If someone on my team returned that piece of code and insisted that it met the requirements, I would find another team member. A random shuffle is supposed to give ballpark equal positions. This algorithm gave Internet Explorer the rightmost position in the list a full %50 of the time. It's not like he's complaining that the algorithm be up to encryption grade randomness, but rather that it fails even the human eyeball test. %10 statistical variation? Sure, whatever. But getting a particular slot a full %250 more than you should, when you're ordered by the court to make something random? That's really poor coding.
And the sad thing is, with just FIVE things to sort and no real pressure for speed or RAM, there is no reason why it should be this poor. There is essentially unlimited computing power and RAM, and it fails to produce even casually random results. It's just an inexperienced coder and an inexperienced team making freshman mistakes. Considering this was part of an EU directive, I would have expected at least a few higher level eyeballs would have caught this.
Why does somebody driving down the (public) road taking a picture of your (public) license plate on your car parked in (public) plain view and comparing it to a list need oversight?
Well, let's say that you're driving from work to some suppliers, then see some customers, then drive out to dinner with someone else. Theoretically, a competitor could put a tail on you and find out where you buy all of your supplies from, who your client list is, and where you like to eat dinner. In practice, though, it's prohibitively expensive to do this to anyone but Steve Jobs.
With automated tracking, people can know what you've been and where you're going. Now they know where you pick up your supplies (and therefore about how much you're paying). Now they know your customers (and can attempt to pick them off). Now they know your favorite restaurant (...not so useful that one). So of course now you have to take more expensive countermeasures, yadda yadda. Your competitors could pay a data warehouse say... 100 dollars per your employee, and get readouts of where they've all gone in the past month. Maybe that lets them figure out a secret ingredient in your special sauce. Maybe they find out that a key person keeps going to swank parts of town, and might be susceptible to being lured away by a bigger salary. Or that someone is cheating on their significant other. Or nothing at all. But none of this would really be considered normal or acceptable business practices.
Maybe the mob pays to track their employees and their employees contacts, to make sure nobody ever gets near a police station. Or crazy people start tracking public officials with the hopes of assassinating them. Or public officials track eachother in the hopes of manufacturing some dirt to use against them. Essentially, it opens up a can of worms that we haven't prepared for. And maybe the only amount of preparation needed is to argue about it for a while and realize that it isn't the end of the world. But that's still a dialog that needs to take place.
There's no reason to post shit that is obviously fake.
Because some people seem to thrive on picking apart technical forgeries? Why do they post stories on arbitrary compression algorithm announcements and free energy generators?
The bot thing is a distraction. If we don't get our genome off this mudball we're as doomed as the dinosaurs. Sooner or later some unpleasantness will occur.
If utilizing remote robots advances our knowledge faster right now than attempting to stuff a human being up there, we'll achieve sustainable space travel faster that way.
Though to be perfectly honest, we've sent remote robots to other planets many times. The mars rovers come to mind. The only difference is that this would be more representatively shaped... though with a 3 - 6 second lag time, it's going to have to be pretty autonomous anyway.
You realize that if you build textures for 1080p, yet are running under the hood at 720p (most console games do), you're throwing out 1/2 of your budgeted texture memory? And you can't do a direct downpull from 1080 to 720, because the pixel information is wrong and it looks like a blurry mess. Otherwise, you want to build your texture at much higher resolution and downrez to both 1080p and 720p, which drives up your texture creation costs significantly.
The PC development versions of console games are just skeletons to help get the real version running. They're not optimized, they have all of the console buttons and helps, the framerate can be erratic, effects may or may not run, they don't respond to standard system hooks... They're not full versions, they're approximations of the real version, which helps streamline the pipeline. And frequently they'll only ever run on the configuration that the developer uses. They crash like mad, and good luck running in a foreign language or changing your HDD letter. They're not intended or ready for prime time.
