiracies swaying the vote is a much more dramatic and interesting explanation than to say that normal political and social causes were responsible.
Yet again, you don't get it. Plug it in and copy files to it? Most people don't want to have to work at the file system level to listen to music. iTunes lets them:
a) import their CDs
b) organize their music
c) make playlists
d) copy it all to the iPod with a single click
USB 2.0 might be neat for you, but you're posting on Slashdot. The iPod's audience (normal people) don't care, and would in fact be irritated to have to use the file system. You're member #3,582,104 of the Geeks Who Don't Understand the iPod Club.
Great story write-up. Just superlative. Let's re-write and make it clear:
"A group of students won the Apple [Computer] Design Award in June for a program called 4Peaks. For winning the award, they received a 'trophy,' which is a metal cube with an Apple logo on top. When you touch the cube, it glows. Curious as to how this works, the students decided to take their 'trophy' cube into a CT scanner and have it scanned to see what was inside. The linked pictures (in the Slashdot writeup) are what the inside of the cube looks like. Neat looking."
Well, here's an example of where XML is your friend. XML requires well-formedness in code; if something like an end tag is omitted, the page is not well-formed and is broken. A correctly-conforming XML parser (such as the Gecko engine) will not render the page, but will display an error message.
This doesn't absolutely prevent someone from writing an XML parser that, like HTML parsers, stumbles its way through bad code, but it is explicitly outlined in the RFCs for XML that non well-formed code should not be rendered. (And practically speaking, XML parsers really do have to honor this; by definition it would be nearly impossible to have an XML parser that rendered XML correctly if it was agnostic to well-formedness.)
From your sig: Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
So you're tolerant to others, as long as they're not intolerant, and when they are you're intolerant of them? Nope, no irony there. You'd probably find reading Chesterton to be quite a shake.
Slashdot Mirror
Its the parent's fault.
The only people who I see putting this argument forward are people who don't have children. You can't be with a kid (especially age 13+) 24 hours a day to monitor them, and even if you teach them well and they're respectful of your wishes and teaching "don't do this," by definition as human beings, they will do it. Thus, the laws of the state exist to protect the child in the void of their parents' oversight and teaching. It's not bad parenting, as you claim - it's reasonable.
I'm not usually one to complain about the age of articles on Slashdot, but I first read about the Long Now project in a Wired cover story published in 1998. Perhaps the article submitter didn't know about it until now, but this is far from a new project.
AES & SHA256 are young. These are newcomers.
If you know of an exploitable, real-world weakness in AES, there's a doctorate degree from any university in the world and a high six-figure salary with your name on it. The U. S. Government, in particular, would be interested in learning of a weakness in AES, since it uses AES for many secret and top secret-classified transactions.
If that's his [McNamara's] conclusion, then let's face it, he's a drooling idiot.
Ermm... you do realize this is Bob McNamara, former Secretary of Defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis and one of the last people alive who was in power during that crisis, e.g. one of the only people in the world with first-hand knowledge of this matter. There's a lot of criticism you could have of Mack, but "drooling idiot?" Probably not.
Wonderkid wrote:
a) A video iPod, yet sales of portable video devices have not taken off, unlike MP3 players before the iPod was first launched.
There were [meaningful] MP3 player sales before the iPod? Really? Where? Who had them?
The cell phone / mobile phone networks are in a mess and not global, while WiFi is a global standard.
Say it with me: regulations, regulations, regulations. Cell phone networks are a mess and non-global because most countries strictly control which radio frequencies are available to telecom carriers for mobile communications, and many countries license incompatible frequencies. Take something as simple as GSM, for instance. In the United States, GSM is licensed in the 850MHz and 1900MHz bands, while in most of Europe, it's licensed in the 900MHz and 1800MHz bands. Mobile carriers have no control over this: it's the government regulators' decisions. Geographic problems affect network technology also. The U.S. has GSM and CDMA as its major digital technologies; parts of Asia are strongly CDMA, while Europe, Africa, and the Middle East are GSM.
It also isn't true to say that "WiFi is a global standard." Even with WiFi, some areas of the world (think Japan) regulate some of the bands that WiFi occupies differently than other countries. What is true of WiFi is that there isn't a [strong] competing wireless network technology alongside it, e.g. there isn't the CDMA/GSM division in WiFi. That is, until WiMax takes off.
