Blocking MS out of the loop is a no-brainer, as the worm only impacts MS systems, and all MS systems at that. Blocking AV from detecting itself individually makes sense, because they are less likely to be present on all machines than Windows is on a Windows machine.
MS also has more resources and incentive to get rid of this worm: there are a myriad of reasons why this worm's existence is bad for MS. It removes control of the systems from MS, preventing them from fixing them remotely. Also, unlike AV (which would suffer a marginal slap on the wrist from a payload being added to the worm relative to MS), the OS itself looks very bad for being able to be exploited in this fashion in the first place.
Additionally, by denying MS, but hiding itself from AV, it allows the user to have the perception of remaining in control. Most users are paranoid about AV, and get satisfaction from the "system secure: 0 viruses found" messages. In the same breath, however, many users don't trust updates from MS (due to them breaking things in the past), and not putting all that much focus on remaining "up to date". Software updates are not viewed as important for security by most people. There would be much wider detection of this worm if AV was similarly denied as MS is.
Conflicker is different htan what MS is doing for a number of reasons. One, MS has a track record of not being overtly nefarious, and is a known quantity. If MS were to pass down a damaging payload from their update servers, there would be hell to pay, and MS would be in deep shit. (Likewise, if a Conflicker payload were to change the update server's path and redirect it to a 3rd party update, MS would also catch hell - getting back to why MS is so peeved about this one.)
Simply put, this worm is dangerous because it is an unknown, volatile quantity against which we've currently got little recourse. It's potentially benign, indefinately; but it's also potentially lethal: the payload it might one day receive might wipe the disk, put a small HPA section on the disk with its payload with a BIOS SSE virus to execute said code once it's in Windows, or a number of other things that are difficult to detect, prevent, and remove. And that's in addition to detecting the worm itself in the first place.
You over-estimate the competence of your average corporate/corporate IT culture. Big companies like IBM and Microsoft might get by OK, but there are a lot of large companies out there who don't have an eye out for IT security for a number of reasons:
* Cost to implement * Inconvenience of implementation * Cost (in man-hours) to monitor
And so on. And, in addition to schools/colleges, you've got a very large handful of companies who are likely to be vulnerable:
* Small-medium companies with with a handful of 'triage' IT staff who don't follow even basic project management principles (for IT, or otherwise). * Small-medium companies who do such things, but aren't clued into the broader security implications (IE, they run Symantec corporate or such, and consider themselves 'good'). * Small companies which don't have the budget or apparent need for IT staff, instead occasionally hiring an IT contractor to do triage/repair. * Small-medium sized hospitals. In my experience, they're one of the worst for being understaffed for IT.
Basically, unless the company has a sizable IT staff (let's guess and call it 5 full-time IT employees who are at the 3rd tier support level or above), you're going to be in trouble.
It's really quite simple. If you were a non-corporeal intelligence who was asexually fathered by a social recluse without a personality and a deep seated hatred for other people, you'd be pretty mean, too.
Wouldn't it be funny if Conflicker were an attempt my MS or Apple or another major computer OEM provider (Dell, HP, etc.) to try and promote computer sales? Wreck the existing computers' installs, and people will go shopping (with their tax 'refund' - April 1st would be a good date to promote that, I think).
No. Just because it communicates using IP does not mean it knows where it's instructions are coming from.
One of the key ways in which these worms/viruses/etc. get stopped is by taking the distribution/update servers down. Hard-coding the update server, or even having a means to update the source, is not terribly useful in the long run. Not when you're trying to be stealthy and avoid detection.
Fortunately for the IT industry (and really, the world as a whole) most trojan worms to this date have been fairly amateur in terms of avoidance techniques. They latch on to one or several vulnerabilities and use fairly predictable intelligence for infection and self-preservation.
Conflicker appears to be the first serious "engineered" worm we've faced yet: worms created by genuine professionals with a deep and broad knowledge of technology and security. This is going to be problematic.