Ultimately, it comes down to money. Valve has a great distribution channel on the PC and a cadre of eager buyers, with lots of demand for their project. They can afford to lavish attention on their computer versions. A PC port of Ninja Blade, on the other hand, might net 50k sales. Assuming $25 to the publisher for each of those sales (generous over the full discounted lifespan of the project), that's 1.2 million dollars to play with. Assuming 1/2 goes to distribution overhead (box art, manufacturing, pc sound library licensing, middleware, etc) that leaves 600k to play with. 1/2 of that probably has to go to profit to make it worth doing at all. So that leaves 300k. Assuming that each worker costs 2x again in materials overhead, worker's comp, etc, that's about 1.5 employees for a year keeping an eye on the PC port. That's not nearly enough to hire more artists to create larger texture bases or segment the development team. That's enough to have one guy struggle to port console specific code throughout the last half-year of development, then throw a couple of spare QA and a cleanup artist for one last month. Any more than that, and the PC version isn't financially worth being bothered about.
So he's using it wrong because he optimizes it and actually evaluates the running code, and you're using it correctly because you treat it as a black box?
I'd rather rely on slow code that is 100% reliable than optimized code that might have introduced bugs. You can throw a faster processor at slow code, but you can't throw more hardware at coding mistakes.
1. If they're riding the brake, they're heating up their pads and significantly reducing braking power. Personally, I'd rather flash a big red light at them on the dash and train them not to do that, rather than have a bad driver running around without adequate braking power.
2. Lots of high-end cars with traction control have an override switch of some sort. If you're going to be brakestarting and other tricks, an override isn't too much to ask.
I've given up on PC gaming myself for many experiences like this. I struggled for about a day to get Bioshock's sound working. Most games I have to fidget repeatedly and for a long time with the graphics settings to get to a playable rate. Even one of the PC games that I helped develop I had to get a hacked version of the installer in order to actually run it on my machine.
I'd say a good third of all of the PC games that I've bought failed to run on my computer at all.
I was actually just talking to someone from one of the Technology Development councils in Massachusetts about this. Apparently they've recognized that as a state we've been so focused on the high-end brain only work, that we've failed to retain jobs for the 75% of people who stop at a high-school diploma. We've watched them go abroad with a wave and a smile, without doing any fighting to keep them here.
Say what you will about the intelligence economy. But in practice, robots are expensive and dumb and AI only works for very focused applications. You still need people to make stuff. Unfortunately, we've let our manufacturing base head overseas as if it were this inevitable decline, without really fighting for it.
I would add that the "floor mat" excuse always sounded like BS to me. I'm guessing there is a firmware bug in there somewhere that they can't find that just registers the gas pedal as down. They'd never admit to that, as it would reduce the public perception of security of drive-by-wire systems, and might introduce expensive public testing procedures.
In that case, your only chance is the brake overriding the gas (a process which should have been true from the beginning anyway). Of course, it might be something else and you might still be screwed... unknown computer bugs are like that.
The government can't create value through subsidies and tax credits, they can only steal from Peter to pay Paul (not to mention some astronomical administrative costs).
The government can incentivize behaviors that reduce overall costs to society. For example, promoting wind development helps reduce the cost to society of air pollution from coal-fired plants. Universal fire coverage creates value by being cheaper and more effective than individual fire coverage. Universal schooling for the young improves people's job prospects and quality of life in a way that wouldn't necessarily be possible for people to amortize costs over said lifetime.
My guess is that Ebay was given these as a research study and publicity stunt.
4 million dollars to save 133 thousand per year is a ROI of 3%. This would need to offset another 133k of backup supplies and costs to even approach the ROI of jamming your money in a CD.
You have to count opportunity costs. 5 boxes at $700,000 dollars would cost 3.5 million dollars. Assuming safe and conservative bond / CD investments at %5, they could earn $175,000 dollars per year at very low risk. That 100k dollar 9 month "savings" is actually costing them a total net loss of 41k dollars. It's better for them to just keep the money in a bank account.
A: Why the hell are treaties private? Shouldn't they be by law public documents? B: This seems like a shortsighted reaction to a serious problem that the lawmakers don't understand. It also seems like the kind of shortsighted reaction that happens around the world hundreds of times each day. We'll survive.
It looks like it creates:
* Punishment for companies who know that their products are being used for copyright infringement, ALA Pirate's Bay, and don't try to stop it.
* Takedown procedures for Trademark Infringement, which are pretty standard.
* Country of origin needs to decide on a punishment for "knowingly and materially aiding" infringement, such as setting up an FTP site for music sharing.
* DMCA's retarded and technologically retarding restriction on picking digital locks on copyrighted content. We in the US have lived with this particular joy for years.
