I should also mention that the release version of Microsoft Windows 95 convinced me that I ought to switch to Apple's operating system. I installed it on my personal computer and it proceeded to wipe out all data on two 512M hard drives (that would be the one it was being installed on as well as the other one on which it was not being installed. I reasoned, at the time, that if I was going to need to completely upgrade my way of working with an operating system, I ought to switch to something that did not tend to destroy data. Thankfully, I did have a tape backup of both drives.
Wow... so you switched to an OS which at the time was able to wipe itself out in a single bound just by installing Netscape on an HFS+ partition? (Something with the internet cache would occasionally just completely hork the indexes on the partition, leaving you with... well... no data).
If you have a large amount of numerical data (hundreds of thousands of rows worth) then I assure you that Matlab, R, Mathematica, or even Gnuplot will be a the fastest way to "get something up easily and quickly". Just because you've never used them (apparently) and thus don't know how very easy they are to use for anyone who does any sort of numerical work, doesn't make them harder. The fact that they are incredibly powerful and permit far more complex number crunching and data manipulation due to a programmable interface doesn't make them any harder to use either - if all you want to do is plot then gnuplot can do it for you in a single command, no need to load speadsheet programs, import CSV files, and click through various graph making tools.
I see you're not talking about GnuOctave then. Pity, because I was. As was the post I was replying to.
And no, not all I need to do is plot. I need a variety of statistical tools as well.
Then there is also GNU-Octave (www.octave.org) and Scilab. If you know Matlab, you will be right at home with either of the two. Now if you are a Simulink user like I am, then... -a.
Yay! A tool you need to program to do simple data analysis! That's so much easier than opening a CSV file in Excel, and creating a chart on another sheet.
Sheesh... you know, sometimes, it's about convenience, and how well you can get something up easily and quickly. NOT about how "the right way" is.
One thing that DOESN'T seem to have changed, judging by a screenshot, is the silly page numbering limitation Word gives you. You can only have a unique header for the first page, and optionally odd/even pages. You can't have several different sets of page numbers within one document, or start page numbering from page x, or have custom headers/footers for any page you choose. Madness, I tell you; why haven't they fixed this yet? I don't want to number my table of contents, nor create 2 separate documents!
You don't know how to use Word, don't you?
Try looking up Section Breaks, Link To Previous, and Format Page Number. EVERYTHING you're asking for is in there.
For example, put your TOC in a separate section to your main doc, et voila!
Wow, generally what kind of dataset has 500 columns? Cant that be denormalized in any way? Do you seriously scan through a list of 500 elements to pick which columns you're interested in at any given point in time? I've worked with a few 500 column oracle tables, but they were the result of poor design without any rational scalability.
Try the output from a prototype CCD array. Typically, that's 1024 columns of data - or more.
You know, I'm not sure why fried food got such a bad name. If you fry some potatoes in non-hydrogenated vegetable oil, it's a perfectly healthy side dish. I'd wager that's healthier than a "healthy low-fat" item that's processed beyond recognition and loaded with chemicals. Just my opinion, of course.
Actually, not the case... do a search on acrylamide. It's a potent carcinogen, and it's created when you fry potatoes, among other things.
This is true, but there is a slight difference... Firefox and Google are 2 different entitities, whereas IE and MSN search are both owned by Microsoft. IE has 90% of the browser market share, thus its decision to set MSN as the default search engine COULD be considered as illegal monopolistic competition.
Dvorak is right: the expense of IE development could have been spent elsewhere, and MS would be none the worse off if they bundled somebody else's browser.
Hmmm... tell that to Quicken or any number of other software apps which use IE for the UI solution. IE isn't just a browser - it's the HTML rendering component for the entire OS. And at the time it was first being developed, Netscape's HTML renderer wasn't componentized - which is yet another reason why they lost the browser wars and both AOL and Quicken went with IE instead of Netscape.
Except Gord isn't an idiot, and he goes on to make a good case for his speculation. It's pretty simple math; read the article. If Sony lost $100 on each of the 1000000 consoles it sold at launch, it would be pretty damn hard for SCE to sweep a $100mil loss under the carpet. According to wikipedia they sold around 10 million in about 2 years; how do you hide a $1 billion production loss? You don't; billion-dollar losses are more Microsoft's area.
