You know, I remember back in the day when Yahoo! was the darling of news media and many people in the media wrote about their style: uncluttered, minimal graphics, and clean. Today's Yahoo! looks an awful like MSN. Cluttery--much unlike Google. It's ironic, no?
Um, guys, don't forget that there is already a level of region protection built into Windows itself. If anyone here has actually used a RPC1 firmware, you will know that to fully disable region protection, you will need not only a firmware "upgrade", but also some sort of software that hooks into Windows and disables the the region protection on the OS side of things.
So it just means that to get real region freedom, the software will need to do more.
And as mentioned earlier, region protection works simply by getting the drive to refuse to give you the CSS decryption key in the key exchange. Movies that are not CSS-encrypted won't be affected. And software that brute-forces the CSS key won't be affected either.
In economics, the sticker cost is never the true cost. It is the sticker cost AND the oppurtunity cost. Something is glaringly missing from this: Yes, the dark green of trees absorb heat instead of reflecting it. But how much does the dark brown of barren soil absorb? What about green grass, which is the same color as trees and thus should absorb the same amount of sunlight?
The idea of dark colors absorbing sunlight instead of reflecting is well known, but generally in the context of when arctic ice melts and the melting reveals barren brown ground that does not reflect the same way as ice/snow and that thus quickens the melting of arctic ice/snow. So if you replace a field of snow with trees (trees that are not snow-covered, mind you--snow-covered trees are mostly white, depending on how recent/fresh the snow is), then yea, you'd get a nice warming effect. But if you replace a barren spread of brown soil with trees, I seriously doubt that you would get that much warming effect.
Ahem! There is a difference between syntactical messiness and semantic messiness. Perl is very ugly syntactically, but I've found it so very beautiful semantically, and its fluidity is exactly what makes Perl so perfect: it allows the fusion of functional (e.g., Lisp-like), imperative (e.g., C-like), and OO paradigms of programming. While many languages fuse the latter two (like C++), few are able to successfully fuse in the first (with things like functions being first-class expressions and something similar to an equivalence of statements and expressions) (and no, just because Python has "lambda" doesn't make it more Lisp-like in the broad picture--in fact, they are even thinking about retreating from that--grrr).
If someone feels that using the full scope of Perl results in messiness, they aren't forced by any means to use that full scope. There are many Perl coders who limit themselves to the "C subset" of Perl. But unlike certain other unnamed languages, Perl doesn't try to play the role of parent in telling you what you can and can't express so those who are more comfortable with a wider breadth of linguistic forms can take advantage of that and make code that is, in a word, elegant.
As for the syntactical ugliness (the $, @, %, etc.) that most people are referring to when they say that Perl is ugly... well, you learn to live with that pretty early on. But beneath that superficial ugliness lies a sparkling beautiful language.
Me too.:) And expanding that wonderful philosophy to the language itself, that is exactly why I don't like Python--I like the freedom of Perl (even if it results in syntactical messiness... but that freedom of expression leads to some of the most elegant code in the world, in a non-syntactical sense). I don't want some paternalistic syntax dictating how I should best express using the langauge.
It still happens. I know, because in the course of administering systems, I've seen a number of things that do this.
One very simplistic and small example is a Perl CGI script that accesses the localhost MySQL server. Something that looked like this: $mysql_login = "foo"; $mysql_passwd = "bar";
Well, how was it going to handle the database login? If not in the script, then in a file? And if it's in a file, then is that file any bit more secure than the script--instead of hard-coding into the script, you'll hard-code it into a file. It's better, but not really much better. There really isn't a good way around this problem.
Think about it... how else would you handle something as simple as a PHP or Perl script accessing the local database? The user supplies data to log in to access the script, not the database. There really isn't any other way.
I've been using computers for over 13 years now. I primarily use Windows with a little bit of Linux. I've been programming for over a decade and I have administered major servers. And I have NEVER ever used ANY of these programs for any sustained amount of time. Guess that means that I just practice bad security, huh? Well...
Anti-virus: Aside from having a tendency to break a lot of things on the system and cause endless compatbility headaches, they also hamper performance significantly. And they expect you to pay them for a piece of bloated software that breaks installs and that slows your system? They also offer a false sense of security, as new worm/virus outbreaks usually run around and do a good chunk of damage before the virus signatures get added to the software. Despite going without protection, I don't get viruses. All it takes is some common sense and patching up of security holes.