Quite frankly, this seems pretty close to "let's take US law and get people to apply it across the EU." Having lived with these problems for years, they weren't the end of the world here and they won't be the end of the world abroad. Taking steps towards international regulating bodies might be the first steps towards the end of spam, reduced botnets, phishing, international domain squatting, and other problems with the network right now. Pragmatically speaking, it probably just means that when Microsoft stops making the Xbox and we all try to get our purchased games off of it, we'll have to go to Russian or Chinese websites to figure out how, rather than ones hosted in Sweden. Oh, and anyone saying anything against Symantec in Europe will be hit with frivilous trademark takedown requests, which should last for 6 months or so until the ISP's just start using their discretion.
And unless you're on a notebook there is no reason to not have 4-8GB of RAM.
Notebooks have been outselling desktops for a few years now. Desktops are now the minority of computers. Also, 4+ GB of RAM isn't possible under windows unless A: running a 64 bit variant, and B: your system provider hasn't cheaped out and has actually updated the BIOS to support it. Considering how useless Vista 64 was, that essentially limits you to computers designed recently and bought in the last year. (or any OSX or Linux variant for a long time now, but that's another argument).
The 4GB RAM ceiling hasn't been smashed for that long. It will take time to adopt.
The UAC, in Vista, nagged constantly early on because of poorly written software.
I'd say that the UAC in Vista nagged constantly early on because it was written to complain about software that was written to standard procedures at the time. There is nothing inherently "poorly written" about writing to the current working directory, especially seeing as how A: XP was only vaguely a multi-user OS and B: Windows 98 was really never a multi-user OS. Also, C: Windows has added dozens of new layers of "default" directories over the years (One with every frick'ing OS revision), such that the only real safe directory is the one that the program is in. Also, seeing as how applications were allowed to do more or less anything in XP / NT, the most efficient and fast route was frequently the one that took the most initiative and privileges.
Software writers were writing to the system at the time. When Apple has changed their system radically in the past, they've firewalled off older code into emulation boxes that could run with their full expected privileges, but within the safer system of the redesigned OS. Microsoft just hoped it would all work, and assumed that people would put up with the annoyances until such a time as all of the software was re-written to their liking. Of course, it's not like they spent years trying to convince developers to behave in a certain way, or released the OS model information in 2003 so that by launch 2006 people could have their applications ready. They dumped it out there and assumed it would all go to plan eventually.
For the record, I switched from Vista to Windows 7. I get at least one UAC prompt on startup (stupid Java), and prompts whenever installing anything (4 new fonts today). It's much better than it had been, but it is still a bit annoying.
When I need to do a bunch of admin tasks on one of my Linux boxes I see nothing wrong with the appropriate use of the root login, it just shouldn't be used on a daily basis for using the machine.
Everyone listen to this (presumed) man. When logging into my old linux box I only ever had to enter Sudo or root login information when installing software, changing something pretty fundamental, or another action initiated by me personally. On Vista, I had to deal with UAC prompts three separate times when just booting the damned thing (Adobe updater, iTunes updater, Java updater). Half of security is making sure the bad guys are caught. But the other half of security is filtering out as many false positives as possible so that real warnings can be heard. UAC's first implementation was moderately good at the former, but ran around shouting "Wolf!" so often that real threats were more likely to get through.
Vista was mostly looked badly because they introduced new security features.
No, Vista mostly looked bad because it broke compatibility to introduce a bunch of new features that they didn't actually implement for Vista. So, for example, a lot of visual and other coding work was done under the hood for a resolution-independent user interface, where being super high-resolution wouldn't necessarily mean that all of your icons are tiny. And then they cut it for time. That work broke a lot of applications, consumed a ton of resources, and ultimately did the same thing as XP. Further, they introduced a lot of new hard disk mechanisms, breaking some of the past ones in the process, for their uber search system... which was cut for time.
Basically the only thing which wasn't cut for time from Vista was the user security model which you mentioned. However, within days of hittting Beta there were large and obvious ways around that security measure if you wanted to install bad things on user's computers. Because of this, proper and legal applications had to stop the user every few minutes for approval, whereas spyware and assorted nasties just wandered through the giant holes. I approve of the idea of implementing a UAC, but Vista's UAC was an annoyingly intrusive sieve, a paper-thin protection that trained users to click OK all the time. Being clearly a first rough draft of a better system, it didn't seem worth an extra few hundred dollars.
