The improvements to Internet Explorer due to appear in Service Pack 2 should help stop the spread of spyware somewhat.
Unfortunately I doubt Windows XP SP2 will work its magic on Win98/Me/2k, i.e. the majority of insecure Windows installations. If only Microsoft would drop this "IE is an inseparable part of the OS" nonsense.
Operating systems should not allow root access or even administrator access for certain functions (like installing software) without explicitly notifying the user of said installation and requiring an administrative password or phrase.
How will that help? All that means is that users will get used to typing in their root password every time they install something. And they'll type it in just as happily for EvilWare PrivacyInvader Pro as they do for Fluffysoft Bunnies(tm).
Unix and similar OSs have fewer spyware problems mainly because they're more commonly used in properly administered networks with a clueful administrator. A properly locked down Windows installation is also pretty secure against spyware; the problem is that most Windows users don't have them.
98Lite is what you're thinking of; my PC still claims to be running it, even though I upgraded to Win2k years ago. It included a replacement for the Win98 setup program that never installed IE at all - you know, like Microsoft swore in court was impossible?
However, I doubt it would work on any more recent version of Windows.
BTW, deleting iexplore.exe will have very little effect beyond preventing the users themselves from using IE; iexplore.exe is just a wrapper to the DLLs that contain the IE rendering engine, ActiveX, and everything else, which will still be installed and available to any program that wants to use them.
I'm also not quite sure how these users are supposed to keep their OS up to date without IE, given that Windows Update relies on ActiveX...
MSX may have failed in the USA, perhaps. It did well in Europe and Japan, and in South America it was a huge success.
You might as well claim the BBC Micro was a failure, because it was barely known in the USA. But they were the mainstay of British educational computing for the best part of a decade.
Firebird is a nice browser and hopefully they will start using native widgets rather than the ugly GTK like widgets being used now.
You know, until you said that I had not for a moment considered the possiblity that Firebird might not be using native widgets. It looks pretty damn native to me. Of course, I'm running Windows - I can see that things might look a bit different for a Linux user.;)
Personally I do a fair bit of research and I find no use for tabs. I can only read one screen at a time so I don't care for tabs.
Well, that's your choice and (IMO) your loss; at least you know the alternatives exist, and you obviously considered what would be best for you before deciding to stick with IE.
I can only read one page at a time, too, but with tabs I can have the next X pages I want to read loading in the background while I read the current one. I think I've probably saved more time that way than I spent installing Firebird.
Now, if only I was doing research, instead of browsing Slashdot articles and webcomics...;)
Opera was the only killer app that I *HAD* to have through the switch.... well laid out keyboard shortcuts,
Interestingly enough, the keyboard layout is the one major problem I see in Firebird and Thunderbird - not so much that the layout they provide is bad, as that there isn't an option to make it match Microsoft's layout, or to customise it to suit your own preferences. Back when I first switched I got very frustrated with Thunderbird's decision not to use the same shortcuts as Outlook and Eudora in particular. Now I'm used to it I can see that it's not really a big deal, but it probably will annoy enough people to hurt the package's adoption on Windows.
However, I think I saw something in the TODO list about adding that feature... I'd be amazed if it isn't implemented soon. And of course if it bothered me enough I could just scratch the itch myself - one of the real advantages of free software.
They're trying to be funny, but they're just demonstrating a failure to understand language evolution.
They're also ignorant. "Words that rhyme with Iraq", like "attack", "yak", and "back"? Except that none of those words rhymes with "Iraq"! The only word I can think of that does rhyme with "Iraq" is "aardvark", and that's the first time I've ever seen the two together in one sentence.
It might be from Spanish slang... but on the other hand my local British dialect uses the similar construction "where's she to" to mean "where has she gone", and given that the Spaniards have historically been our deadly enemies, I doubt our speech has been greatly influenced by theirs.;)
We WON the war. And most everyone is better off for it.