Anti-spyware: I've never gotten spyware. It really isn't that hard to select no in the install options or to Google up a software product that may seem shady (not often that I'd be using such software in the first place, though) to see if there are any known spyware associated with it.
Software firewall: I am uneasy about firewalls. On one hand, I recognize that a proper firewall (i.e., hardware) is usually a good idea in an enterprise setting, but I am not so fond of this everyone-should-have-a-software-firewall craze. For one, it breaks the Internet. I can't count the number of times when I've found myself on a network that, in the name of security, block all outgoing ports except HTTP, SMTP, and all the other common ones, and me having to establish SSH tunnels to get around such restrictions in order for me to do what I want. I've even seen a DSL router whose pre-set firewall setting (if you turn the damned firewall on) blocked virtually everything (SMTP over SSL, POP over SSL, and even SSH, which means that I can't even tunnel around the damned thing). It's one thing to block incoming ports that you know you won't be listening to (e.g., 31337), but most firewalls do a lot more than that.
Of course, all this is from the perspective of an experienced computer user. I agree that for the Average Joe who doesn't know what the heck a port is and who can't tell if what they downloaded is a virus or not, such things may be worthwhile. But to make a blanket statement saying that people who throw these things aside are not security conscious is just wrong. I simply don't want to sacrifice performance and usability for what (to me personally) amounts to snake oil.
A lot of people have posted about "hey, what about Linux users". Well, face it, Linux users are a small minority. But there are quite a number Windows users who know what the difference is between a legit attachment and a viral attachment who may share the same perspective that I have on all this junk.
1/ I think that the core NASA missions should be kept at NASA for the sake of maintaining scientific integrity and also because it allows for riskier and more substantial undertakings. The grunt work of hauling cargo (which is what this is all about) is a good candidate for outsourcing, though. So as long as this doesn't turn into a slippery slope of a total NASA privatization...
2/ I am reserved about how effective this can be. Can the private sector really do it for a lower cost? Will they be able to do a good job? NASA is not very efficient, so hopefully this won't be that hard to achieve, but until they can show that private companies really can be as effective, I'll take this as wait-and-see.
And to comment on the article's constant mention of space start-ups: perhaps I shouldn't judge so much on just one incident, but the whole X-Prize thing did not serve as a good first impression for me personally for the private-sector start-up space industry. The kind of hoopula that went into what was essentially a glorified rocket plane that momentarily touched space and won by a design that was geared specifically towards meeting the winning requirements was really discouraging (like studying for a test by studying the test instead of the real material), and I fear that, at the moment, much of the talk about space start-ups in the US is just hype.
I'm surprised that nobody has pointed this out: the article notes that the author of the software has tried to contact the company and has received no reply, which strikes me as rather odd, almost a little like when Plextor brought action against some freeware tools but never followed up on it in any fashion whatsoever. So this brings up some possibilities:
1/ There might've been a misunderstanding, as briefly suggested in the article.
2/ Organizations are never completely monolithic. They are composed of individuals who try to somehow work in unison, but it is not uncommon for an underling to do something that the powers-to-be at the top did not intend. Maybe one of their lawyers got a little overzealous.
It may very well be the case that the company is just taking its merry time and that when it replies, it will confirm our current belief that it has totally lost touch with reality, but until that happens, I think it's a bit premature to jump to so many conclusions.
If ICANN wants to play down the influence of the US government, something that it could do is to provide rationale for what it is doing that come from a neutral and respected source. For example, the US Gov't says.xxx is bad. ICANN agrees. People are in uproar. ICANN then says *why* they agree with the US Gov't and state reasons that are neutrally-rooted as to why. For example, they can cite this thing by the IETF (on last check, a fairly neutral group, not tied with the US Gov't): http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3675.txt
What's so dumb about the idea? ICANN creates the TLD. Website visitors and owners then decide for themselves what is "Asian" and what is not.
If you look at.com, a lot of.com sites are not commercial. The de facto meaning of.com is determined freely and organicly by the masses of operators and visitors, and the ICANN specs only provide something of a suggested meaning. I think that the same can work here to great effect.