A while back, a friend and and I made up a non-functional 'ultimate worm' rough prototype. Our design had many of the features which Conflicker seems to demonstrate: decentralized P2P type updating, stealthy system presence, encrypted communication, and the like. One key functionality was that the botnet controller could, at any time, update the botnet through any infected host and have it propagate throughout the botnet cluster, unattended. There would be absolutely no way to trace the origin of the update.
We had some additional functionality (what I'd call generational peering vectors) which hasn't manifested in Conflicker yet, thank god, but otherwise Conflicker and our design are freakishly alike.
My guess? I suspect Conflicker is either a massive foreign commercial project (compared to previous botnet attempts) staffed with sought-after professionals, or it's a (pick one) government-run experiment/espionage attempt. From a national-security perspective, I think the best thing that could be done is to create a counter-espionage bot to seek out and destroy infections of Conflicker. But maybe I'm off on this.
Absolutely! Doesn't MS even own a large percentage of Apple's stock? Why would they do that, while at the same time talking smack about Apple - a 'competitor'? It's horribly dishonest, and anyone who looks at the whole picture (a small percentage of a small percentage of the population) is gong to realize it. This is doublespeak at its finest.
It works to Microsoft's advantage for a number of reasons to mention Apple over Linux, or for that matter, to simply say Vista/W7 is/will be better than XP.
The latter draws attention to the fact that, indeed, their products have been shit, and MS would much rather people stick with XP than "upgrade" to a Mac over Vista/W7 (henceforth called "VMS" for Vista-based Microsoft System).
The former allows attention to be focused on Linux, giving the largely advertising-free OS (barring word-of-mouth) some greatly beneficial advertising: if MS thinks Linux is a threat, it must have merit, right? There's no way in hell MS would do that, so they'd rather create a phantom out of something that already exists (and which they gain at least some profit from, anyway) with the guise of (financial) competition than allow any attention to fall on their actual competitors.
I always find it hilarious how people assume MS doesn't benefit from an Apple sale. They own Apple stock. Most Mac users will buy Office ($150+) for their Mac. Bootcamp? Many will pay for a retail copy of Windows. I'd not be surprised if the average amount of money brought into MS from the sale of a Mac wasn't close to, or higher than, the total amount brought in by an OEM non-corporate sale of Windows, honestly.
The biggest thing MS has to look out for right now is unemployed tech workers who know their shit. Yes, seriously. If you're familiar with operating systems and can't find work, what're you going to do for money? You're going to try and do service and sales work. A lot of these tech workers will do MS-only type service, but I suspect once they do enough Vista or XP reinstalls (even if with a tool like unattended), they'll get tired of it and start trying to push Linux for a certain segment of their users. This means old hardware will have new life breathed into it, and there will be fewer computer sales. For your average user, a GNOME desktop is going to provide just as much functionaliy with firefox and thunderbird as an OS X desktop would with Safari and Mail.
My apologies; lumping in 'problem biofuels' was accidental/not my intent. What we really need to do is focus on the key technologies, and not lump everything under "biofuel" or "petrofuel". The more efficient technologies get a bad rap due to the association with the poor technologies within each group.
As far as "viable alternatives", you can't make an alternative viable by crippling the thing you're trying to make an alternative to. That's just crippling the original and replacing it. It's also not exactly possible, because no alternative (or combination of alternatives) could actually come place to replacing petroleum - now, or in the foreseeable future.
What you're basically proposing is to cease petrol production and allow biofuels to fill the void - as I understand it. It's not physically possible to accomplish, or ethical to attempt, without utterly destroying global industry and dumping people down to 3rd world status overnight.
Question: when, exactly, did you make the transition to IT? During the dot-com boom, perhaps, when everyone and their brother was getting into IT?
That was then, this is now. I'm not saying it isn't possible with the right combination of luck, experience, and friends, but the market is a far cry different now than it was even, oh, a year ago.
Companies do not want to hire "new blood". They want a fit-and-finish complete programmer - or DBA, sysadmin, et cetera. Finding a company that doesn't play by these rules is few and far between. If you're applying for a junior programmer position, you better have had schooling and experience in doing it.