And that was the real rub. Win 98 was a lot more functional and internet-enabled than Win 95. Win XP was light years more stable than Win 98, with internet functionality built into the heart of the system. Windows Vista? Vista is just XP, but without running as much, and doing so in a more annoying fashion. It's like they forgot that a system update needs to sell on the advantages of the system over the current one, rather than just because it's the latest version of a standard iteration process.
Windows 7 is more popular in no small part because the Vista incompatibilities are mostly ironed out. The left / right panes is a nifty trick, and the new taskbar is quite usable with less clutter. Even the problems with running applications in 32 bits in a 64 bit environment are ironed out. Basically, there are no drawbacks to the new system over XP, unlike Vista at the time it launched. However, people's hardware is getting pretty long in the tooth. Anyone who had been holding out with XP can now get a Windows 7 machine with a huge hardware boost and some nice system touches, and can break the 4GB Ram barrier to boot.
There are definitely thing that just don't work well on iPhones.
Personally, I'd have touch represent click events, touch-and-drag represent mouseover / general mouse movement events, and touch-twice-and-drag represent the comparatively rare click-and-drag event. That should be sufficient to cover 99% of use cases.
In that case, Slashdot is an abomination. It (optionally) uses XMLHttpRequest to load pieces of the comments page without requiring a refresh of the entire page. So why do you post on an abomination?
A: Slashdot has interesting content. B: Slashdot is an abomination. Pagedown goes too far because the bar at the top steals precious real-estate for no reason. Accidentally navigating away and back loses all box text, despite years of tools which save that state for just such eventualities. It runs incredibly slow on iPhones, despite being basically a static page with a reply box. It has a bunch of "Web 1.5" stuff hanging around in the options which hasn't really done much in years. It took about 2 years after the site refresh before it would serve consistently across all browsers.
Hooray for pushing the envelope for sake of pushing the envelope's sake. But if every website were coded like Slashdot, the web would be a far more painful place.
It can run about $7,500 to put a quarter of the screen banner up on a section front page on the NYTimes.com for a month. A comparable ad in the paper would cost you over a hundred thousand dollars.
There is a reason why the print side of things has ten times the revenue on one-tenth the readership. In this case, ad revenue wouldn't matter a darn compared to subscription fees.
Note: Posting from a phone, so no links. But the NY Times is not shy about posting their financials.
No, it's not. Get your inflated sense of right and wrong out of my house.
Are you saying someone spying on someone else to get their jollies off is exactly the same thing as someone spying on someone else because they're afraid they might hurt themselves? Intent is generally taken into account in sentencing, and in this case it seems like it should be as well.
Honestly, I hope that they get a lot more than that, that any elected officials who were aware of the situation and didn't work to prevent it are impeached and convicted (and given serious prison time as well as any government benefits including pensions revoked), and the school administration officials receive the same.
Spying for sake of influencing government is a horrible offence. To remove someone's rights, intentionally destroy their reputation, or because they're a perverted letch, are all awful reasons to spy on someone. These people should be arrested immediately and the book thrown at them.
Spying because you have a sense of responsibility about the activities of teenagers that you can't control, because you're acting on a sense of right and wrong that has been taken to extremes, is more forgivable. My high school principal had to deal with knife fights, drive-bys, underage pregnancies, suicides, pipe bomb creations gone wrong, heroin overdoses, cocaine overdoses, rape, arson of the school, animal husbandry, animal mutilations, bomb threats, murders, drug dealing... And that's just the stuff that I had heard about, at a relatively safe suburban school. We had basically everything operating out of that high school from prostitution rings to sophisticated computer parts fencing operations to fly-by-night bootleggers. I'm surprised the principal survived, let alone had enough sanity left to plan out how to spy on the students.
"That's no bug... it's the Outlook 2010 installer!"
This is what makes it amusing to me. I've made thousands of dollars on Outlook's inability to handle its own PST and OST files as they get above a certain size. Sending out gigantic messages just completes that circle.