I've used the IIS GUI once because I was curious. *shudder* GUIs are useful only when well-designed.
1/ There are Apache GUIs. Google them up. Some are free, some are not.
2/ Opening the config file in a GUI text editor and navigating around with a mouse should be fairly easy, especially with the copious amount of documenation in the config.
3/ It's very difficult to express the rich level of complexity of Apache configurations in a GUI. Just imagine how on Earth a GUI can be made to handle nested VirtualHosts, Directorys, and Files. Throw in some regexp, and suddenly, you are faced with a situation where it becomes a heck of a lot easier to just edit the config file. To say that a GUI is always easier than text is incorrect; it depends on the situation, and Apache configs are one of those situations where this is the case (kinda like how when dealing with non-photographic web graphics, you need to use PNG or GIF and avoid JPG like the plague and how when dealing with photographic web graphics, you have to use JPG... each rules over their own niche of strength).
4/ If a GUI is made, it is highly likely that it won't be as powerful as just using a text editor; it's not as expressive (see above). But there's really not much to do with the basic configuration, either. For the most part, the default configuration works just fine, and if someone needs to edit the settings, it's mostly for the complicated stuff that would be a bloody mess to do in a GUI.
It's quite common these days for non-Americans to pin just about anything as a mistake of the US government. Not that I blame people for doing so because we have had quite a number of our diplomatic blunders in the past years... but to let this tainted image result in the assumption that the US government does the wrong thing all the time is just as incorrect as assuming that the US government does the right thing all the time.
In any case, just because religious conservative groups oppose the.xxx domain doesn't automatically mean that those who dislike religious conservatives (me=atheist) must then automatically take the opposite side--there are, believe it or not, instances when two opposing sides can take the same stance on the same issue (though their reasons for doing so may certainly differ).
There are a lot of issues to consider, and to save myself the trouble, I'll just paste a link to this IETF document, RFC3675.
That's interesting how they jumped from the 2.1.x beta versions to 2.2.0. They didn't do this when they went from the 2.0.x beta to the 2.0.x stable (hence the large.55 attached to 2.0.x right now). It's kinda like what Perl does with having devel and stable versions have odd and even numbers, respectively.
Anyway, I guess the big question is, how many people will actually adopt 2.2.0. I still remember when 2.0 came out to mostly a yawn as most people kept using 1.3.x. Even today, most of the servers that I come across or administer are still using 1.3.x because unless you were running Windows, 2.x didn't really offer spectacular improvements over 1.3.x, and looking at the changes for 2.(1|2).x (anyone who's going to transfer a >2GB file over HTTP is crazy;)), I have this feeling that we might see the same 1.3->2.0 inertia.
This is going to be moot if the law enforcement is dealing with people who are serious about what they're doing. I'm sure that if someone is planning an elaborate high-profile attack, they would have the sense to be careful as well, so it won't matter if you use IE or if you use Firefox or if you use Lynx--it's not that hard to wipe out all traces of activity from your computer no matter what browser you use. So I doubt that this is going to be of any help in dealing with smart criminals.
And if the law enforcement can't figure out how to write a simple tool to decipher the files that are left behind from alternative browsers (especially one like Firefox that is open-source, meaning that the format of such files would be easy to determine), then that's just, well, pathetic.
And finally, I think that this is a good thing. Most people in this world will probably never ever have to deal with law enforcement. But they do have to deal with snooping parents, snooping friends, snooping girlfriends, snooping spouses, snooping bosses, etc., so I welcome this as good news.;)
The article talks about getting media labeled with lifespans. In the case of optical media, the burning process contributes to the longevity just as much as the physical disc itself. I'd imagine that moving a laptop while its internal drive is burning could be problematic and lead to media that won't last as long. Or improper laser calibration.
Second, how do the manufacturers know how long a disc will last? They do accelerated aging tests by exposing discs to extreme conditions, but are those results good estimates? Maybe, but we'll never find out until decades down the line when we can finally verify the validity of such claims empirically.
Yay! One more company to support the technically superior (see http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/186 for technical details) BD format!:) Apple's market share might not make that much of a dent in the HD-DVD vs. BD war, but Apple does carry a name recognition and "cool factor" that might help. And Pixar, too.