In precisely what way are people, other than the Iraqi dissidents whom Saddam was actively torturing, better off for our having won the war?
So far, nobody has shown that Saddam was in any way a threat to me personally, since I don't live in Iraq. It appears that he didn't have any WMDs, so he couldn't have been going to supply those to terrorists. So I'm no safer for his having been deposed.
Meanwhile, my government has spent vast sums of money on a very expensive war. Money which could have gone towards healthcare, education, medical and scientific research. Heck, maybe it would even have gone towards tax breaks.
Well, that sounds rather selfish of me. So why not think of all the people whose suffering could have been alleviated if, for example, those billions that the war has cost us had gone towards making cheap medicines available in Africa? Are you saying that it's better to rescue a few thousand people from an oppressive regime, than to rescue many millions from preventable diseases? Because I have my doubts about that one.
Anyway, I complain about spam filters, too, although I understand their usage in light of modern email abuse. The problem is that filters have a hard time distinguishing between legitimate and nonlegitimate commercial mail.
I don't see the problem. I don't know of a single spam filter that doesn't have whitelisting capabilities. If these people have signed up for your emails, they should whitelist your address. Just add instructions on how to do that in various popular email clients to the pages where people sign up for your marketing. Whatever other spam filtering they have is irrelevant, and you should have no need to try to circumvent it.
Duplication of nouns is indeed a very common feature of many human languages - even English, in baby talk. But I can't off-hand think of a single example of repeating a very common word three or more times as a frequent element of a language; perhaps linguists with more esoteric knowledge have heard of such a thing?
That's funny, I thought the erudite poster was speaking of British practice, because I (American) have never heard such a rule and I do hear Americans say things like "one thousand five hundred and one".
British practice is the same as Australian in this regard - we say "five hundred and one", and most British people would regard "five hundred one" as a very odd way of putting it.
I do not know of anywhere other than America where the "five hundred one" form is common (from what you're saying it isn't universal even there), so it seems fair to assume that anyone using it is American.
From past experience, if it was Gnome described that way then I suspect that the whole discussion would be dominated by irrate KDE fans, screaming about the injustice of the world. For a recent example, see the discussions about UserLinux choosing Gnome as its desktop.
That was an issue about a major figure in OSS making a decision to completely remove all traces of one of the two major desktop environments from his distribution, to the extent that not even its supporting libraries would be provided. And the article was about people not liking that.
This is a single throwaway comment in the description of an article on a completely unrelated subject.
I hope you can see why one of the above situations might be more likely to spark holy wars than the other.
Let's wait for an article on how LuserLinux (backed by some well-known figure like ESR) is not going to include Gnome or any Gnome libraries before we draw comparisons, okay?
(BTW, I use Blackbox on the few occasions I boot Linux, so I would hope you don't mistake me for a riled KDE user.)
If my CD or DVD got damaged, they should replace them for free.
If you're worried about damaging your DVDs, why not insure them? You don't expect to be given a new car for free when your old one crashes or breaks down; why should DVDs be different?
Your definition of a "scripting" language is moot. Java is no more or less a "scripting" language than Python. C# no more or less than Ruby.
Slightly OT: the definition I was taught is that a language is a scripting language if its runtime reads source code directly, an interpreted language if its runtime reads bytecode (like Java), and a compiled language if it generates native code.
This is still not really satisfactory, and it breaks down very quickly when it encounters a language like O'Caml, which supports all three execution models directly, but as a working definition it's not so bad. Note in particular the lack of any pejorative subtext to the "scripting language" definition.
Why do you think code running on a good Java VM is FASTER than the equivalent code written in C/C++? Well, I asume you don't even know that this is the case.
Please provide the evidence on which you are basing this bold claim, so that I too may be enlightened.
Great. Just what we need - another of those braindead technological "advances" like human-readable data interchange formats that makes life easier for a few developers (simpler, cheaper compiler development) and harder for millions of users (worse performance).