Slashdot Mirror
If someone on my team returned that piece of code and insisted that it met the requirements, I would find another team member. A random shuffle is supposed to give ballpark equal positions. This algorithm gave Internet Explorer the rightmost position in the list a full %50 of the time. It's not like he's complaining that the algorithm be up to encryption grade randomness, but rather that it fails even the human eyeball test. %10 statistical variation? Sure, whatever. But getting a particular slot a full %250 more than you should, when you're ordered by the court to make something random? That's really poor coding.
And the sad thing is, with just FIVE things to sort and no real pressure for speed or RAM, there is no reason why it should be this poor. There is essentially unlimited computing power and RAM, and it fails to produce even casually random results. It's just an inexperienced coder and an inexperienced team making freshman mistakes. Considering this was part of an EU directive, I would have expected at least a few higher level eyeballs would have caught this.
Why does somebody driving down the (public) road taking a picture of your (public) license plate on your car parked in (public) plain view and comparing it to a list need oversight?
Well, let's say that you're driving from work to some suppliers, then see some customers, then drive out to dinner with someone else. Theoretically, a competitor could put a tail on you and find out where you buy all of your supplies from, who your client list is, and where you like to eat dinner. In practice, though, it's prohibitively expensive to do this to anyone but Steve Jobs.
With automated tracking, people can know what you've been and where you're going. Now they know where you pick up your supplies (and therefore about how much you're paying). Now they know your customers (and can attempt to pick them off). Now they know your favorite restaurant (...not so useful that one). So of course now you have to take more expensive countermeasures, yadda yadda. Your competitors could pay a data warehouse say... 100 dollars per your employee, and get readouts of where they've all gone in the past month. Maybe that lets them figure out a secret ingredient in your special sauce. Maybe they find out that a key person keeps going to swank parts of town, and might be susceptible to being lured away by a bigger salary. Or that someone is cheating on their significant other. Or nothing at all. But none of this would really be considered normal or acceptable business practices.
Maybe the mob pays to track their employees and their employees contacts, to make sure nobody ever gets near a police station. Or crazy people start tracking public officials with the hopes of assassinating them. Or public officials track eachother in the hopes of manufacturing some dirt to use against them. Essentially, it opens up a can of worms that we haven't prepared for. And maybe the only amount of preparation needed is to argue about it for a while and realize that it isn't the end of the world. But that's still a dialog that needs to take place.
There's no reason to post shit that is obviously fake.
Because some people seem to thrive on picking apart technical forgeries? Why do they post stories on arbitrary compression algorithm announcements and free energy generators?
The bot thing is a distraction. If we don't get our genome off this mudball we're as doomed as the dinosaurs. Sooner or later some unpleasantness will occur.
If utilizing remote robots advances our knowledge faster right now than attempting to stuff a human being up there, we'll achieve sustainable space travel faster that way.
Though to be perfectly honest, we've sent remote robots to other planets many times. The mars rovers come to mind. The only difference is that this would be more representatively shaped... though with a 3 - 6 second lag time, it's going to have to be pretty autonomous anyway.
You realize that if you build textures for 1080p, yet are running under the hood at 720p (most console games do), you're throwing out 1/2 of your budgeted texture memory? And you can't do a direct downpull from 1080 to 720, because the pixel information is wrong and it looks like a blurry mess. Otherwise, you want to build your texture at much higher resolution and downrez to both 1080p and 720p, which drives up your texture creation costs significantly.
The PC development versions of console games are just skeletons to help get the real version running. They're not optimized, they have all of the console buttons and helps, the framerate can be erratic, effects may or may not run, they don't respond to standard system hooks... They're not full versions, they're approximations of the real version, which helps streamline the pipeline. And frequently they'll only ever run on the configuration that the developer uses. They crash like mad, and good luck running in a foreign language or changing your HDD letter. They're not intended or ready for prime time.
