If you have electric brakes, which are already in use on commercial vehicles, and which are similar in design to air brakes (but more reliable, simplier, and cheaper), the failure mode is "brake", thanks to the wonder of springs. This isn't exactly a complicated problem.
Re:Too much "innovation", too little scope for cha
on
GUIs Get a Makeover
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· Score: 1
While your point is valid, some of your history is not:
The Apple menu in Systems 1-6 was not used as a launch bar or anything else of the sort. In most cases it contained an item called "About [program name]", a divider, and a list of Desk Accessories*. Regular programs could not be launched from the Apple menu at all (at least not directly), and there was no way for a user to manipulate the contents other than by installing and removing Desk Accessories.
Starting in System 7 the Apple menu could be used as a launch bar, and eventually even got support for hierarchial folders for things like "Recent Documents". But it was intended as a user-customizable shortcut bar, and to provide access to legacy Desk Acessory-like programs, not as the primary launch system.
At no time did the Apple menu allow you to do anything other than launch a program or Desk Accessory (though in the System 7.5 days there was a program that initiated a shutdown). The "Special" menu provided functions like "Shutdown" until OS X, and in OS X the Apple menu is a lot like the "Special" menu from pre-X days.
*Desk Accessories were very limited programs that had to be installed into the resource fork of the System file. They ran in the address space of a regular program, and did not even have access to draw their own menus. In System 7 they got their own address space and a default set of menus as legacy support, and developers were encouraged to create stand-alone programs instead of Desk Accessories.
If the client-server code gets re-used in every new app, how is that different from using a web browser with respect the context of the obscurity that the parent suggested could be provided with other solutions? Any sufficiently re-used bit of code loses its obscurity by means of its popularity.
Moreover, it's still more work to maintain your own client-server app than to use the browsers and HTTP servers that are available for free on every popular operating system. Even if you assume $0 in maintenance, you at least have to write the thing in the first place.
A) It's just as simple to prevent an SQL injection attack. Failing to clean your input is just a stupid mistake, regardless of the input method. Mistakes happen, but let's not pretend that input validation is complicated.
B) The reason people like to build web interfaces is that the client, server, and transfer mechanism already exist. Writing a new one for each project is much, much more work.
About 6 weeks ago. And it was out for more than 4 days. Before that my phone was out in May 2005 for a couple of days. Both times I continued to have IP access via GPRS and WiFi, and could have (if I had VoIP->POTS service) kept using a VoIP line with the same phone number despite the failure of my POTS line.
May experiences may not be common, but at least in my life, IP has been both more reliable, and just as importantly, more flexible.
Smoking kills 400,000 people per year huh? Are you sure that isn't some of the "truth" that you got from the silly commercials this guy was complaining about in the first place? Only about 3,000,000 people actually died in 2004. Given the ~20% rate of smoking in adults at that time, that's only ~600,000 smokers that died in 2004. Are you seriously suggesting that 2/3 smokers die from smoking?
PGP is a lossless encryption whereas fairplay uses a watermark technique. Big difference in algorithms and quantum theory has nothing to do with it.
FairPlay uses Rijndael-AES to encrypt the AAC stream. It's just as lossless as PGP. There is personal information in the file, but not in the audio stream (this isn't MPEG here -- the file is structued). The personal information (such as the actual song keys and your account name) can be removed without affecting the encrypted/non-encrypted state of the audio stream. I don't know what system you're thinking of, but it's not FairPlay.
But can you also watch those recorded shows over your home network on other PCs? Burn to DVD?
Maybe not with Tivo, but you can with ReplayTV, and it doesn't even take any hacking.
That being said, my next PVR system will be computer-based, rather than Tivo/Replay/etc. Forget this whole "insert DVD" thing -- I want all my media online and available from any playback device in the house.
That's exactly my point, and I'm not wrong. Even if we limit the discussion here to onemany NAT and not manymany NAT, which doesn't do anything like what you claim, the parts that you like are the stateful firewall parts, not the address translation parts.