I'm sorry? The compiler most people here probably use is GCC, which already uses a general-purpose IL to compile a range of very different high-level langauges. And indeed it doesn't perform as well as, say, Intel's C++-specific compiler. But I haven't seen any studies which suggest this is the fault of the IL alone; and its performance is good enough to have made Linux compiled with GCC a respectable choice for enterprise computing.
A universal standard IL would be unlikely to result in worse machine code than GCC produces, so millions of users would notice no difference whatsoever. And meanwhile it would make life easier for many developers. I really don't see a problem with this. So far as I can tell, what you're saying is "I don't think it will work, so you're idiots to even consider it".
Well, all I can say is that if everyone had that attitude, the major hardware platform today would still be the abacus.
This isn't a matter of political correctness. In Britain we've used the old "it's the taking part that counts" line for far, far longer than the "modern PC climate" has existed.
Those who try and fail are heroes - they're as heroic as those who try and succeed. Let's take a non-PC example - think of the soldier who defends a bridge against hopeless odds. He kills maybe a dozen or so enemies, but then he's cut down. By your definition, he is not a hero! But I think you would find your view in the minority.
note that Macs come factory fresh with the latest patches installed. I checked a friend's new machine, and found that it was patched to 10.2.8 (the latest version at the time).
What's that got to do with anything? Most PCs come ready patched too. The issue is installing the OS from scratch. Tell me, if you'd bought a copy of Jaguar on the same day your friend bought his new Mac, would that have been version 10.2.8?
Slashdot Mirror
The improvements to Internet Explorer due to appear in Service Pack 2 should help stop the spread of spyware somewhat.
Unfortunately I doubt Windows XP SP2 will work its magic on Win98/Me/2k, i.e. the majority of insecure Windows installations. If only Microsoft would drop this "IE is an inseparable part of the OS" nonsense.
Operating systems should not allow root access or even administrator access for certain functions (like installing software) without explicitly notifying the user of said installation and requiring an administrative password or phrase.
How will that help? All that means is that users will get used to typing in their root password every time they install something. And they'll type it in just as happily for EvilWare PrivacyInvader Pro as they do for Fluffysoft Bunnies(tm).
Unix and similar OSs have fewer spyware problems mainly because they're more commonly used in properly administered networks with a clueful administrator. A properly locked down Windows installation is also pretty secure against spyware; the problem is that most Windows users don't have them.
98Lite is what you're thinking of; my PC still claims to be running it, even though I upgraded to Win2k years ago. It included a replacement for the Win98 setup program that never installed IE at all - you know, like Microsoft swore in court was impossible?
However, I doubt it would work on any more recent version of Windows.
BTW, deleting iexplore.exe will have very little effect beyond preventing the users themselves from using IE; iexplore.exe is just a wrapper to the DLLs that contain the IE rendering engine, ActiveX, and everything else, which will still be installed and available to any program that wants to use them.
I'm also not quite sure how these users are supposed to keep their OS up to date without IE, given that Windows Update relies on ActiveX...
MSX may have failed in the USA, perhaps. It did well in Europe and Japan, and in South America it was a huge success.
You might as well claim the BBC Micro was a failure, because it was barely known in the USA. But they were the mainstay of British educational computing for the best part of a decade.
Firebird is a nice browser and hopefully they will start using native widgets rather than the ugly GTK like widgets being used now.
;)
You know, until you said that I had not for a moment considered the possiblity that Firebird might not be using native widgets. It looks pretty damn native to me. Of course, I'm running Windows - I can see that things might look a bit different for a Linux user.
Personally I do a fair bit of research and I find no use for tabs. I can only read one screen at a time so I don't care for tabs.
;)
Well, that's your choice and (IMO) your loss; at least you know the alternatives exist, and you obviously considered what would be best for you before deciding to stick with IE.
I can only read one page at a time, too, but with tabs I can have the next X pages I want to read loading in the background while I read the current one. I think I've probably saved more time that way than I spent installing Firebird.