The future lies in VoIP.
Maybe, but that's a more distant future than the next 3-5 years. Decent VoIP transmission requires significant bandwidth; this rules out the cellular network de facto for the next few years. VoIP over WiFi requires something that WiFi lacks: meaningful QoS. Know why you don't see business switching to wireless VoIP by the truckload? QoS. Even without the QoS problem, there are plenty of other still-present deficiencies in WiFi that make it currently unsuitable for VoIP. Security is one of them; we just this year finally got a good, workable, robust wireless security paradigm in the form of 802.11i. So far, I've seen zero wireless VoIP handsets that support WPA2. Most companies won't trust their voice communications to WEP, and rightly so. Conservative estimates give 3 years before 802.11i and its affiliated technologies really bunker down and start to take root.
Syncing with any Mac or PC would be wireless too which would be sweet.
Everybody keeps complaining to Apple about not having any wireless options in the iPod. Well, there's a good reason they don't: speed. It takes 10-15 minutes to fill my 4G iPod mini over FireWire; that's with FireWire's 400Mbps non-peak-throughput speeds. Bluetooth 1.x crawls along at about 1Mbps in really good conditions. The best WiFi we have is the 125Mbps "Super G", although actual throughput is only 30-45Mbps at best. Now, let's say that instead of a 4G iPod mini, I have a 60G iPod with color display. How long is it going to take me to fill up my 60G iPod over my 125Mbps WiFi connection? Long enough for me to decide it's not worth it.
Consider that a music playing PHONE is not original
It's not done really well by anybody yet, in the same way that MP3 wasn't done well by anybody before the iPod (and with the exception of the iPod, still isn't). Sure, many people can "figure out" the current MP3 phones after significant hassle, in the same way many people could "figure out" the early Rios and Nomads, but like the MP3 player market, sales have shown that when it comes to portable entertainment, the public does not want to be hassled. If you disagree, Apple has a US$4B yearly iPod business for you to argue with.
perhaps with a 2MP digicam on the back too.
Apple [fortunately] only does technology that it knows it can do really well. Cameras consist of a lot more than a plastic lens and an OEMed CCD. Apple is very unlikely to get [back] into cameras; there's more in cameras than they know about, and anyway, just about everybody already has a decent (e.g. >2MP) digital camera, plus three or four others in their cell phones, PDAs, shoes, etc. The iPod really doesn't need a camera.
Apple finally fixed one of my biggest complaints with this release: as of 10.4.2, OS X now supports AES encryption for WPA-PSK (a component of WPA2), eliminating the barrier to WPA2 adoption for Mac users. Among vendors whose equipment supports WPA-PSK with AES is Linksys, Belkin, Cisco, and doubtless many others.
Three cheers for Apple!
Scotland Yard is reporting that it's "only" four bombings - three in the Underground, and one on a double-decker. The BBC UK has many reports, pictures, and extended coverage. Tony Blair was visibly shaken, and said that he is leaving the G8 Summit to survey the situation, but will return to the Summit, and the Summit will continue in his absense. Blair said it was "reasonably clear" there had been a series of terrorist attacks.
BBC is just reporting that "an Islamist website has posted a statement - purportedly from al-Qaeda - claiming it was behind the attacks."
Tony Blair is just preparing a second speech right now, surrounded by the other G8 leaders, saying, "We will not allow violence to change our societies or values" and "the perpetrators of today's attacks are bent on destroying human life...today's bombings will not weaken our resolve to uphold the most deeply-held principles of our societies and defeat those who would impose their fanaticism and extremism on others. We shall prevail, and they shall not."
The nice thing about web forms is that you can put them on any page and they still work. I've had my own "customized" Google homepage for years: http://home.six27.com. It's obviously not quite as elegant as Google's, but I can incorporate all the things I want or use regularly, and if I find something else I want, I can just add it on. Plus, it's completely portable from computer to computer - no need to sign in!
The devs were already working on it before some jerk full-disclosured w/working exploit.