For example, a onemany NAT gateway can be configured to forward all incoming connections to a host (or even several hosts for that matter) on the internal network. All the traffic that comes through the gateway will go through address translation, but none of it will be dropped. In this setup (which is available even on many home NAT routers as the DMZ setting) none of the "security" you claim NAT provides is present.
Dropping packets is what a firewall does. NATting is what happens after the firewall acts to ensure that IP connections work correctly across the discontinuous address space. The fact that they often happen together is not proof that they are inseparable, nor that one provides the functions of the other.
How is "prevents uninitiated outside connections from reaching devices inside the private network unless specifically configured as a server" any different than what a firewall does?
I agree with the parent -- you don't mean NAT, you meant stateful packet inspection and blocking of inbound traffic that isn't related to previous outbound traffic.
Being random is an important part of being legal -- back when the FAA started requiring security screenings at airports (1972?) SCOTUS ruled that such screenings must A) be limited in scope only to explosives and weapons, and B) must be applied uniformly. So admitting that you're selecting people (even by a non-protected category) calls the legality of the searches into question.
I think your local library would beg to differ. Reducing the weight of books would simplify shelving and general architectural design of libraries.
If they were lighter and smaller they'd just get damaged more easily. Thinner pages would rip and be transparent.
That's not quite "working exactly like today's books" then is it? Non-paper technologies (even non-electronic ones) might well be thinner, stronger, and more opaque than traditional paper books.
Then it's a good thing we have glasses and electricity.
Yes, because it's really handy to hold a magnifying glass in your arthritic hands while reading the newspaper. Thanks for your compassion.
Even medieval people had candles. Reading backlit screens in the dark fucks your eyes up anyway.
That's just blatantly false. A properly illuminated screen will not "fuck your eyes up". Having a single, high-intensity illumination setting is not the only option for an ebook.
No, it isn't. Maybe if you're illiterate.
In case you've never visited the non-fiction section, there are books with non-literary descriptions of sounds. Maybe you don't want someone to imitate the sounds described in a story, but in a bird-watching guide it *would* be useful to have actual sound samples, rather than pseudo-phonetic descriptions of sounds that have no linguistic basis.
How do you backup your expensive ebook reader when it's burnt to a crisp.
How do you back up your expensive non-e-book when it's burnt to a crisp? At least with the e-book you can make a copy before the fire -- photocopying 400 pages however, doesn't seem very practical.
He wasn't truly happy with the poetry and music, he was depressed. Are you seriously suggesting that not wanting to write poems anymore compares with not wanting to participate in life?
Creative writing is not the end-all, be-all of self-expression and happiness. I personally consider myself quite happy despite having never penned a poem. Maybe writing was important to him when he was depressed, but isn't anymore; is it so surprising that after a personality change his interests and priorities might also be different?
Or maybe that's the problem -- are you concerned that the drugs changed his personality in general? The drugs are *supposed* to change his personality. His former personality was that of a depressive/psychotic, and he wanted to change it so he could appreciate life and interact in society. At least in my book, that's not such a bad thing.
Would you really be upset if you only made money at the rate of real economic growth? That doesn't sound like a terrible deal to me -- the real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) growth rate of the US GDP was 3.5% last year. That's not the best rate of return you can find, but it's pretty good for a system with 0 risk.
I do small-business support like that in the Des Moines, Iowa and La Crosse, Wisconsin areas, in case anyone is looking for a couple of man-hours a month of IT support. We do a little more integration than "insert this CD", but it's still a "we tell you what to buy, we do the software install, call us if it doesn't work" setup using linux and generally using only one server. Both we and the client know that if the server fails their business is down for the day, maybe two, while it's being replaced. But that risk is worth the $10k they save by not having multiple machines to purchase and support. It works out great for all involved.
I'm also looking for one of those shaved monkies in La Crosse, Wisconsin (or maybe even someone with Windows and/or UNIX skills for that matter) in case anyone is looking for a part-time job.