Now, if only I was doing research, instead of browsing Slashdot articles and webcomics...
Opera was the only killer app that I *HAD* to have through the switch. ... well laid out keyboard shortcuts,
Interestingly enough, the keyboard layout is the one major problem I see in Firebird and Thunderbird - not so much that the layout they provide is bad, as that there isn't an option to make it match Microsoft's layout, or to customise it to suit your own preferences. Back when I first switched I got very frustrated with Thunderbird's decision not to use the same shortcuts as Outlook and Eudora in particular. Now I'm used to it I can see that it's not really a big deal, but it probably will annoy enough people to hurt the package's adoption on Windows.
However, I think I saw something in the TODO list about adding that feature... I'd be amazed if it isn't implemented soon. And of course if it bothered me enough I could just scratch the itch myself - one of the real advantages of free software.
They're trying to be funny, but they're just demonstrating a failure to understand language evolution.
They're also ignorant. "Words that rhyme with Iraq", like "attack", "yak", and "back"? Except that none of those words rhymes with "Iraq"! The only word I can think of that does rhyme with "Iraq" is "aardvark", and that's the first time I've ever seen the two together in one sentence.
It might be from Spanish slang... but on the other hand my local British dialect uses the similar construction "where's she to" to mean "where has she gone", and given that the Spaniards have historically been our deadly enemies, I doubt our speech has been greatly influenced by theirs. ;)
no one speaks in Olde English anymore, now do they?
;)
That ne bith swa. Oft ic mid fela othres be thaem ealdre engliscgereorde sprece.
Come on, someone correct my grammar...
(Not my spelling, though, please. Damn Slashdot won't let me use perfectly good English characters like þ and &ash;.)
We WON the war. And most everyone is better off for it.
In precisely what way are people, other than the Iraqi dissidents whom Saddam was actively torturing, better off for our having won the war?
So far, nobody has shown that Saddam was in any way a threat to me personally, since I don't live in Iraq. It appears that he didn't have any WMDs, so he couldn't have been going to supply those to terrorists. So I'm no safer for his having been deposed.
Meanwhile, my government has spent vast sums of money on a very expensive war. Money which could have gone towards healthcare, education, medical and scientific research. Heck, maybe it would even have gone towards tax breaks.
Well, that sounds rather selfish of me. So why not think of all the people whose suffering could have been alleviated if, for example, those billions that the war has cost us had gone towards making cheap medicines available in Africa? Are you saying that it's better to rescue a few thousand people from an oppressive regime, than to rescue many millions from preventable diseases? Because I have my doubts about that one.
Anyway, I complain about spam filters, too, although I understand their usage in light of modern email abuse. The problem is that filters have a hard time distinguishing between legitimate and nonlegitimate commercial mail.
I don't see the problem. I don't know of a single spam filter that doesn't have whitelisting capabilities. If these people have signed up for your emails, they should whitelist your address. Just add instructions on how to do that in various popular email clients to the pages where people sign up for your marketing. Whatever other spam filtering they have is irrelevant, and you should have no need to try to circumvent it.
Duplication of nouns is indeed a very common feature of many human languages - even English, in baby talk. But I can't off-hand think of a single example of repeating a very common word three or more times as a frequent element of a language; perhaps linguists with more esoteric knowledge have heard of such a thing?
I'm still waiting to see KDE on Windows!
What - you mean something like this?
That's funny, I thought the erudite poster was speaking of British practice, because I (American) have never heard such a rule and I do hear Americans say things like "one thousand five hundred and one".
British practice is the same as Australian in this regard - we say "five hundred and one", and most British people would regard "five hundred one" as a very odd way of putting it.
I do not know of anywhere other than America where the "five hundred one" form is common (from what you're saying it isn't universal even there), so it seems fair to assume that anyone using it is American.