1/ Quality of service. Government involvement doesn't stamp out competition. It could spur private enterprises to provide better, faster, stabler, less conjested service. It could potentially mean *more* competition.
2/ This is a public good. Many hard-core libertarians would disagree with money spent on public goods, and that's really just a matter of philosophy. But given the precedents of public parks (why build public parks when you could have Green Grass Enterprises provide parks and charge the little kids money each time they want to go down a slide?), public libraries (why have libraries when you can be overcharged by Borders?), a military (why have government build and own the nukes that protected us from the USSR and not NukeUSA Inc.?), etc., what is wrong with public Internet? Oh, right, Internet is more lucrative than the park business. Anyway, enough sarcasm. The point is, the precedent is set. Sometimes the line between special interests and genuine public goods can be blurry, but in this case, I'd definitely call it a public good, and by precedent, it should be fine!
3/ A rising tide raises all ships. Sometimes, social engineering is a good thing. Seeing as how much a paradigm the Internet is, getting people access to it can help change the nature of society. By the way, most economists (even conservative ones) consider education and information to be public goods.
Whatever happened to the good old days when users *expected* version 1 to be the unstable version and that version 2 or 3 is when the good stuff comes out? In the time it took for Phoenix/Fire(bird|fox) finally exited beta, Netscape had gone from version 1 to version 2 to version 3... anyway, my thoughts on this...
1/ Overuse of betas will lead to a diminishing of the meaning of beta. Favorite examples would be ICQ and Firefox. I used Firefox since 0.6, and it's worked beautifully for me ever since. But *despite the fact that it worked fine enough to serve as my primary browser*, it was considered beta. As more and more people discover this little fact that "beta doesn't really mean beta" then its meaning will diminish. Next thing we know, we'll be talking about long alpha periods.
2/ The versioning system is supposed to give people a good idea of what kinds of changes there have been. The use of beta names diminishes and distorts that. Once again, I return to Firefox. The amount of changes made between 0.6 and 1.0 of FF is tremendous. Based on what is seen on paper, it was more substantial than what 1.0->1.5 would be. With perpetual betas, people have that magical 1.0 barrier that they can't break. So there is a compression and thus distortion of version numbering.
3/ It's a cute new way to push aside blame. Well, it's a beta product, so if it's broke, it's not our fault. Of course, there are time when this *should* have been used (and not used), like Netscape 6. But it's being overused.
4/ This is just pure nostalgia, but I miss the good old days when version numbers would leap ahead and people would be in anticipation of exciting new features. Now, version numbers creep from beta1 to beta2 to beta3 and while there are still cool and exciting changes, they seem marginalized.
I strongly believe that betas should be used for things that are legitimately under development. As soon as it's stable enough that the developer would feel comfortable with using it on a regular basis without it completely blowing up, it's 1.0. Save the perfection and endless tweaking and bugfixing for 1.1 or 2.0; I have yet to see a perfect 1.0, even if eons of time have been funneled into perfection.
To be blunt, Anandtech should stick to reviewing CPUs. In my experience, reviews of optical drives by those who don't specialize in them (such as Anandtech or Tom's) tend to be very poor. They look at the wrong things (put emphasis on things that are not important and not put emphasis on things that are) and their testing methods are not always accurate.
For example, there are many who feel that the BenQ is actually a very excellent drive. The active OPC produces *better* results (not worse, as the reviewer thinks). Though slightly slower, it has the ability to overspeed media (burn 8x media at 16x, for example) with excellent quality. It also doesn't help that the review used a very outdated firmware for the BenQ review.
And to answer another question that someone had, none of these firmwares have DRM.
A better place for reviews: http://www.cdrlabs.com/
And a review of this Anandtech review: http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.ph p?t=18064
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I remember back in the day when Yahoo! was the darling of news media and many people in the media wrote about their style: uncluttered, minimal graphics, and clean. Today's Yahoo! looks an awful like MSN. Cluttery--much unlike Google. It's ironic, no?
Um, guys, don't forget that there is already a level of region protection built into Windows itself. If anyone here has actually used a RPC1 firmware, you will know that to fully disable region protection, you will need not only a firmware "upgrade", but also some sort of software that hooks into Windows and disables the the region protection on the OS side of things.