Except the meta-data rich world you describe still requires some sort of absolute referencing system, like say, filepaths. I agree that the user shouldn't always have to know the filepath, but I don't see any way for the computer itself to avoid having an index relating item (i.e. file) X to physical location Y.
I also don't see any reasonable way to make this list non-hierarchial -- if it was you'd have to search through the index, entry by entry, every time youwanted to look up anything. Again, the user doesn't have to <I>see</I> this, but sorted list with hierarchial entry points seem a very reasonable way to organize an index.
I also don't understand your argument against everything-is-a-file. This seems like one of the strengths of UNIX to me -- as a programmer I need to know only one way to access <I>any</I> kind of information, from any source. Certainly you could replace the filepath addressing system with the foobar addressing system that uses (insert unique, indexed naming-system here), but that seems like a lot of work to get fundamentally the same system.
Or maybe someone actually did invent a totally new system for storing separate pieces of information on a storage device and allowing me to retrive each on individually and on-demand without having an index linking some sort of unique logical identifier to a physical location on the storage device while I wasn't looking.
Yeah, and they say "Economy East Asian Edition. Not for sale in the US or Canda," so everyone will know that you're a cheapskate. I've actually been quite happy with my Indian text books.
Well I wish *someone* would tell me what's so great about Outlook's mail features when compared with IMAP/LDAP email in say, an email client that supports those features. I've run Outlook with an Exchange server. It looked a lot like IMAP to me. In fact, my IMAP folders on another server were basically indistinguishable from the Exchange-hosted folders.
As far as the calendar goes I'm not going to offer any argument, because there isn't one to be made -- there is no good standard for group scheduling. There are many implentation, some of which provide a feature set very similar to Outlook, few have any basis in standards, which is what would make them compelling, because you'd then have a choice both for servers and clients.
Just wanted to comment on your "maximize" button. It isn't. It's a zoom button, just like all Apple's programs have. "Maximize" is not something that you can do to Apple windows.
You can however "zoom" to accomidate all items in the window, to return to the previous window size, or to toggle between display modes. It's a similar function to maximize, but it's "smarter," be that good or bad.
Or you could get your head out of your ass and realize that it isn't necessary to run Outlook to run your office. Moreover, even if you want to use Outlook, you could get online mail folders with IMAP (a standard technology that works with most any mail client) and online address books with LDAP (another standard technology that works with almost any mail client).
The only thing that we don't have a really good standard for at the moment is shared scheduling. However, there are many options for shared scheduling that, while not compatible with Outlook's calendar, are capable of all its functions, and can easily be integrated into your IMAP/LDAP email solution.
Or you could continue to believe that open standards for data exchange are a bad thing, and then whine about how nothing else is compatible.
In fact, I believe that this sort of attitude is a large part of the problem with our modern use of civil law -- I wrote code and made no attempt to conceal its operation. You ran it, with no apparent regard for its function. How could it possibly be my fault that my code doesn't do what you thought it might?
So my code erased your hard drive. Who's to say that it wasn't legitimately a new, scripted version of fdisk? Your misunderstanding of its intended function is hardly my responsibility.
Except that's not true -- if Verisign doesn't want you to have a domain you don't get it, period. Their ToS, and as a result, the ToS of all DNS registrars allow them to deny registrations at will.
Now if they actually did this regularly they'd get sued, but not wanting is hardly the same as not being capable.
I don't know what you people are thinking. The military provides the same "quality hands-on experience" that you'd get from your neighborhood tech school. You spend 2 years learning to install Micro~1 products and configure low-end Cisco equipment. Likewise you could spend the same amount of time learning to replace fuses and solder wires in the "electrical technician" field.
You are not expected to know when or why you would do the things you've learned, only to be able to execute a given task when commanded to do so. It's grunt-level, mindless training for professional grunts.
Why on earth you would expect the military to provide any better training to enlisted men is beyond me -- if they wanted people with an education they'd find officers, who are *already* trained.