Ultimately, it comes down to money. Valve has a great distribution channel on the PC and a cadre of eager buyers, with lots of demand for their project. They can afford to lavish attention on their computer versions. A PC port of Ninja Blade, on the other hand, might net 50k sales. Assuming $25 to the publisher for each of those sales (generous over the full discounted lifespan of the project), that's 1.2 million dollars to play with. Assuming 1/2 goes to distribution overhead (box art, manufacturing, pc sound library licensing, middleware, etc) that leaves 600k to play with. 1/2 of that probably has to go to profit to make it worth doing at all. So that leaves 300k. Assuming that each worker costs 2x again in materials overhead, worker's comp, etc, that's about 1.5 employees for a year keeping an eye on the PC port. That's not nearly enough to hire more artists to create larger texture bases or segment the development team. That's enough to have one guy struggle to port console specific code throughout the last half-year of development, then throw a couple of spare QA and a cleanup artist for one last month. Any more than that, and the PC version isn't financially worth being bothered about.
- Laid off, so I don't care.
So he's using it wrong because he optimizes it and actually evaluates the running code, and you're using it correctly because you treat it as a black box?
I'd rather rely on slow code that is 100% reliable than optimized code that might have introduced bugs. You can throw a faster processor at slow code, but you can't throw more hardware at coding mistakes.
1. If they're riding the brake, they're heating up their pads and significantly reducing braking power. Personally, I'd rather flash a big red light at them on the dash and train them not to do that, rather than have a bad driver running around without adequate braking power.
2. Lots of high-end cars with traction control have an override switch of some sort. If you're going to be brakestarting and other tricks, an override isn't too much to ask.
I've given up on PC gaming myself for many experiences like this. I struggled for about a day to get Bioshock's sound working. Most games I have to fidget repeatedly and for a long time with the graphics settings to get to a playable rate. Even one of the PC games that I helped develop I had to get a hacked version of the installer in order to actually run it on my machine.
I'd say a good third of all of the PC games that I've bought failed to run on my computer at all.
I was actually just talking to someone from one of the Technology Development councils in Massachusetts about this. Apparently they've recognized that as a state we've been so focused on the high-end brain only work, that we've failed to retain jobs for the 75% of people who stop at a high-school diploma. We've watched them go abroad with a wave and a smile, without doing any fighting to keep them here.
Say what you will about the intelligence economy. But in practice, robots are expensive and dumb and AI only works for very focused applications. You still need people to make stuff. Unfortunately, we've let our manufacturing base head overseas as if it were this inevitable decline, without really fighting for it.
I would add that the "floor mat" excuse always sounded like BS to me. I'm guessing there is a firmware bug in there somewhere that they can't find that just registers the gas pedal as down. They'd never admit to that, as it would reduce the public perception of security of drive-by-wire systems, and might introduce expensive public testing procedures.
In that case, your only chance is the brake overriding the gas (a process which should have been true from the beginning anyway). Of course, it might be something else and you might still be screwed... unknown computer bugs are like that.
Judging by this video, I'd guess so.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpMkCF3AdMY
The government can't create value through subsidies and tax credits, they can only steal from Peter to pay Paul (not to mention some astronomical administrative costs).
The government can incentivize behaviors that reduce overall costs to society. For example, promoting wind development helps reduce the cost to society of air pollution from coal-fired plants. Universal fire coverage creates value by being cheaper and more effective than individual fire coverage. Universal schooling for the young improves people's job prospects and quality of life in a way that wouldn't necessarily be possible for people to amortize costs over said lifetime.
My guess is that Ebay was given these as a research study and publicity stunt.
4 million dollars to save 133 thousand per year is a ROI of 3%. This would need to offset another 133k of backup supplies and costs to even approach the ROI of jamming your money in a CD.
You have to count opportunity costs. 5 boxes at $700,000 dollars would cost 3.5 million dollars. Assuming safe and conservative bond / CD investments at %5, they could earn $175,000 dollars per year at very low risk. That 100k dollar 9 month "savings" is actually costing them a total net loss of 41k dollars. It's better for them to just keep the money in a bank account.
A: Why the hell are treaties private? Shouldn't they be by law public documents?
B: This seems like a shortsighted reaction to a serious problem that the lawmakers don't understand. It also seems like the kind of shortsighted reaction that happens around the world hundreds of times each day. We'll survive.
It looks like it creates:
* Punishment for companies who know that their products are being used for copyright infringement, ALA Pirate's Bay, and don't try to stop it.
* Takedown procedures for Trademark Infringement, which are pretty standard.
* Country of origin needs to decide on a punishment for "knowingly and materially aiding" infringement, such as setting up an FTP site for music sharing.