From past experience, if it was Gnome described that way then I suspect that the whole discussion would be dominated by irrate KDE fans, screaming about the injustice of the world. For a recent example, see the discussions about UserLinux choosing Gnome as its desktop.
That was an issue about a major figure in OSS making a decision to completely remove all traces of one of the two major desktop environments from his distribution, to the extent that not even its supporting libraries would be provided. And the article was about people not liking that.
This is a single throwaway comment in the description of an article on a completely unrelated subject.
I hope you can see why one of the above situations might be more likely to spark holy wars than the other.
Let's wait for an article on how LuserLinux (backed by some well-known figure like ESR) is not going to include Gnome or any Gnome libraries before we draw comparisons, okay?
(BTW, I use Blackbox on the few occasions I boot Linux, so I would hope you don't mistake me for a riled KDE user.)
If my CD or DVD got damaged, they should replace them for free.
If you're worried about damaging your DVDs, why not insure them? You don't expect to be given a new car for free when your old one crashes or breaks down; why should DVDs be different?
Various benchmarks have shown 10-20% faster execution speed for JVM versus CLR.
Citations, please.
No, I'm not going to google for it myself; you're the one making the claims, it's your job to support them.
Your definition of a "scripting" language is moot. Java is no more or less a "scripting" language than Python. C# no more or less than Ruby.
Slightly OT: the definition I was taught is that a language is a scripting language if its runtime reads source code directly, an interpreted language if its runtime reads bytecode (like Java), and a compiled language if it generates native code.
This is still not really satisfactory, and it breaks down very quickly when it encounters a language like O'Caml, which supports all three execution models directly, but as a working definition it's not so bad. Note in particular the lack of any pejorative subtext to the "scripting language" definition.
Why do you think code running on a good Java VM is FASTER than the equivalent code written in C/C++? Well, I asume you don't even know that this is the case.
Please provide the evidence on which you are basing this bold claim, so that I too may be enlightened.
Great. Just what we need - another of those braindead technological "advances" like human-readable data interchange formats that makes life easier for a few developers (simpler, cheaper compiler development) and harder for millions of users (worse performance).
I'm sorry? The compiler most people here probably use is GCC, which already uses a general-purpose IL to compile a range of very different high-level langauges. And indeed it doesn't perform as well as, say, Intel's C++-specific compiler. But I haven't seen any studies which suggest this is the fault of the IL alone; and its performance is good enough to have made Linux compiled with GCC a respectable choice for enterprise computing.
A universal standard IL would be unlikely to result in worse machine code than GCC produces, so millions of users would notice no difference whatsoever. And meanwhile it would make life easier for many developers. I really don't see a problem with this. So far as I can tell, what you're saying is "I don't think it will work, so you're idiots to even consider it".
Well, all I can say is that if everyone had that attitude, the major hardware platform today would still be the abacus.
This isn't a matter of political correctness. In Britain we've used the old "it's the taking part that counts" line for far, far longer than the "modern PC climate" has existed.
Those who try and fail are heroes - they're as heroic as those who try and succeed. Let's take a non-PC example - think of the soldier who defends a bridge against hopeless odds. He kills maybe a dozen or so enemies, but then he's cut down. By your definition, he is not a hero! But I think you would find your view in the minority.
note that Macs come factory fresh with the latest patches installed. I checked a friend's new machine, and found that it was patched to 10.2.8 (the latest version at the time).
What's that got to do with anything? Most PCs come ready patched too. The issue is installing the OS from scratch. Tell me, if you'd bought a copy of Jaguar on the same day your friend bought his new Mac, would that have been version 10.2.8?
What, and spend the rest of the week trying to explain where the Start button went?
10 ?"HELLO WORLD":GOTO10
Argh! He's using the evil Microsoft dialect of BASIC!
As all BBC fans know, the One True Abbreviation of "PRINT" is "P.", not the abomination that is "?".
I remember writing a simple adventure game on a friend's MSX once... the incompatible abbreviations bit me on just about every line.