Sony lost AU$150 per unit on the PS2 when they launched in Australia, according to a Sony rep.
If the original opportunist was any good, there would not be much of a problem. Furthermore, this is a bit of a movie scenario, which I don't think very likely in the real world. There would be a problem though: the artists that don't do live appearences would lose a lot. Not that I would mind that too much, there a very few artists I like that are no good at live performances.
The difference is that in the past, it was used against the *vendors* who were selling information for profit, without license. The new definition of piracy is for people who are accepting or distributing copies, but without any money changing hands. It's an expansion of the definition.
Actually, no, the definition has not changed. Copyright lies in who has the authority to create copies - not whether or not they're being sold.
I think the slashdot crowd has gotta let this one go. Piracy now means copyright infringement. ... and has done for about 300 years:) First usage in the sense of infringing on someone else's intellectual property was in 1701.
What an odd statement. You do realize that Ritalin has the opposite effect on people with ADD/ADHD than it does on 'normal' people? In that it actually slows your brain down enough to work properly?
So you mean to tell me that the fast analysis response neurons in the fusiform gyrus actually learn and respond when you're playing a game which just might require fast intuitive response?
Blimey! I'd never have guessed that.
Mirror neurons are used to make split-second judgements. They're behind what most people call "intuition" or "gut feeling". And you make those decisions in less than a second - incredibly well, surprisingly.
Go read the book Blink! - it's full of information about how this system works.
None of which explains why this vulnerability is absent in Win95 and ME, but present in Win2k and XP.
Let me correct that statement for you.
None of which explains why this vulnerability is absent in Win95 and ME, but present in Win2k and XP and WINE.
Much better. Now, what's the conspiracy you're positing again?
Re:Back door or poor design? You can't really tell
on
WMF Flaw not a Backdoor
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Either way, it is still hard to tell why it was designed that way in the first place, maybe one of these links can tell us?
It's quite simple:
WMF is used under the hood in lots of places in GDI. Any time GDI passes a bunch o' commands from one place to another, you'll find WMF. And as a result, WMF encapsulates almost everything you can do with GDI.
SetAbortProc is used to allow an app to display a custom "Printing Page xxx of xxx... [Cancel]" dialog to be displayed on Windows 2.0, 3.0 and 3.1, all of which are cooperatively multitasking and so need to drain their message queues on a regular basis - which they do every time that AbortProc is called.
There are even examples of this exact behavior on MSDN. It's still semi-useful under later versions of windows to be able to do this, and it's good for backwards compatibility, so it stuck around.
It must be noted that DRM, and most copyright laws, are desighned to "protect"* the publisher, not the original author. As a writer you whant something that protects your right to distribute your work anyway you whant. As soon as you sign on with a normal publisher you lose all rights to the work. That is whan gets my goat.
As a writer myself, I can tell you that you've just said something that is one hundred percent unadulterated bullshit.
Microsoft's source code is *not* available to the extent you believe it is. It is in fact only available in bits and pieces, and then, only to those who sign an exhaustive non-disclosure agreement. And, what little is available, has only been around for a short time.
Yes, actually, it is available to the extent I believe it is. Thanksmuch for playing.
This isn't about conspiracies. This isn't about Gibson. Who in their right mind would admit wrongdoing on a scale such as this? There is only a downside. Your reliance on people's consciences is flawed.
Given that MS's code is (and has been for a long time) available to independent security auditors, several universities, independent companies and government bodies, they'd be crazy to deny something that people could figure out for themselves by looking at the code.
You didn't NEED this functionality in the framework to begin with. It's data, combining GDI call scripting in a batch- why do you need to be making arbitrary code calls from within data? If you're doing that sort of thing, shouldn't you be doing that in CODE?
Because it's an asynchronous callback; the GDI work is done in a *separate* thread once batched, and depending on where it is in the rendering process, different abort proc's may need to be called.
Slashdot Mirror
I should also mention that the release version of Microsoft Windows 95 convinced me that I ought to switch to Apple's operating system. I installed it on my personal computer and it proceeded to wipe out all data on two 512M hard drives (that would be the one it was being installed on as well as the other one on which it was not being installed. I reasoned, at the time, that if I was going to need to completely upgrade my way of working with an operating system, I ought to switch to something that did not tend to destroy data. Thankfully, I did have a tape backup of both drives.