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If you have electric brakes, which are already in use on commercial vehicles, and which are similar in design to air brakes (but more reliable, simplier, and cheaper), the failure mode is "brake", thanks to the wonder of springs. This isn't exactly a complicated problem.
While your point is valid, some of your history is not:
The Apple menu in Systems 1-6 was not used as a launch bar or anything else of the sort. In most cases it contained an item called "About [program name]", a divider, and a list of Desk Accessories*. Regular programs could not be launched from the Apple menu at all (at least not directly), and there was no way for a user to manipulate the contents other than by installing and removing Desk Accessories.
Starting in System 7 the Apple menu could be used as a launch bar, and eventually even got support for hierarchial folders for things like "Recent Documents". But it was intended as a user-customizable shortcut bar, and to provide access to legacy Desk Acessory-like programs, not as the primary launch system.
At no time did the Apple menu allow you to do anything other than launch a program or Desk Accessory (though in the System 7.5 days there was a program that initiated a shutdown). The "Special" menu provided functions like "Shutdown" until OS X, and in OS X the Apple menu is a lot like the "Special" menu from pre-X days.
*Desk Accessories were very limited programs that had to be installed into the resource fork of the System file. They ran in the address space of a regular program, and did not even have access to draw their own menus. In System 7 they got their own address space and a default set of menus as legacy support, and developers were encouraged to create stand-alone programs instead of Desk Accessories.
If the client-server code gets re-used in every new app, how is that different from using a web browser with respect the context of the obscurity that the parent suggested could be provided with other solutions? Any sufficiently re-used bit of code loses its obscurity by means of its popularity.
Moreover, it's still more work to maintain your own client-server app than to use the browsers and HTTP servers that are available for free on every popular operating system. Even if you assume $0 in maintenance, you at least have to write the thing in the first place.
A) It's just as simple to prevent an SQL injection attack. Failing to clean your input is just a stupid mistake, regardless of the input method. Mistakes happen, but let's not pretend that input validation is complicated.
B) The reason people like to build web interfaces is that the client, server, and transfer mechanism already exist. Writing a new one for each project is much, much more work.
About 6 weeks ago. And it was out for more than 4 days. Before that my phone was out in May 2005 for a couple of days. Both times I continued to have IP access via GPRS and WiFi, and could have (if I had VoIP->POTS service) kept using a VoIP line with the same phone number despite the failure of my POTS line.
May experiences may not be common, but at least in my life, IP has been both more reliable, and just as importantly, more flexible.
Smoking kills 400,000 people per year huh? Are you sure that isn't some of the "truth" that you got from the silly commercials this guy was complaining about in the first place? Only about 3,000,000 people actually died in 2004. Given the ~20% rate of smoking in adults at that time, that's only ~600,000 smokers that died in 2004. Are you seriously suggesting that 2/3 smokers die from smoking?
PGP is a lossless encryption whereas fairplay uses a watermark technique. Big difference in algorithms and quantum theory has nothing to do with it.
FairPlay uses Rijndael-AES to encrypt the AAC stream. It's just as lossless as PGP. There is personal information in the file, but not in the audio stream (this isn't MPEG here -- the file is structued). The personal information (such as the actual song keys and your account name) can be removed without affecting the encrypted/non-encrypted state of the audio stream. I don't know what system you're thinking of, but it's not FairPlay.
I play an instrument. Several in fact. And while it's a nice distraction I'd rather give it up than movies.
But can you also watch those recorded shows over your home network on other PCs? Burn to DVD?
Maybe not with Tivo, but you can with ReplayTV, and it doesn't even take any hacking.
That being said, my next PVR system will be computer-based, rather than Tivo/Replay/etc. Forget this whole "insert DVD" thing -- I want all my media online and available from any playback device in the house.
That's exactly my point, and I'm not wrong. Even if we limit the discussion here to onemany NAT and not manymany NAT, which doesn't do anything like what you claim, the parts that you like are the stateful firewall parts, not the address translation parts.