So it just means that to get real region freedom, the software will need to do more.
And as mentioned earlier, region protection works simply by getting the drive to refuse to give you the CSS decryption key in the key exchange. Movies that are not CSS-encrypted won't be affected. And software that brute-forces the CSS key won't be affected either.
In economics, the sticker cost is never the true cost. It is the sticker cost AND the oppurtunity cost. Something is glaringly missing from this: Yes, the dark green of trees absorb heat instead of reflecting it. But how much does the dark brown of barren soil absorb? What about green grass, which is the same color as trees and thus should absorb the same amount of sunlight?
The idea of dark colors absorbing sunlight instead of reflecting is well known, but generally in the context of when arctic ice melts and the melting reveals barren brown ground that does not reflect the same way as ice/snow and that thus quickens the melting of arctic ice/snow. So if you replace a field of snow with trees (trees that are not snow-covered, mind you--snow-covered trees are mostly white, depending on how recent/fresh the snow is), then yea, you'd get a nice warming effect. But if you replace a barren spread of brown soil with trees, I seriously doubt that you would get that much warming effect.
Ahem! There is a difference between syntactical messiness and semantic messiness. Perl is very ugly syntactically, but I've found it so very beautiful semantically, and its fluidity is exactly what makes Perl so perfect: it allows the fusion of functional (e.g., Lisp-like), imperative (e.g., C-like), and OO paradigms of programming. While many languages fuse the latter two (like C++), few are able to successfully fuse in the first (with things like functions being first-class expressions and something similar to an equivalence of statements and expressions) (and no, just because Python has "lambda" doesn't make it more Lisp-like in the broad picture--in fact, they are even thinking about retreating from that--grrr).
If someone feels that using the full scope of Perl results in messiness, they aren't forced by any means to use that full scope. There are many Perl coders who limit themselves to the "C subset" of Perl. But unlike certain other unnamed languages, Perl doesn't try to play the role of parent in telling you what you can and can't express so those who are more comfortable with a wider breadth of linguistic forms can take advantage of that and make code that is, in a word, elegant.
As for the syntactical ugliness (the $, @, %, etc.) that most people are referring to when they say that Perl is ugly... well, you learn to live with that pretty early on. But beneath that superficial ugliness lies a sparkling beautiful language.
Me too. :) And expanding that wonderful philosophy to the language itself, that is exactly why I don't like Python--I like the freedom of Perl (even if it results in syntactical messiness... but that freedom of expression leads to some of the most elegant code in the world, in a non-syntactical sense). I don't want some paternalistic syntax dictating how I should best express using the langauge.
It still happens. I know, because in the course of administering systems, I've seen a number of things that do this.
One very simplistic and small example is a Perl CGI script that accesses the localhost MySQL server. Something that looked like this:
$mysql_login = "foo";
$mysql_passwd = "bar";
Well, how was it going to handle the database login? If not in the script, then in a file? And if it's in a file, then is that file any bit more secure than the script--instead of hard-coding into the script, you'll hard-code it into a file. It's better, but not really much better. There really isn't a good way around this problem.
Think about it... how else would you handle something as simple as a PHP or Perl script accessing the local database? The user supplies data to log in to access the script, not the database. There really isn't any other way.
I've been using computers for over 13 years now. I primarily use Windows with a little bit of Linux. I've been programming for over a decade and I have administered major servers. And I have NEVER ever used ANY of these programs for any sustained amount of time. Guess that means that I just practice bad security, huh? Well...
Anti-virus: Aside from having a tendency to break a lot of things on the system and cause endless compatbility headaches, they also hamper performance significantly. And they expect you to pay them for a piece of bloated software that breaks installs and that slows your system? They also offer a false sense of security, as new worm/virus outbreaks usually run around and do a good chunk of damage before the virus signatures get added to the software. Despite going without protection, I don't get viruses. All it takes is some common sense and patching up of security holes.
Anti-spyware: I've never gotten spyware. It really isn't that hard to select no in the install options or to Google up a software product that may seem shady (not often that I'd be using such software in the first place, though) to see if there are any known spyware associated with it.