Personally, I've got about 8 years of experience doing sysadmin contract work (during which time I completed an IT degree). I am very good at what I do. Yet I've had a hell of a time finding a FT permanent position in the last year and a half due to (what I assume to be) HR seeing no relevant (programming jobs), full-time positions on my resume.
You can't get an "entry level" programming job because they don't exist - not in the purest sense. However, entry-level positions requiring 1-2 years of related experience do exist. Sometimes they even accept a 2-4 year degree sufficient substitution! But usually, that's in additional to the experience.
The only realistic way to break in to any industry with little to no actual experience is to know someone who can get you a job. It's either who you know, or to have a boilerplate IT resume with no gaps or things which don't fit.
10-15 years? I've been on Slashdot for over a decade, and since its inception this kind of thing has been covered here. Things like the Microsoft antitrust case has been going on for a while. It's just that big cases haven't been that all common because there's a significant chance of MAD.
It's not bullshit; you just don't understand what they're saying.
Just because they say it's about TomTom's specific "implementation" of the Linux kernel does not mean that TomTom's specific implementation isn't synonymous with the Linux kernel itself.
They are likely quite aware of how Linux works at this stage (they are, after all, the world's biggest software company's legal team), and approach things from the perspective of the kernel being the source. In short, they want VFAT support out of the kernel.
They aren't that stupid. Though they might want you to think they're that stupid. You seem to forget that MS has gotten where it is today through litigation and hostile takeovers. They're also likely assuming that the judge(s) for the case(s) aren't technologically savvy.
This makes it apparent that MS is in this thing for the end result: namely, patents stifling MS-alternative software, and Linux adoption in particular. They are very likely to be willing to pay the full amount, if it means they've got a club with which they can threaten Open Source competitors.
I'm not sure which is more fucked... that I could read that just fine, at 6am in the morning (on the down side of the day, no less), or that I actually bothered to read half of it.:-/
I agree with you completely. It isn't speed that's the issue, so much as usability.
I put up with the bloat of Firefox on my 512Mb laptop on the sole basis that it's functional. It has the extensions I need, and I can work it in around how I do my other work. Opera crashes incessantly, though it's probably second best in terms of 'usable'. And IE doesn't even approach either. Chrome, the little I've used it, is closer to IE than the other two (and not that much different than Firefox in terms of memory use).
My god man, how heavy can these sites get on Javascript? The most demanding sites I've been to, in terms of tax on the system (flash not included) are Slashdot and Digg. How much worse than the "4+ seconds to render the comments page" I experience on my system could it be?
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but what's all the fuss with a "faster" browser, at this point? They're pretty damn fast as they are (pick one). The big problem, in my mind, is their memory use. That goes for both "normal running" memory use, and "my god it's leaky" memory use.
Currently, Firefox is running with 360M virtual and 131M resident memory utilized. The browser window has been open for 85 minutes with exactly 20 tabs - no flash, and 1 slashdot page. I've got to shut down firefox due to excessive swapping/poor system performance more often than I used to have to reboot Windows 9x due to stability issues!
Firefox, IE, and Opera have all shot up in their memory use extremely quickly - to the point where Firefox has become almost unusable on my laptop with 512M, while having Tbird and OO.org open at the same time. And that's only with about 20 tabs open, noscript, flashblock, and a bunch of other things to reduce the memory overhead.
Just because RAM is cheap doesn't mean you should leave people out in the cold who have older stuff. Likewise, if you bloat your products, porting them to portable devices (cell phones, etc.) is going to be a bit troublesome: RAM doesn't seem to be having the same speed or capacity leaps that CPUs are - and in a portable, sticking more RAM in is only going to decrease battery life.
They didn't specify CO2. They said emissions. Look up the hazardous byproducts of burning ethanol, if you feel so inclined. You can not grow coconut trees throughout the whole world, or even in a significant part of it. Last I checked, coconut oil was expensive (largely due to its scarcity).