For example, a onemany NAT gateway can be configured to forward all incoming connections to a host (or even several hosts for that matter) on the internal network. All the traffic that comes through the gateway will go through address translation, but none of it will be dropped. In this setup (which is available even on many home NAT routers as the DMZ setting) none of the "security" you claim NAT provides is present.
Dropping packets is what a firewall does. NATting is what happens after the firewall acts to ensure that IP connections work correctly across the discontinuous address space. The fact that they often happen together is not proof that they are inseparable, nor that one provides the functions of the other.
How is "prevents uninitiated outside connections from reaching devices inside the private network unless specifically configured as a server" any different than what a firewall does?
I agree with the parent -- you don't mean NAT, you meant stateful packet inspection and blocking of inbound traffic that isn't related to previous outbound traffic.
Being random is an important part of being legal -- back when the FAA started requiring security screenings at airports (1972?) SCOTUS ruled that such screenings must A) be limited in scope only to explosives and weapons, and B) must be applied uniformly. So admitting that you're selecting people (even by a non-protected category) calls the legality of the searches into question.
Books are incredibly light actually.
I think your local library would beg to differ. Reducing the weight of books would simplify shelving and general architectural design of libraries.
If they were lighter and smaller they'd just get damaged more easily. Thinner pages would rip and be transparent.
That's not quite "working exactly like today's books" then is it? Non-paper technologies (even non-electronic ones) might well be thinner, stronger, and more opaque than traditional paper books.
Then it's a good thing we have glasses and electricity.
Yes, because it's really handy to hold a magnifying glass in your arthritic hands while reading the newspaper. Thanks for your compassion.
Even medieval people had candles. Reading backlit screens in the dark fucks your eyes up anyway.
That's just blatantly false. A properly illuminated screen will not "fuck your eyes up". Having a single, high-intensity illumination setting is not the only option for an ebook.
No, it isn't. Maybe if you're illiterate.
In case you've never visited the non-fiction section, there are books with non-literary descriptions of sounds. Maybe you don't want someone to imitate the sounds described in a story, but in a bird-watching guide it *would* be useful to have actual sound samples, rather than pseudo-phonetic descriptions of sounds that have no linguistic basis.
How do you backup your expensive ebook reader when it's burnt to a crisp.
How do you back up your expensive non-e-book when it's burnt to a crisp? At least with the e-book you can make a copy before the fire -- photocopying 400 pages however, doesn't seem very practical.
He wasn't truly happy with the poetry and music, he was depressed. Are you seriously suggesting that not wanting to write poems anymore compares with not wanting to participate in life?
Creative writing is not the end-all, be-all of self-expression and happiness. I personally consider myself quite happy despite having never penned a poem. Maybe writing was important to him when he was depressed, but isn't anymore; is it so surprising that after a personality change his interests and priorities might also be different?
Or maybe that's the problem -- are you concerned that the drugs changed his personality in general? The drugs are *supposed* to change his personality. His former personality was that of a depressive/psychotic, and he wanted to change it so he could appreciate life and interact in society. At least in my book, that's not such a bad thing.
Would you really be upset if you only made money at the rate of real economic growth? That doesn't sound like a terrible deal to me -- the real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) growth rate of the US GDP was 3.5% last year. That's not the best rate of return you can find, but it's pretty good for a system with 0 risk.
I do small-business support like that in the Des Moines, Iowa and La Crosse, Wisconsin areas, in case anyone is looking for a couple of man-hours a month of IT support. We do a little more integration than "insert this CD", but it's still a "we tell you what to buy, we do the software install, call us if it doesn't work" setup using linux and generally using only one server. Both we and the client know that if the server fails their business is down for the day, maybe two, while it's being replaced. But that risk is worth the $10k they save by not having multiple machines to purchase and support. It works out great for all involved.
I'm also looking for one of those shaved monkies in La Crosse, Wisconsin (or maybe even someone with Windows and/or UNIX skills for that matter) in case anyone is looking for a part-time job.