Software firewall: I am uneasy about firewalls. On one hand, I recognize that a proper firewall (i.e., hardware) is usually a good idea in an enterprise setting, but I am not so fond of this everyone-should-have-a-software-firewall craze. For one, it breaks the Internet. I can't count the number of times when I've found myself on a network that, in the name of security, block all outgoing ports except HTTP, SMTP, and all the other common ones, and me having to establish SSH tunnels to get around such restrictions in order for me to do what I want. I've even seen a DSL router whose pre-set firewall setting (if you turn the damned firewall on) blocked virtually everything (SMTP over SSL, POP over SSL, and even SSH, which means that I can't even tunnel around the damned thing). It's one thing to block incoming ports that you know you won't be listening to (e.g., 31337), but most firewalls do a lot more than that.
Of course, all this is from the perspective of an experienced computer user. I agree that for the Average Joe who doesn't know what the heck a port is and who can't tell if what they downloaded is a virus or not, such things may be worthwhile. But to make a blanket statement saying that people who throw these things aside are not security conscious is just wrong. I simply don't want to sacrifice performance and usability for what (to me personally) amounts to snake oil.
A lot of people have posted about "hey, what about Linux users". Well, face it, Linux users are a small minority. But there are quite a number Windows users who know what the difference is between a legit attachment and a viral attachment who may share the same perspective that I have on all this junk.
If you want to get this at the ol' .com.com (never understood why they did that) instead of MSNBC, here's C|Net's article on this:t s+for+shuttle+trips/2100-11397_3-5986093.html
http://news.com.com/NASA+seeks+private+replacemen
I think this is good... as long as...
1/ I think that the core NASA missions should be kept at NASA for the sake of maintaining scientific integrity and also because it allows for riskier and more substantial undertakings. The grunt work of hauling cargo (which is what this is all about) is a good candidate for outsourcing, though. So as long as this doesn't turn into a slippery slope of a total NASA privatization...
2/ I am reserved about how effective this can be. Can the private sector really do it for a lower cost? Will they be able to do a good job? NASA is not very efficient, so hopefully this won't be that hard to achieve, but until they can show that private companies really can be as effective, I'll take this as wait-and-see.
And to comment on the article's constant mention of space start-ups: perhaps I shouldn't judge so much on just one incident, but the whole X-Prize thing did not serve as a good first impression for me personally for the private-sector start-up space industry. The kind of hoopula that went into what was essentially a glorified rocket plane that momentarily touched space and won by a design that was geared specifically towards meeting the winning requirements was really discouraging (like studying for a test by studying the test instead of the real material), and I fear that, at the moment, much of the talk about space start-ups in the US is just hype.
I'm surprised that nobody has pointed this out: the article notes that the author of the software has tried to contact the company and has received no reply, which strikes me as rather odd, almost a little like when Plextor brought action against some freeware tools but never followed up on it in any fashion whatsoever. So this brings up some possibilities:
1/ There might've been a misunderstanding, as briefly suggested in the article.
2/ Organizations are never completely monolithic. They are composed of individuals who try to somehow work in unison, but it is not uncommon for an underling to do something that the powers-to-be at the top did not intend. Maybe one of their lawyers got a little overzealous.
It may very well be the case that the company is just taking its merry time and that when it replies, it will confirm our current belief that it has totally lost touch with reality, but until that happens, I think it's a bit premature to jump to so many conclusions.
Now they need to have an open dictionary for French... a counter-balance for L'Académie française. ;)
If ICANN wants to play down the influence of the US government, something that it could do is to provide rationale for what it is doing that come from a neutral and respected source. For example, the US Gov't says .xxx is bad. ICANN agrees. People are in uproar. ICANN then says *why* they agree with the US Gov't and state reasons that are neutrally-rooted as to why. For example, they can cite this thing by the IETF (on last check, a fairly neutral group, not tied with the US Gov't): http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3675.txt
What's so dumb about the idea? ICANN creates the TLD. Website visitors and owners then decide for themselves what is "Asian" and what is not.
.com, a lot of .com sites are not commercial. The de facto meaning of .com is determined freely and organicly by the masses of operators and visitors, and the ICANN specs only provide something of a suggested meaning. I think that the same can work here to great effect.