Most biofuels have so far been derived from corn, soy, and other commercial grains/food, because that's what's available. Consider what could be done with that food if you weren't burning it in your environmentally friendly vehicle. People could eat it, surprisingly. (Remember that semi-famine the world had the years following US adoption of ethanol?)
What's dishonest is saying "there are alternatives!" then naming half a dozen "alternatives" which aren't viable in volume, price, or logistics to any significant degree, and never will be for those very same reasons. Pursue the current trends in biofuels to their logical conclusion, and we'll have no grains left to eat.
I'm sorry... what? Why in the world would anyone bitch if a better fuel came along as an alternative to gasoline? Are people bitching about the smartphones replacing their older phones? Or did people bitch too hard when cars replaced the horse?... oh. We're talking about (industrially produced) biofuels, though, aren't we? The ones that cost more to produce and consume more energy to make than they output? Well, then it's really not all too surprising people would bitch! There's absolutely no incentive, to the consumer, to switch.
(And no, biofuels will never be cheaper than petrolium fuels unless they stop making them out of things that need to be harvested and augmented by petroleum fuels. So saying "gas just needs to get expensive enough" doesn't really cut it.)
If you want biofuel of any value, you will have to grow it in a vat with bacteria, quickly.
(Meanwhile, there's nuclear energy, which is clean, cheap, and potentially plentiful - if we were to utilize it - and we've had the tech for that for over 50 years. Even France uses it (buying US 'waste' to do so, actually). Why isn't nuclear a viable option to any 'greens'?)
Its simple: eco-friendly is the new god to many. They see it as heresy to even suggest 'green' fuels aren't green, or aren't a better-than-break-even venture. Like most religious zealots, facts or reality mean nothing if those facts interfere with their faith or first beliefs. Simply put, logic be damned. (This is why we've got 'green terrorists' burning down SUV dealerships.)
Oh, also, it's plainly obvious why Shell is doing what they're doing. Large companies are not well suited for persuing emerging trends, or for that matter, quick-and-dirty R&D. This is particularly true during a recession/depression, when they've got to be careful to not be capsized utterly. On the flip side of things, this is why small R&D, and 'start ups' in general, tend to flourish during hard economic times (as Apple, MS, etc. did during the late-70s/early-80s): the big dogs are slow to maneuver due to a tightening belt, and are more risk/challenge averse.
If history can be any indication, some small start-ups will invent/discover the "next big thing" in terms of 'renewable' energy.
Is anyone free to use that idea? I know a couple animators who might be willing to work up a humorous-yet-somewhat-realistic penguin to pose in such poses. Imagine:
- Small penguin with arms held firmly to his side, beak stuck out in an "O", held to someone's ear. - Medium penguin in someone's lap in an airport, the person petting it (think: medium-small puppy). - Large penguin(s) standing in a row, stacked (think: chicken/egg barn) up, handing each other email, web pages, pictures, etc. - Penguin in cop suit orchestrating traffic (maybe from on top of a traffic light pole) - Penguin toaster and/or fridge, alarm clock (eyes serving as the digits on the clock).
But some of the commercials (notably the rock-paper-linux one and the hospital one) were actually half decent. rock-paper-linux reminded me a bit of an IBM-meets-Apple commercial, and the hospital one reminded me a lot of the old 3dfx commercials, or maybe an Intel commercial.
Production values were pretty damn high, and those two, at least, didn't really play too much into the stupid "I'm Linux" theme.
Those are great! They both made me chuckle. I'd say the 'hospital' one is better. Reminded me slightly of the old 3dfx videos from around 1997 or 1998.
Here we go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmaYH1F6kho
Actually, yes, there are additional ATF regulations you're not aware of. See; AP ammunition - particularly handgun AP. It's unclear whether.308 AP is also illegal.
Yep, that's right: nuggets of copper- and lead-clad steel or tungsten in certain dimensions is illegal.
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Blocking MS out of the loop is a no-brainer, as the worm only impacts MS systems, and all MS systems at that. Blocking AV from detecting itself individually makes sense, because they are less likely to be present on all machines than Windows is on a Windows machine.