Well double dumbass on the Mozilla developers for knowing about it and not taking steps to mitigate it even without an exploit in the wild. Calling the person who released it a "jerk" just shows that you have no understanding that a security risk is severe, whether or not anybody knows about its existence. It's said time and time again, but nobody ever listens: security through obscurity is not security. The person who posted it wasn't a jerk - that's just blaming somebody else for the Mozilla developers' failures. Stop pointing the finger, fix the damn problem, and release a patch before Monday morning.
[Disclaimer: I'm a Mozilla lover, not a Mozilla hater, but lovers can still have quarrels. I've used Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox exclusively since a week after Phoenix 0.1 was made public, and I've been a heavy advocate for it from day 1.]
MS came from behind to catch up and pass Netscape
With no disrespect to you or the other poster(s) in this thread who've made this argument, a comparison of the Netscape Communications of 5 years ago and the Mozilla Foundation of today is asinine. When Microsoft overtook Netscape, it was because Netscape had left its front door wide open and placed a detailed map of its weaknesses in public view. The Netscape of yesteryear was shipping a hugely bloated everything-in-one application that didn't work right, needed constant patching, and failed to support some (even then) very basic rendering guidelines. The Netscape 4 series was a web designer's worst nightmare. It was a massive download (20-30M?) in an era where only a small minority of people had access to broadband. And it didn't fit visually and functionally with the rest of Windows. And of course, its primary competition (IE) was already bundled with the OS. Netscape itself was a for profit company in the dot-com era that, like so many dot-bombs, tried to build a business model out of one niche product when a) comparable or better products existed, and b) an established market presence (Microsoft) could far outstrip it in development and marketing resources. Furthermore, Netscape's focus was divided by its also trying to become a web portal leader and its trying to launch major litigation against a major Fortune 500 company. Bad product + outgunned resources + divided focus = business disaster. The remains of Netscape were eventually scraped off the pavement by AOL. The Mozilla Foundation, by comparison, is a non-profit community-driven organization that ships only a handful of specialized, well-targetted applications whose features equal and surpass its competition. Its products have a loyal following because of their technical superiority; this manifests itself in a massive grassroots marketing juggernaut whose collective weight is the envy of some marketing firms. Microsoft may well have strong competition for Firefox with IE7 (although I suspect they won't), but I think it's demonstrably clear that this isn't an instance of history repeating itself. The two major warring are, this time around, very different entities.
Parody is an appropriate tool for social commentary.
Nope, sorry Bruce, I disagree with you here. It's not appropriate when it's used within a context that might be construed as news reporting. In that case, it's extremely irresponsible journalism for the writer to slip it in there - even if it's disclaimed as being false. It leads to confusion on the readers' part, which in turn leads to confusion when the story is repeated. "Social commentary" is fine in a context where it's clear that an editorial position is being taken; even then, however, there needs to be clear delineation between what is "fact" and what is "commentary."
It's certainly arguable that The Register is a source of either news or worthwhile commentary, but that point notwithstanding, the article's composition was flawed, and should be removed by both The Register and Slashdot.
(NB: Linus would also be perfectly fine complaining to OSDN that Slashdot has libeled him.)
As about 50 other people have said, DBAN, Darik's Boot and Nuke. It far exceeds HIPAA Security Rule guidelines for secure deletion of media containing ePHI. It's about as close to a truly secure disk wiping system as you can get.
What the article doesn't make clear is whether or not this means that any of these three publications will make plain-vanilla RSS readily available. If they will, they'll have a hard time convincing people to use their own branded software. If not (e.g. if their RSS feeds are somewhat proprietary), they're shooting themselves in the foot. RSS is an established, working standard. The main complaint of many content providers over RSS is that it's not quite as ad-friendly as regular HTML content (this is a feature, not a bug, if you're a reader).
The Denver Post hasn't had an RSS feed all this time; if they finally post one, I might start reading them more regularly. If, on the other hand, I have to use their proprietary software for their proprietary RSS feed (which almost certainly will be a Windows 2K/XP only application), they'll see my readership decline 100%.
Better idea for content providers: give your readers Firefox and Sage to read your feeds. You'll be giving them a great RSS feeder and be doing them a favor by also providing them with a secure, standards-compliant web browser.
as well as any loss in value of the product because the warrantee is invalid if you send away the original UPC or purchase slip or whatever to get the rebate
The original UPC is of no consequence to your warranty, once you're past the 14- or 30-day return policy of the store. If a company ever requests the UPC to fulfill a product warranty, ask to speak to their head of counsel. As for the original purchase slip (receipt), it's acceptable to send in a photocopy. If you're denied because you send a facsimile, drop a short letter to your state Attorney General and explain the situation. They'll handle it from there.