... well... no data).
Wow... so you switched to an OS which at the time was able to wipe itself out in a single bound just by installing Netscape on an HFS+ partition? (Something with the internet cache would occasionally just completely hork the indexes on the partition, leaving you with
If you have a large amount of numerical data (hundreds of thousands of rows worth) then I assure you that Matlab, R, Mathematica, or even Gnuplot will be a the fastest way to "get something up easily and quickly". Just because you've never used them (apparently) and thus don't know how very easy they are to use for anyone who does any sort of numerical work, doesn't make them harder. The fact that they are incredibly powerful and permit far more complex number crunching and data manipulation due to a programmable interface doesn't make them any harder to use either - if all you want to do is plot then gnuplot can do it for you in a single command, no need to load speadsheet programs, import CSV files, and click through various graph making tools.
I see you're not talking about GnuOctave then. Pity, because I was. As was the post I was replying to.
And no, not all I need to do is plot. I need a variety of statistical tools as well.
Funny you should ask all this... given that Microsoft and the Office group are probably the most educated experts in the accessibility field.
As for Screen Scrapers, try looking up something called "Active Accessibility".
Not to mention that apparently you can turn all of this new UI flash off.
Oh, and the high contrast scheme is a special setting in Windows - Office will obey it. Trust me.
Then there is also GNU-Octave (www.octave.org) and Scilab. If you know Matlab, you will be right at home with either of the two. Now if you are a Simulink user like I am, then... -a.
Yay! A tool you need to program to do simple data analysis! That's so much easier than opening a CSV file in Excel, and creating a chart on another sheet.
Sheesh... you know, sometimes, it's about convenience, and how well you can get something up easily and quickly. NOT about how "the right way" is.
One thing that DOESN'T seem to have changed, judging by a screenshot, is the silly page numbering limitation Word gives you. You can only have a unique header for the first page, and optionally odd/even pages. You can't have several different sets of page numbers within one document, or start page numbering from page x, or have custom headers/footers for any page you choose. Madness, I tell you; why haven't they fixed this yet? I don't want to number my table of contents, nor create 2 separate documents!
You don't know how to use Word, don't you?
Try looking up Section Breaks, Link To Previous, and Format Page Number. EVERYTHING you're asking for is in there.
For example, put your TOC in a separate section to your main doc, et voila!
Wow, generally what kind of dataset has 500 columns? Cant that be denormalized in any way? Do you seriously scan through a list of 500 elements to pick which columns you're interested in at any given point in time? I've worked with a few 500 column oracle tables, but they were the result of poor design without any rational scalability.
Try the output from a prototype CCD array. Typically, that's 1024 columns of data - or more.
since the hardware just isnt available. in almost a year, theyve only sold 3.3 million consoles worldwide. thats highly underwhelming.
7 months is "almost a year"?
You know, I'm not sure why fried food got such a bad name. If you fry some potatoes in non-hydrogenated vegetable oil, it's a perfectly healthy side dish. I'd wager that's healthier than a "healthy low-fat" item that's processed beyond recognition and loaded with chemicals. Just my opinion, of course.
Actually, not the case... do a search on acrylamide. It's a potent carcinogen, and it's created when you fry potatoes, among other things.
Article on Acrylamide from CSPI
I'm not sure I believe this story...
sip
Wait a minute, yes I do.
This is true, but there is a slight difference... Firefox and Google are 2 different entitities, whereas IE and MSN search are both owned by Microsoft. IE has 90% of the browser market share, thus its decision to set MSN as the default search engine COULD be considered as illegal monopolistic competition.
So you're saying that keiretsus are legal?
Dvorak is right: the expense of IE development could have been spent elsewhere, and MS would be none the worse off if they bundled somebody else's browser.
Hmmm... tell that to Quicken or any number of other software apps which use IE for the UI solution. IE isn't just a browser - it's the HTML rendering component for the entire OS. And at the time it was first being developed, Netscape's HTML renderer wasn't componentized - which is yet another reason why they lost the browser wars and both AOL and Quicken went with IE instead of Netscape.
Except Gord isn't an idiot, and he goes on to make a good case for his speculation. It's pretty simple math; read the article. If Sony lost $100 on each of the 1000000 consoles it sold at launch, it would be pretty damn hard for SCE to sweep a $100mil loss under the carpet. According to wikipedia they sold around 10 million in about 2 years; how do you hide a $1 billion production loss? You don't; billion-dollar losses are more Microsoft's area.