* DMCA's retarded and technologically retarding restriction on picking digital locks on copyrighted content. We in the US have lived with this particular joy for years.
Quite frankly, this seems pretty close to "let's take US law and get people to apply it across the EU." Having lived with these problems for years, they weren't the end of the world here and they won't be the end of the world abroad. Taking steps towards international regulating bodies might be the first steps towards the end of spam, reduced botnets, phishing, international domain squatting, and other problems with the network right now. Pragmatically speaking, it probably just means that when Microsoft stops making the Xbox and we all try to get our purchased games off of it, we'll have to go to Russian or Chinese websites to figure out how, rather than ones hosted in Sweden. Oh, and anyone saying anything against Symantec in Europe will be hit with frivilous trademark takedown requests, which should last for 6 months or so until the ISP's just start using their discretion.
And unless you're on a notebook there is no reason to not have 4-8GB of RAM.
Notebooks have been outselling desktops for a few years now. Desktops are now the minority of computers. Also, 4+ GB of RAM isn't possible under windows unless A: running a 64 bit variant, and B: your system provider hasn't cheaped out and has actually updated the BIOS to support it. Considering how useless Vista 64 was, that essentially limits you to computers designed recently and bought in the last year. (or any OSX or Linux variant for a long time now, but that's another argument).
The 4GB RAM ceiling hasn't been smashed for that long. It will take time to adopt.
The UAC, in Vista, nagged constantly early on because of poorly written software.
I'd say that the UAC in Vista nagged constantly early on because it was written to complain about software that was written to standard procedures at the time. There is nothing inherently "poorly written" about writing to the current working directory, especially seeing as how A: XP was only vaguely a multi-user OS and B: Windows 98 was really never a multi-user OS. Also, C: Windows has added dozens of new layers of "default" directories over the years (One with every frick'ing OS revision), such that the only real safe directory is the one that the program is in. Also, seeing as how applications were allowed to do more or less anything in XP / NT, the most efficient and fast route was frequently the one that took the most initiative and privileges.
Software writers were writing to the system at the time. When Apple has changed their system radically in the past, they've firewalled off older code into emulation boxes that could run with their full expected privileges, but within the safer system of the redesigned OS. Microsoft just hoped it would all work, and assumed that people would put up with the annoyances until such a time as all of the software was re-written to their liking. Of course, it's not like they spent years trying to convince developers to behave in a certain way, or released the OS model information in 2003 so that by launch 2006 people could have their applications ready. They dumped it out there and assumed it would all go to plan eventually.
For the record, I switched from Vista to Windows 7. I get at least one UAC prompt on startup (stupid Java), and prompts whenever installing anything (4 new fonts today). It's much better than it had been, but it is still a bit annoying.
When I need to do a bunch of admin tasks on one of my Linux boxes I see nothing wrong with the appropriate use of the root login, it just shouldn't be used on a daily basis for using the machine.
Everyone listen to this (presumed) man. When logging into my old linux box I only ever had to enter Sudo or root login information when installing software, changing something pretty fundamental, or another action initiated by me personally. On Vista, I had to deal with UAC prompts three separate times when just booting the damned thing (Adobe updater, iTunes updater, Java updater). Half of security is making sure the bad guys are caught. But the other half of security is filtering out as many false positives as possible so that real warnings can be heard. UAC's first implementation was moderately good at the former, but ran around shouting "Wolf!" so often that real threats were more likely to get through.
Vista was mostly looked badly because they introduced new security features.
No, Vista mostly looked bad because it broke compatibility to introduce a bunch of new features that they didn't actually implement for Vista. So, for example, a lot of visual and other coding work was done under the hood for a resolution-independent user interface, where being super high-resolution wouldn't necessarily mean that all of your icons are tiny. And then they cut it for time. That work broke a lot of applications, consumed a ton of resources, and ultimately did the same thing as XP. Further, they introduced a lot of new hard disk mechanisms, breaking some of the past ones in the process, for their uber search system... which was cut for time.