MS also has more resources and incentive to get rid of this worm: there are a myriad of reasons why this worm's existence is bad for MS. It removes control of the systems from MS, preventing them from fixing them remotely. Also, unlike AV (which would suffer a marginal slap on the wrist from a payload being added to the worm relative to MS), the OS itself looks very bad for being able to be exploited in this fashion in the first place.
Additionally, by denying MS, but hiding itself from AV, it allows the user to have the perception of remaining in control. Most users are paranoid about AV, and get satisfaction from the "system secure: 0 viruses found" messages. In the same breath, however, many users don't trust updates from MS (due to them breaking things in the past), and not putting all that much focus on remaining "up to date". Software updates are not viewed as important for security by most people. There would be much wider detection of this worm if AV was similarly denied as MS is.
Conflicker is different htan what MS is doing for a number of reasons. One, MS has a track record of not being overtly nefarious, and is a known quantity. If MS were to pass down a damaging payload from their update servers, there would be hell to pay, and MS would be in deep shit. (Likewise, if a Conflicker payload were to change the update server's path and redirect it to a 3rd party update, MS would also catch hell - getting back to why MS is so peeved about this one.)
Simply put, this worm is dangerous because it is an unknown, volatile quantity against which we've currently got little recourse. It's potentially benign, indefinately; but it's also potentially lethal: the payload it might one day receive might wipe the disk, put a small HPA section on the disk with its payload with a BIOS SSE virus to execute said code once it's in Windows, or a number of other things that are difficult to detect, prevent, and remove. And that's in addition to detecting the worm itself in the first place.
You over-estimate the competence of your average corporate/corporate IT culture. Big companies like IBM and Microsoft might get by OK, but there are a lot of large companies out there who don't have an eye out for IT security for a number of reasons:
* Cost to implement
* Inconvenience of implementation
* Cost (in man-hours) to monitor
And so on. And, in addition to schools/colleges, you've got a very large handful of companies who are likely to be vulnerable:
* Small-medium companies with with a handful of 'triage' IT staff who don't follow even basic project management principles (for IT, or otherwise).
* Small-medium companies who do such things, but aren't clued into the broader security implications (IE, they run Symantec corporate or such, and consider themselves 'good').
* Small companies which don't have the budget or apparent need for IT staff, instead occasionally hiring an IT contractor to do triage/repair.
* Small-medium sized hospitals. In my experience, they're one of the worst for being understaffed for IT.
Basically, unless the company has a sizable IT staff (let's guess and call it 5 full-time IT employees who are at the 3rd tier support level or above), you're going to be in trouble.
It's really quite simple. If you were a non-corporeal intelligence who was asexually fathered by a social recluse without a personality and a deep seated hatred for other people, you'd be pretty mean, too.
Wouldn't it be funny if Conflicker were an attempt my MS or Apple or another major computer OEM provider (Dell, HP, etc.) to try and promote computer sales? Wreck the existing computers' installs, and people will go shopping (with their tax 'refund' - April 1st would be a good date to promote that, I think).
No. Just because it communicates using IP does not mean it knows where it's instructions are coming from.
One of the key ways in which these worms/viruses/etc. get stopped is by taking the distribution/update servers down. Hard-coding the update server, or even having a means to update the source, is not terribly useful in the long run. Not when you're trying to be stealthy and avoid detection.
Fortunately for the IT industry (and really, the world as a whole) most trojan worms to this date have been fairly amateur in terms of avoidance techniques. They latch on to one or several vulnerabilities and use fairly predictable intelligence for infection and self-preservation.
Conflicker appears to be the first serious "engineered" worm we've faced yet: worms created by genuine professionals with a deep and broad knowledge of technology and security. This is going to be problematic.
A while back, a friend and and I made up a non-functional 'ultimate worm' rough prototype. Our design had many of the features which Conflicker seems to demonstrate: decentralized P2P type updating, stealthy system presence, encrypted communication, and the like. One key functionality was that the botnet controller could, at any time, update the botnet through any infected host and have it propagate throughout the botnet cluster, unattended. There would be absolutely no way to trace the origin of the update.