Sony lost AU$150 per unit on the PS2 when they launched in Australia, according to a Sony rep.
If the original opportunist was any good, there would not be much of a problem. Furthermore, this is a bit of a movie scenario, which I don't think very likely in the real world. There would be a problem though: the artists that don't do live appearences would lose a lot. Not that I would mind that too much, there a very few artists I like that are no good at live performances.
Ahh.. ye olde I'm alright Jack argument.
You can steal a horse in one town and ride it to the furthest town away that you can get to, and everyone will know that it's not your horse.
Of course they know. They check the license plate and the bumper sticker - it's pretty obvious.
The difference is that in the past, it was used against the *vendors* who were selling information for profit, without license. The new definition of piracy is for people who are accepting or distributing copies, but without any money changing hands. It's an expansion of the definition.
Actually, no, the definition has not changed. Copyright lies in who has the authority to create copies - not whether or not they're being sold.
Another (much lesser known) one...
SAM Coupe - used "^" to go up the hierarchy.
I think the slashdot crowd has gotta let this one go. Piracy now means copyright infringement. ... and has done for about 300 years :) First usage in the sense of infringing on someone else's intellectual property was in 1701.
Ritalin is speed for little kids?
What an odd statement. You do realize that Ritalin has the opposite effect on people with ADD/ADHD than it does on 'normal' people? In that it actually slows your brain down enough to work properly?
So you mean to tell me that the fast analysis response neurons in the fusiform gyrus actually learn and respond when you're playing a game which just might require fast intuitive response?
Blimey! I'd never have guessed that.
Mirror neurons are used to make split-second judgements. They're behind what most people call "intuition" or "gut feeling". And you make those decisions in less than a second - incredibly well, surprisingly.
Go read the book Blink! - it's full of information about how this system works.
None of which explains why this vulnerability is absent in Win95 and ME, but present in Win2k and XP.
Let me correct that statement for you.
None of which explains why this vulnerability is absent in Win95 and ME, but present in Win2k and XP and WINE .
Much better. Now, what's the conspiracy you're positing again?
Either way, it is still hard to tell why it was designed that way in the first place, maybe one of these links can tell us?
It's quite simple:
WMF is used under the hood in lots of places in GDI. Any time GDI passes a bunch o' commands from one place to another, you'll find WMF. And as a result, WMF encapsulates almost everything you can do with GDI.
SetAbortProc is used to allow an app to display a custom "Printing Page xxx of xxx... [Cancel]" dialog to be displayed on Windows 2.0, 3.0 and 3.1, all of which are cooperatively multitasking and so need to drain their message queues on a regular basis - which they do every time that AbortProc is called.
There are even examples of this exact behavior on MSDN. It's still semi-useful under later versions of windows to be able to do this, and it's good for backwards compatibility, so it stuck around.
It must be noted that DRM, and most copyright laws, are desighned to "protect"* the publisher, not the original author. As a writer you whant something that protects your right to distribute your work anyway you whant. As soon as you sign on with a normal publisher you lose all rights to the work. That is whan gets my goat.
As a writer myself, I can tell you that you've just said something that is one hundred percent unadulterated bullshit.
Microsoft's source code is *not* available to the extent you believe it is. It is in fact only available in bits and pieces, and then, only to those who sign an exhaustive non-disclosure agreement. And, what little is available, has only been around for a short time.
Yes, actually, it is available to the extent I believe it is. Thanksmuch for playing.
This isn't about conspiracies. This isn't about Gibson. Who in their right mind would admit wrongdoing on a scale such as this? There is only a downside. Your reliance on people's consciences is flawed.
Given that MS's code is (and has been for a long time) available to independent security auditors, several universities, independent companies and government bodies, they'd be crazy to deny something that people could figure out for themselves by looking at the code.
You didn't NEED this functionality in the framework to begin with. It's data, combining GDI call scripting in a batch- why do you need to be making arbitrary code calls from within data? If you're doing that sort of thing, shouldn't you be doing that in CODE?
Because it's an asynchronous callback; the GDI work is done in a *separate* thread once batched, and depending on where it is in the rendering process, different abort proc's may need to be called.