Domino client won't run. Neither is a Sametime client available. Both were in heavy use in IBM Global Services, at least.
That's assuming that IBM intends to keep up development of Domino; rumors have circulated for a while that there isn't going to be a Domino 7 (6.5.x is the latest). I've also gotten the impression from other IBM workers that Domino and Notes are as hated at IBM as they are everywhere else in the world; and Domino is definetely a monolithic, ugly beast. Sametime is perhaps its one redeeming feature.
Ideally, IBM would take what they learned from Domino and develop an open source groupware platform (badly needed) for Linux. I've never quite figured out why nobody has bothered to challenge the groupware market more. Currently, you can choose from Exchange, GroupWare, or Domino - all equally awful in their own unique ways. Surely IBM could lend some sanity to this mess?
Mozilla (Camaro, Firebird, whatever the hell they're calling themselves this week) just sucks compared to Safari.
You had me until here; Gecko (the Mozilla rendering engine) is generally regarded as the best rendering engine available. It's not the fastest, mind you, but it's the most developed with regards to web standards. Safari isn't far off, but some of it's quirks can get a bit annoying at times. Just ask Gmail users what they thought of Safari up until about 2 months ago.
As a web developer, I'm generally pretty happy with how Safari renders websites, but I really do wish that Apple had forked Gecko instead of KHTML. Given the popularity of Firefox, the Gecko engine has some serious momentum behind it from web developers; twiddling with a 3rd major rendering engine (KHTML) just adds to testing time. And at this point, Firefox and its brethren run as fast as Safari, even though they're not Cocoa applications.
I know that Apple wants to bring as many applications in house as possible, but as a Mac user, at this point I question the value of Apple continuing to sink resources into its own browser when a clearly equal if not superior peer product exists in Firefox (and even moreso after Firefox 1.1 with Mac-specific tweaks is released). Firefox isn't Cocoa, but not everything has to be, either.
There is no such thing as a "stable" "job" anywhere in the United States today. [...] But the 1950s career ladder is gone.
It is, however, ignoble of modern day corporations to assume that the career ladder and career-for-life workplace won't return. Currently the trend is [as you noted] three to five years per job. Ultimately, I think, businesses are going to realize that cyclical employment costs them a lot more money than retaining employees for several decade. Oh sure, pensions aren't cheap, but neither is training new employees, unemployment insurance, and dealing with your five year employee taking your trade secrets to your direct competitor.
The career ladder didn't just arise out of nowhere - the great businessmen of yore knew that it was as good for the business as it was for the employee. Unfortunately, "modern" business practice seems to have forgetten that. The old adage about those who forget history are doomed to repeat it seems appropriate here...
Education has now become accepted as being acquired through experience and higher learning - not just the next step/next grade level of yesteryear.
Only in certain fields, which (judging from your responses elsewhere) you're a part of. In most of the world, it's still accepted that education gives students a few valuable things that they cannot and will not learn outside of an academic setting. These are things such as a holistic sense of how their particular field of study is interrelated with all others, how history has shaped their field and the world around them (useful for avoiding historical repetition, a nasty disease), and drawing from the first two points, how they can take their own skills in their field and make a tangible difference in their communities.
It's also worth pointing out that you said, "Education has been found to be less desirable than motivation and work ethic." Although not universally true, it's generally the case that getting even a bachelor's degree requires a healthy amount of motivation and work ethic. That gets progressively more true the higher up in education you go.
It's sometimes retorted, "Well, look at all those people who never graduated college/high school/elementary school and went on to invent or do some brilliant thing." Such arguments are true enough - education isn't a prerequisite to success or skill. But you'd be hard pressed - in fact, it's impossible - to go through a day and not encounter all sorts of things in your world made possible by people who put their time in in the classroom. For every Steve Jobs (a college dropout) there are 100 people working around him with college degrees that make the bigger work possible.
The only reason Adobe charges so damn much [for Photoshop] is because they know a certain number of people will buy it regardless.