We had some additional functionality (what I'd call generational peering vectors) which hasn't manifested in Conflicker yet, thank god, but otherwise Conflicker and our design are freakishly alike.
My guess? I suspect Conflicker is either a massive foreign commercial project (compared to previous botnet attempts) staffed with sought-after professionals, or it's a (pick one) government-run experiment/espionage attempt. From a national-security perspective, I think the best thing that could be done is to create a counter-espionage bot to seek out and destroy infections of Conflicker. But maybe I'm off on this.
Absolutely! Doesn't MS even own a large percentage of Apple's stock? Why would they do that, while at the same time talking smack about Apple - a 'competitor'? It's horribly dishonest, and anyone who looks at the whole picture (a small percentage of a small percentage of the population) is gong to realize it. This is doublespeak at its finest.
It works to Microsoft's advantage for a number of reasons to mention Apple over Linux, or for that matter, to simply say Vista/W7 is/will be better than XP.
The latter draws attention to the fact that, indeed, their products have been shit, and MS would much rather people stick with XP than "upgrade" to a Mac over Vista/W7 (henceforth called "VMS" for Vista-based Microsoft System).
The former allows attention to be focused on Linux, giving the largely advertising-free OS (barring word-of-mouth) some greatly beneficial advertising: if MS thinks Linux is a threat, it must have merit, right? There's no way in hell MS would do that, so they'd rather create a phantom out of something that already exists (and which they gain at least some profit from, anyway) with the guise of (financial) competition than allow any attention to fall on their actual competitors.
I always find it hilarious how people assume MS doesn't benefit from an Apple sale. They own Apple stock. Most Mac users will buy Office ($150+) for their Mac. Bootcamp? Many will pay for a retail copy of Windows. I'd not be surprised if the average amount of money brought into MS from the sale of a Mac wasn't close to, or higher than, the total amount brought in by an OEM non-corporate sale of Windows, honestly.
The biggest thing MS has to look out for right now is unemployed tech workers who know their shit. Yes, seriously. If you're familiar with operating systems and can't find work, what're you going to do for money? You're going to try and do service and sales work. A lot of these tech workers will do MS-only type service, but I suspect once they do enough Vista or XP reinstalls (even if with a tool like unattended), they'll get tired of it and start trying to push Linux for a certain segment of their users. This means old hardware will have new life breathed into it, and there will be fewer computer sales. For your average user, a GNOME desktop is going to provide just as much functionaliy with firefox and thunderbird as an OS X desktop would with Safari and Mail.
My apologies; lumping in 'problem biofuels' was accidental/not my intent. What we really need to do is focus on the key technologies, and not lump everything under "biofuel" or "petrofuel". The more efficient technologies get a bad rap due to the association with the poor technologies within each group.
As far as "viable alternatives", you can't make an alternative viable by crippling the thing you're trying to make an alternative to. That's just crippling the original and replacing it. It's also not exactly possible, because no alternative (or combination of alternatives) could actually come place to replacing petroleum - now, or in the foreseeable future.
What you're basically proposing is to cease petrol production and allow biofuels to fill the void - as I understand it. It's not physically possible to accomplish, or ethical to attempt, without utterly destroying global industry and dumping people down to 3rd world status overnight.
Question: when, exactly, did you make the transition to IT? During the dot-com boom, perhaps, when everyone and their brother was getting into IT?
That was then, this is now. I'm not saying it isn't possible with the right combination of luck, experience, and friends, but the market is a far cry different now than it was even, oh, a year ago.
Companies do not want to hire "new blood". They want a fit-and-finish complete programmer - or DBA, sysadmin, et cetera. Finding a company that doesn't play by these rules is few and far between. If you're applying for a junior programmer position, you better have had schooling and experience in doing it.
Personally, I've got about 8 years of experience doing sysadmin contract work (during which time I completed an IT degree). I am very good at what I do. Yet I've had a hell of a time finding a FT permanent position in the last year and a half due to (what I assume to be) HR seeing no relevant (programming jobs), full-time positions on my resume.