If you look at
I've used the IIS GUI once because I was curious. *shudder* GUIs are useful only when well-designed.
1/ There are Apache GUIs. Google them up. Some are free, some are not.
2/ Opening the config file in a GUI text editor and navigating around with a mouse should be fairly easy, especially with the copious amount of documenation in the config.
3/ It's very difficult to express the rich level of complexity of Apache configurations in a GUI. Just imagine how on Earth a GUI can be made to handle nested VirtualHosts, Directorys, and Files. Throw in some regexp, and suddenly, you are faced with a situation where it becomes a heck of a lot easier to just edit the config file. To say that a GUI is always easier than text is incorrect; it depends on the situation, and Apache configs are one of those situations where this is the case (kinda like how when dealing with non-photographic web graphics, you need to use PNG or GIF and avoid JPG like the plague and how when dealing with photographic web graphics, you have to use JPG... each rules over their own niche of strength).
4/ If a GUI is made, it is highly likely that it won't be as powerful as just using a text editor; it's not as expressive (see above). But there's really not much to do with the basic configuration, either. For the most part, the default configuration works just fine, and if someone needs to edit the settings, it's mostly for the complicated stuff that would be a bloody mess to do in a GUI.
5/ Compactness and portability.
I would guess that with the increase in use of mod_php or mod_perl, people went with those options for fast server-side execution instead.
It's quite common these days for non-Americans to pin just about anything as a mistake of the US government. Not that I blame people for doing so because we have had quite a number of our diplomatic blunders in the past years... but to let this tainted image result in the assumption that the US government does the wrong thing all the time is just as incorrect as assuming that the US government does the right thing all the time.
.xxx domain doesn't automatically mean that those who dislike religious conservatives (me=atheist) must then automatically take the opposite side--there are, believe it or not, instances when two opposing sides can take the same stance on the same issue (though their reasons for doing so may certainly differ).
;) Hope this helps.
In any case, just because religious conservative groups oppose the
There are a lot of issues to consider, and to save myself the trouble, I'll just paste a link to this IETF document, RFC3675.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3675.txt
The IETF, on last check, isn't religiously-motivated, nor are they politically affiliated.
That's interesting how they jumped from the 2.1.x beta versions to 2.2.0. They didn't do this when they went from the 2.0.x beta to the 2.0.x stable (hence the large .55 attached to 2.0.x right now). It's kinda like what Perl does with having devel and stable versions have odd and even numbers, respectively.
;)), I have this feeling that we might see the same 1.3->2.0 inertia.
Anyway, I guess the big question is, how many people will actually adopt 2.2.0. I still remember when 2.0 came out to mostly a yawn as most people kept using 1.3.x. Even today, most of the servers that I come across or administer are still using 1.3.x because unless you were running Windows, 2.x didn't really offer spectacular improvements over 1.3.x, and looking at the changes for 2.(1|2).x (anyone who's going to transfer a >2GB file over HTTP is crazy
This is going to be moot if the law enforcement is dealing with people who are serious about what they're doing. I'm sure that if someone is planning an elaborate high-profile attack, they would have the sense to be careful as well, so it won't matter if you use IE or if you use Firefox or if you use Lynx--it's not that hard to wipe out all traces of activity from your computer no matter what browser you use. So I doubt that this is going to be of any help in dealing with smart criminals.
;)
And if the law enforcement can't figure out how to write a simple tool to decipher the files that are left behind from alternative browsers (especially one like Firefox that is open-source, meaning that the format of such files would be easy to determine), then that's just, well, pathetic.
And finally, I think that this is a good thing. Most people in this world will probably never ever have to deal with law enforcement. But they do have to deal with snooping parents, snooping friends, snooping girlfriends, snooping spouses, snooping bosses, etc., so I welcome this as good news.
First thing that came to my mind when I saw this article was Star Trek's Universal Translator. This is neat...
Longest swim: 197 km from Mexico to Cuba.5 4452
Source: http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/index.asp?ID=
I guess the trans-Atlantic swim mentioned earlier didn't count because that was done at intervals.
The article talks about getting media labeled with lifespans. In the case of optical media, the burning process contributes to the longevity just as much as the physical disc itself. I'd imagine that moving a laptop while its internal drive is burning could be problematic and lead to media that won't last as long. Or improper laser calibration.