Basically the only thing which wasn't cut for time from Vista was the user security model which you mentioned. However, within days of hittting Beta there were large and obvious ways around that security measure if you wanted to install bad things on user's computers. Because of this, proper and legal applications had to stop the user every few minutes for approval, whereas spyware and assorted nasties just wandered through the giant holes. I approve of the idea of implementing a UAC, but Vista's UAC was an annoyingly intrusive sieve, a paper-thin protection that trained users to click OK all the time. Being clearly a first rough draft of a better system, it didn't seem worth an extra few hundred dollars.
And that was the real rub. Win 98 was a lot more functional and internet-enabled than Win 95. Win XP was light years more stable than Win 98, with internet functionality built into the heart of the system. Windows Vista? Vista is just XP, but without running as much, and doing so in a more annoying fashion. It's like they forgot that a system update needs to sell on the advantages of the system over the current one, rather than just because it's the latest version of a standard iteration process.
Windows 7 is more popular in no small part because the Vista incompatibilities are mostly ironed out. The left / right panes is a nifty trick, and the new taskbar is quite usable with less clutter. Even the problems with running applications in 32 bits in a 64 bit environment are ironed out. Basically, there are no drawbacks to the new system over XP, unlike Vista at the time it launched. However, people's hardware is getting pretty long in the tooth. Anyone who had been holding out with XP can now get a Windows 7 machine with a huge hardware boost and some nice system touches, and can break the 4GB Ram barrier to boot.
There are definitely thing that just don't work well on iPhones.
Personally, I'd have touch represent click events, touch-and-drag represent mouseover / general mouse movement events, and touch-twice-and-drag represent the comparatively rare click-and-drag event. That should be sufficient to cover 99% of use cases.
In that case, Slashdot is an abomination. It (optionally) uses XMLHttpRequest to load pieces of the comments page without requiring a refresh of the entire page. So why do you post on an abomination?
A: Slashdot has interesting content.
B: Slashdot is an abomination. Pagedown goes too far because the bar at the top steals precious real-estate for no reason. Accidentally navigating away and back loses all box text, despite years of tools which save that state for just such eventualities. It runs incredibly slow on iPhones, despite being basically a static page with a reply box. It has a bunch of "Web 1.5" stuff hanging around in the options which hasn't really done much in years. It took about 2 years after the site refresh before it would serve consistently across all browsers.
Hooray for pushing the envelope for sake of pushing the envelope's sake. But if every website were coded like Slashdot, the web would be a far more painful place.
It can run about $7,500 to put a quarter of the screen banner up on a section front page on the NYTimes.com for a month. A comparable ad in the paper would cost you over a hundred thousand dollars.
There is a reason why the print side of things has ten times the revenue on one-tenth the readership. In this case, ad revenue wouldn't matter a darn compared to subscription fees.
Note: Posting from a phone, so no links. But the NY Times is not shy about posting their financials.
No, it's not. Get your inflated sense of right and wrong out of my house.
Are you saying someone spying on someone else to get their jollies off is exactly the same thing as someone spying on someone else because they're afraid they might hurt themselves? Intent is generally taken into account in sentencing, and in this case it seems like it should be as well.
Honestly, I hope that they get a lot more than that, that any elected officials who were aware of the situation and didn't work to prevent it are impeached and convicted (and given serious prison time as well as any government benefits including pensions revoked), and the school administration officials receive the same.
Spying for sake of influencing government is a horrible offence. To remove someone's rights, intentionally destroy their reputation, or because they're a perverted letch, are all awful reasons to spy on someone. These people should be arrested immediately and the book thrown at them.
Spying because you have a sense of responsibility about the activities of teenagers that you can't control, because you're acting on a sense of right and wrong that has been taken to extremes, is more forgivable. My high school principal had to deal with knife fights, drive-bys, underage pregnancies, suicides, pipe bomb creations gone wrong, heroin overdoses, cocaine overdoses, rape, arson of the school, animal husbandry, animal mutilations, bomb threats, murders, drug dealing... And that's just the stuff that I had heard about, at a relatively safe suburban school. We had basically everything operating out of that high school from prostitution rings to sophisticated computer parts fencing operations to fly-by-night bootleggers. I'm surprised the principal survived, let alone had enough sanity left to plan out how to spy on the students.
"That's no bug... it's the Outlook 2010 installer!"
This is what makes it amusing to me. I've made thousands of dollars on Outlook's inability to handle its own PST and OST files as they get above a certain size. Sending out gigantic messages just completes that circle.