Have you looked at entry-level jobs lately?
You can't get an "entry level" programming job because they don't exist - not in the purest sense. However, entry-level positions requiring 1-2 years of related experience do exist. Sometimes they even accept a 2-4 year degree sufficient substitution! But usually, that's in additional to the experience.
The only realistic way to break in to any industry with little to no actual experience is to know someone who can get you a job. It's either who you know, or to have a boilerplate IT resume with no gaps or things which don't fit.
"The first thing we gotta do is, we shoot all the lawyers..."
10-15 years? I've been on Slashdot for over a decade, and since its inception this kind of thing has been covered here. Things like the Microsoft antitrust case has been going on for a while. It's just that big cases haven't been that all common because there's a significant chance of MAD.
It's not bullshit; you just don't understand what they're saying.
Just because they say it's about TomTom's specific "implementation" of the Linux kernel does not mean that TomTom's specific implementation isn't synonymous with the Linux kernel itself.
They are likely quite aware of how Linux works at this stage (they are, after all, the world's biggest software company's legal team), and approach things from the perspective of the kernel being the source. In short, they want VFAT support out of the kernel.
They aren't that stupid. Though they might want you to think they're that stupid. You seem to forget that MS has gotten where it is today through litigation and hostile takeovers. They're also likely assuming that the judge(s) for the case(s) aren't technologically savvy.
Cross your fingers.
This makes it apparent that MS is in this thing for the end result: namely, patents stifling MS-alternative software, and Linux adoption in particular. They are very likely to be willing to pay the full amount, if it means they've got a club with which they can threaten Open Source competitors.
I'm not sure which is more fucked... that I could read that just fine, at 6am in the morning (on the down side of the day, no less), or that I actually bothered to read half of it. :-/
I agree with you completely. It isn't speed that's the issue, so much as usability.
I put up with the bloat of Firefox on my 512Mb laptop on the sole basis that it's functional. It has the extensions I need, and I can work it in around how I do my other work. Opera crashes incessantly, though it's probably second best in terms of 'usable'. And IE doesn't even approach either. Chrome, the little I've used it, is closer to IE than the other two (and not that much different than Firefox in terms of memory use).
My god man, how heavy can these sites get on Javascript? The most demanding sites I've been to, in terms of tax on the system (flash not included) are Slashdot and Digg. How much worse than the "4+ seconds to render the comments page" I experience on my system could it be?
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but what's all the fuss with a "faster" browser, at this point? They're pretty damn fast as they are (pick one). The big problem, in my mind, is their memory use. That goes for both "normal running" memory use, and "my god it's leaky" memory use.
Currently, Firefox is running with 360M virtual and 131M resident memory utilized. The browser window has been open for 85 minutes with exactly 20 tabs - no flash, and 1 slashdot page. I've got to shut down firefox due to excessive swapping/poor system performance more often than I used to have to reboot Windows 9x due to stability issues!
Firefox, IE, and Opera have all shot up in their memory use extremely quickly - to the point where Firefox has become almost unusable on my laptop with 512M, while having Tbird and OO.org open at the same time. And that's only with about 20 tabs open, noscript, flashblock, and a bunch of other things to reduce the memory overhead.
Just because RAM is cheap doesn't mean you should leave people out in the cold who have older stuff. Likewise, if you bloat your products, porting them to portable devices (cell phones, etc.) is going to be a bit troublesome: RAM doesn't seem to be having the same speed or capacity leaps that CPUs are - and in a portable, sticking more RAM in is only going to decrease battery life.
They didn't specify CO2. They said emissions. Look up the hazardous byproducts of burning ethanol, if you feel so inclined. You can not grow coconut trees throughout the whole world, or even in a significant part of it. Last I checked, coconut oil was expensive (largely due to its scarcity).