Sorry, but this is a patently false argument. There's a lot of really incredible engineering and mathematics that has gone into Photoshop. Consider the optical kerning engine - simply the best typographical kerning mechanism ever invented. It analyzes the shape of every letter and determines on a per-character basis what degree of kerning is necessary to prevent collisions and preserve a consistent look. Brought to you by years of analytical geometry. Or consider the cloning brush - a tool in Photoshop that blends dischordant pieces of an image with its surroundings. Brought to you by lots of doctoral-level calculus. The list goes on.
The expertise that produces the engineering and math marvels found in Adobe products does not come cheap. You can criticize Adobe for spending too much on marketing or unnecessary litigation, but you can't claim that Adobe charges a lot of money "just because." They have a very high salary line in their annual budget, and the quality of their products reflects this.
EA is there to make money, not take care of people. If they are treating their employees poorly who cares? If the game is good I'll buy it, if it's not I won't.
Regular life in the real world disagrees with you. EA does have an ethical imperative to treat their workers fairly, humanely, and to put the lives of the employees before business. Only libertarians and high school juniors think that capitalism means, "Do whatever it takes to get money, and let the course of business take its toll." (Libertarianism is, by the way, the carrying out of fascism by other means; the one thing libertarianism precisely does not grant is liberty.)
The employees shouldn't have to quit if they're being if they're being treated poorly; government agencies, unions, and consumers should take proactive measures to stop the poor treatment. That may involve monetary fines, forced arbitration between an employees' union and the company, and if warranted criminal proceedings being taken against the company's officers. No, that isn't very laissez faire, but neither is real life.
Wow, I wish I could assign all five of my mod points to your post here. Thanks for compiling a level-headed and wise posting for people to read. You're entirely right that the process is too complicated for a conspiracy theory of some sort to hand one candidate or the other the vote. As you also rightly point out, the simple fact that voting discrepancies are being discovered is proof that the auditing trail works.
I doubt this will put some people's minds at rest, finally, and conspiracy theories will continue to be traded about. What would be better would be for the people who backed Kerry (such as myself) to take a long and discerning look at why Bush was able to win the election, rather than lobbing venomous allegations across the political aisle. I think that the results of the election provide more than enough material for the Democrats and non-Republicans to scrutinize during the next four years. Doing so will certainly be far more advantageous in the long run than worrying ad nauseum about shadow conspiracies.
I will grant, however, that the idea of shadow conspiracies swaying the vote is a much more dramatic and interesting explanation than to say that normal political and social causes were responsible.
Yet again, you don't get it. Plug it in and copy files to it? Most people don't want to have to work at the file system level to listen to music. iTunes lets them:
- a) import their CDs
- b) organize their music
- c) make playlists
- d) copy it all to the iPod with a single click
USB 2.0 might be neat for you, but you're posting on Slashdot. The iPod's audience (normal people) don't care, and would in fact be irritated to have to use the file system. You're member #3,582,104 of the Geeks Who Don't Understand the iPod Club.Great story write-up. Just superlative. Let's re-write and make it clear:
"A group of students won the Apple [Computer] Design Award in June for a program called 4Peaks. For winning the award, they received a 'trophy,' which is a metal cube with an Apple logo on top. When you touch the cube, it glows. Curious as to how this works, the students decided to take their 'trophy' cube into a CT scanner and have it scanned to see what was inside. The linked pictures (in the Slashdot writeup) are what the inside of the cube looks like. Neat looking."
Whew...that wasn't so hard, was it?
Bad markup shouldn't render.
Well, here's an example of where XML is your friend. XML requires well-formedness in code; if something like an end tag is omitted, the page is not well-formed and is broken. A correctly-conforming XML parser (such as the Gecko engine) will not render the page, but will display an error message.
This doesn't absolutely prevent someone from writing an XML parser that, like HTML parsers, stumbles its way through bad code, but it is explicitly outlined in the RFCs for XML that non well-formed code should not be rendered. (And practically speaking, XML parsers really do have to honor this; by definition it would be nearly impossible to have an XML parser that rendered XML correctly if it was agnostic to well-formedness.)
From your sig:
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
So you're tolerant to others, as long as they're not intolerant, and when they are you're intolerant of them? Nope, no irony there. You'd probably find reading Chesterton to be quite a shake.