Except the meta-data rich world you describe still requires some sort of absolute referencing system, like say, filepaths. I agree that the user shouldn't always have to know the filepath, but I don't see any way for the computer itself to avoid having an index relating item (i.e. file) X to physical location Y.
I also don't see any reasonable way to make this list non-hierarchial -- if it was you'd have to search through the index, entry by entry, every time youwanted to look up anything. Again, the user doesn't have to <I>see</I> this, but sorted list with hierarchial entry points seem a very reasonable way to organize an index.
I also don't understand your argument against everything-is-a-file. This seems like one of the strengths of UNIX to me -- as a programmer I need to know only one way to access <I>any</I> kind of information, from any source. Certainly you could replace the filepath addressing system with the foobar addressing system that uses (insert unique, indexed naming-system here), but that seems like a lot of work to get fundamentally the same system.
Or maybe someone actually did invent a totally new system for storing separate pieces of information on a storage device and allowing me to retrive each on individually and on-demand without having an index linking some sort of unique logical identifier to a physical location on the storage device while I wasn't looking.
Yeah, and they say "Economy East Asian Edition. Not for sale in the US or Canda," so everyone will know that you're a cheapskate. I've actually been quite happy with my Indian text books.
Well I wish *someone* would tell me what's so great about Outlook's mail features when compared with IMAP/LDAP email in say, an email client that supports those features. I've run Outlook with an Exchange server. It looked a lot like IMAP to me. In fact, my IMAP folders on another server were basically indistinguishable from the Exchange-hosted folders.
As far as the calendar goes I'm not going to offer any argument, because there isn't one to be made -- there is no good standard for group scheduling. There are many implentation, some of which provide a feature set very similar to Outlook, few have any basis in standards, which is what would make them compelling, because you'd then have a choice both for servers and clients.
Just wanted to comment on your "maximize" button. It isn't. It's a zoom button, just like all Apple's programs have. "Maximize" is not something that you can do to Apple windows.
You can however "zoom" to accomidate all items in the window, to return to the previous window size, or to toggle between display modes. It's a similar function to maximize, but it's "smarter," be that good or bad.
Or you could get your head out of your ass and realize that it isn't necessary to run Outlook to run your office. Moreover, even if you want to use Outlook, you could get online mail folders with IMAP (a standard technology that works with most any mail client) and online address books with LDAP (another standard technology that works with almost any mail client).
The only thing that we don't have a really good standard for at the moment is shared scheduling. However, there are many options for shared scheduling that, while not compatible with Outlook's calendar, are capable of all its functions, and can easily be integrated into your IMAP/LDAP email solution.
Or you could continue to believe that open standards for data exchange are a bad thing, and then whine about how nothing else is compatible.
No.
In fact, I believe that this sort of attitude is a large part of the problem with our modern use of civil law -- I wrote code and made no attempt to conceal its operation. You ran it, with no apparent regard for its function. How could it possibly be my fault that my code doesn't do what you thought it might?
So my code erased your hard drive. Who's to say that it wasn't legitimately a new, scripted version of fdisk? Your misunderstanding of its intended function is hardly my responsibility.
Except that's not true -- if Verisign doesn't want you to have a domain you don't get it, period. Their ToS, and as a result, the ToS of all DNS registrars allow them to deny registrations at will.
Now if they actually did this regularly they'd get sued, but not wanting is hardly the same as not being capable.
I don't know what you people are thinking. The military provides the same "quality hands-on experience" that you'd get from your neighborhood tech school. You spend 2 years learning to install Micro~1 products and configure low-end Cisco equipment. Likewise you could spend the same amount of time learning to replace fuses and solder wires in the "electrical technician" field.
You are not expected to know when or why you would do the things you've learned, only to be able to execute a given task when commanded to do so. It's grunt-level, mindless training for professional grunts.
Why on earth you would expect the military to provide any better training to enlisted men is beyond me -- if they wanted people with an education they'd find officers, who are *already* trained.
This is one place that IBM shines -- you can buy IBM systems without hard drives. Handy for those of us that already own all the OSes we need.