Most biofuels have so far been derived from corn, soy, and other commercial grains/food, because that's what's available. Consider what could be done with that food if you weren't burning it in your environmentally friendly vehicle. People could eat it, surprisingly. (Remember that semi-famine the world had the years following US adoption of ethanol?)
What's dishonest is saying "there are alternatives!" then naming half a dozen "alternatives" which aren't viable in volume, price, or logistics to any significant degree, and never will be for those very same reasons. Pursue the current trends in biofuels to their logical conclusion, and we'll have no grains left to eat.
I'm sorry... what? Why in the world would anyone bitch if a better fuel came along as an alternative to gasoline? Are people bitching about the smartphones replacing their older phones? Or did people bitch too hard when cars replaced the horse? ... oh. We're talking about (industrially produced) biofuels, though, aren't we? The ones that cost more to produce and consume more energy to make than they output? Well, then it's really not all too surprising people would bitch! There's absolutely no incentive, to the consumer, to switch.
(And no, biofuels will never be cheaper than petrolium fuels unless they stop making them out of things that need to be harvested and augmented by petroleum fuels. So saying "gas just needs to get expensive enough" doesn't really cut it.)
If you want biofuel of any value, you will have to grow it in a vat with bacteria, quickly.
(Meanwhile, there's nuclear energy, which is clean, cheap, and potentially plentiful - if we were to utilize it - and we've had the tech for that for over 50 years. Even France uses it (buying US 'waste' to do so, actually). Why isn't nuclear a viable option to any 'greens'?)
Its simple: eco-friendly is the new god to many. They see it as heresy to even suggest 'green' fuels aren't green, or aren't a better-than-break-even venture. Like most religious zealots, facts or reality mean nothing if those facts interfere with their faith or first beliefs. Simply put, logic be damned. (This is why we've got 'green terrorists' burning down SUV dealerships.)
Oh, also, it's plainly obvious why Shell is doing what they're doing. Large companies are not well suited for persuing emerging trends, or for that matter, quick-and-dirty R&D. This is particularly true during a recession/depression, when they've got to be careful to not be capsized utterly. On the flip side of things, this is why small R&D, and 'start ups' in general, tend to flourish during hard economic times (as Apple, MS, etc. did during the late-70s/early-80s): the big dogs are slow to maneuver due to a tightening belt, and are more risk/challenge averse.
If history can be any indication, some small start-ups will invent/discover the "next big thing" in terms of 'renewable' energy.
Is anyone free to use that idea? I know a couple animators who might be willing to work up a humorous-yet-somewhat-realistic penguin to pose in such poses. Imagine:
- Small penguin with arms held firmly to his side, beak stuck out in an "O", held to someone's ear.
- Medium penguin in someone's lap in an airport, the person petting it (think: medium-small puppy).
- Large penguin(s) standing in a row, stacked (think: chicken/egg barn) up, handing each other email, web pages, pictures, etc.
- Penguin in cop suit orchestrating traffic (maybe from on top of a traffic light pole)
- Penguin toaster and/or fridge, alarm clock (eyes serving as the digits on the clock).
Yeah, the 'ad campaign' idea was pretty stupid.
But some of the commercials (notably the rock-paper-linux one and the hospital one) were actually half decent. rock-paper-linux reminded me a bit of an IBM-meets-Apple commercial, and the hospital one reminded me a lot of the old 3dfx commercials, or maybe an Intel commercial.
Production values were pretty damn high, and those two, at least, didn't really play too much into the stupid "I'm Linux" theme.
Those are great! They both made me chuckle. I'd say the 'hospital' one is better. Reminded me slightly of the old 3dfx videos from around 1997 or 1998.
Here we go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmaYH1F6kho
Those guys did awesome advertising.
So, dude... apparently you're not getting a Dell?
This is hardly the first time through the "oh my god that sucks" marketing shredder for Dell.
Actually, yes, there are additional ATF regulations you're not aware of. See; AP ammunition - particularly handgun AP. It's unclear whether .308 AP is also illegal.
Yep, that's right: nuggets of copper- and lead-clad steel or tungsten in certain dimensions is illegal.