Second, how do the manufacturers know how long a disc will last? They do accelerated aging tests by exposing discs to extreme conditions, but are those results good estimates? Maybe, but we'll never find out until decades down the line when we can finally verify the validity of such claims empirically.
Yay! One more company to support the technically superior (see http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/186 for technical details) BD format! :) Apple's market share might not make that much of a dent in the HD-DVD vs. BD war, but Apple does carry a name recognition and "cool factor" that might help. And Pixar, too.
1/ Quality of service. Government involvement doesn't stamp out competition. It could spur private enterprises to provide better, faster, stabler, less conjested service. It could potentially mean *more* competition.
2/ This is a public good. Many hard-core libertarians would disagree with money spent on public goods, and that's really just a matter of philosophy. But given the precedents of public parks (why build public parks when you could have Green Grass Enterprises provide parks and charge the little kids money each time they want to go down a slide?), public libraries (why have libraries when you can be overcharged by Borders?), a military (why have government build and own the nukes that protected us from the USSR and not NukeUSA Inc.?), etc., what is wrong with public Internet? Oh, right, Internet is more lucrative than the park business. Anyway, enough sarcasm. The point is, the precedent is set. Sometimes the line between special interests and genuine public goods can be blurry, but in this case, I'd definitely call it a public good, and by precedent, it should be fine!
3/ A rising tide raises all ships. Sometimes, social engineering is a good thing. Seeing as how much a paradigm the Internet is, getting people access to it can help change the nature of society. By the way, most economists (even conservative ones) consider education and information to be public goods.
Whatever happened to the good old days when users *expected* version 1 to be the unstable version and that version 2 or 3 is when the good stuff comes out? In the time it took for Phoenix/Fire(bird|fox) finally exited beta, Netscape had gone from version 1 to version 2 to version 3... anyway, my thoughts on this...
1/ Overuse of betas will lead to a diminishing of the meaning of beta. Favorite examples would be ICQ and Firefox. I used Firefox since 0.6, and it's worked beautifully for me ever since. But *despite the fact that it worked fine enough to serve as my primary browser*, it was considered beta. As more and more people discover this little fact that "beta doesn't really mean beta" then its meaning will diminish. Next thing we know, we'll be talking about long alpha periods.
2/ The versioning system is supposed to give people a good idea of what kinds of changes there have been. The use of beta names diminishes and distorts that. Once again, I return to Firefox. The amount of changes made between 0.6 and 1.0 of FF is tremendous. Based on what is seen on paper, it was more substantial than what 1.0->1.5 would be. With perpetual betas, people have that magical 1.0 barrier that they can't break. So there is a compression and thus distortion of version numbering.
3/ It's a cute new way to push aside blame. Well, it's a beta product, so if it's broke, it's not our fault. Of course, there are time when this *should* have been used (and not used), like Netscape 6. But it's being overused.
4/ This is just pure nostalgia, but I miss the good old days when version numbers would leap ahead and people would be in anticipation of exciting new features. Now, version numbers creep from beta1 to beta2 to beta3 and while there are still cool and exciting changes, they seem marginalized.
I strongly believe that betas should be used for things that are legitimately under development. As soon as it's stable enough that the developer would feel comfortable with using it on a regular basis without it completely blowing up, it's 1.0. Save the perfection and endless tweaking and bugfixing for 1.1 or 2.0; I have yet to see a perfect 1.0, even if eons of time have been funneled into perfection.
To be blunt, Anandtech should stick to reviewing CPUs. In my experience, reviews of optical drives by those who don't specialize in them (such as Anandtech or Tom's) tend to be very poor. They look at the wrong things (put emphasis on things that are not important and not put emphasis on things that are) and their testing methods are not always accurate.
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For example, there are many who feel that the BenQ is actually a very excellent drive. The active OPC produces *better* results (not worse, as the reviewer thinks). Though slightly slower, it has the ability to overspeed media (burn 8x media at 16x, for example) with excellent quality. It also doesn't help that the review used a very outdated firmware for the BenQ review.
And to answer another question that someone had, none of these firmwares have DRM.
A better place for reviews:
http://www.cdrlabs.com/
And a review of this Anandtech review:
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.p