Well with spam, you need to feed the Bayesian filter a bunch of "ham" (i.e. non-spam) messages, so it knows not to mark similar messages as spam...
So let's just monitor all e-mail going through major US ISPs, and compile it all into a large database, so we can feed the terrorism filter with non-terrorist mail.
...exactly the same way humanity survived the last hundred years?
Re:Al Queda, witches, devil worshippers, and gangs
on
Gangs on the Internet
·
· Score: 1
Christianity (excluding Catholicism) isn't contradictory, if you understand it. It branched off from Judaism, obviously, but there's a lot of discussion in the New Testament about how you can be Christian without being Jewish (there was initially some confusion about this). Most of the hodge-podge traditions thrown in from other religions are things like holidays (e.g. Christmas and Easter) and are completely unimportant theologically.
Yeah, more than once I've gotten five negative moderations in a row, on posts that shouldn't have been modded that way (e.g. an off-topic mod on a post that was clearly on-topic). Not complaining about one or two wayward mods, but these were obviously personal attacks.
Hiding extensions is a dumb idea WHEN THE OS DECIDES WHAT TO DO BY THE EXTENSION.
Hiding extensions is a dumb idea when users as accustomed to seeing extensions anyway. If users never saw any extensions anywhere, then a file named virus.txt.exe displayed as virus.txt would look out of place, but since users see files with a.txt extension all the time (even if they don't normally see it in Explorer on their PC), they accept it without question.
If extensions were never visible anywhere, users would use some other means of determining what a file is. But of course that's not the case, so hiding the extensions is retarded, and I'm very disappointed that Apple has chosen to imitate this "feature" in Mac OS X.
I've started buying exclusively Belkin cat5/6 cables, because they have little protective plastic bits to keep the clip from breaking off when you drag the cable across the floor, but the protective plastic bits don't actually cover the clip, so you can still easily unplug them without a pair of pliers.
Never thought I'd shop for a specific brand of network cables, but I haven't found another manufacturer that does this.
The Finder's well-known to be almost total crap. However, so is your example. It's not even possible! In OS X, you can't manually layer the windows of different applications because bringing any of an application's windows to the foreground will bring the entire application forward. (I think iChat behaves differently under some circumstances, but that appears to be bug.)
If you use Cmd-Tab to switch between applications, or you click the Dock icon, it brings all windows of that application to the front. If you click a window with the mouse, only that individual window comes to the front. This behavior is consistent(ly inconsistent) across all apps I know of, including iChat.
Note that clicking the Dock icon will have the additional effect of, well, whatever the app wants to do. In most apps, if there's already a document window open, clicking the Dock icon will only bring the app to the front. If no documents are open, it will open a new window (whatever Cmd-N would normally do). In Mail, clicking the Dock icon opens a new viewer window if there isn't one open already, regardless of whether there are any other windows (e.g. messages) open. In QuickTime Player, nothing happens.
Also while many may see July 4th as a feel-good day to launch (National pride and all that) if anything goes wrong there are religious types both Christian and Muslim that will see it as a sign validating whatever their view of the world is.
I'd be willing to bet there are non-religious types, as well as religious types not Christian or Muslim, who will see it as a sign validating whatever their view of the world is too.
When google will let my customers pay without having a google account I will switch.
You don't have to switch - you can support both. Customers who already have a Google account can pay through Google's new system; customers who already have a PayPal account can use PayPal; customers who aren't already signed up with anything can go through PayPal as well, or can sign up with Google.
They're keeping your http logs (like every ISP out there),
Um, no, not every ISP keeps HTTP logs. Some ISPs, including the one I use, just give you access to the Internet (gasp!), without redirecting port 80 through a transparent proxy server.
Sorry, but you just described OS X! Take OS X, run XP in VirtualPC, and add Mono, and you'll have exactly what you asked for -- it's not even called Windows!
What part of "It's basically the same idea that Apple did five years ago" did you miss?
Clearly people aren't abandoning Windows in droves to go to OS X, so it's obviously not a very good strategy.
Yet clearly people are abandoning Windows 98 in droves to go to Windows XP, and Microsoft expects people to abandon Windows XP to go to Windows Vista, so people abandoning Windows Vista to go to whatever new OS Dell and HP are shipping is really not such an unreasonable idea.
Making an OS that only runs new apps well is like making a car that only runs well on new roads.
Which is why I mentioned using VirtualPC, which should be able to run the old apps just as well as they ran on old hardware.
Believe it or not, people don't just use an OS because MS makes it. If that were the case, MS would have been able to sell OS/2 in 1987 or Windows NT in 1993. OS/2 was not sufficiently better than Windows to get people to switch, and it took NT 10 years for widespread adoption.
Uhh, if Microsoft had sold OS/2, people would have bought it. IBM couldn't sell OS/2 precisely because Microsoft convinced people to wait for NT instead.
BTW, Windows NT/XP has at times run on the following architectures in the order of when it was ported: i860, MIPS, i386, Alpha, PPC, Itanium, and x86-64.
Yes, but the applications haven't. I've seen one or two apps that had NT/Alpha support; I think NCSA Mosaic might have been one of them. Microsoft can port the OS to whatever they want, it's the apps that are a pain in the ass.
People have a love-hate relationship with Windows. Just like feuding couples won't easily split-up if they have kids, the market will stick with Windows.
This is the current situation. However, Microsoft hasn't spent $billions marketing a new OS from the makers of Windows, that's better than Windows, runs old Windows apps, runs cool new apps that don't run on Windows, and is ready for the future.
I actually find this really interesting. Not that Microsoft is talking about a new OS after Vista, but that they're talking about it being a successor to Windows, not a new version of Windows.
Microsoft has been trying to dig themselves out of the hole that they dug themselves into for several years now, and they can't do it (i.e. fix Windows) without breaking backwards compatibility with old applications, and as long as they keep releasing new versions of Windows, they have to maintain that backwards compatibility, or word will spread quickly and people won't buy it. Besides, if you have to buy new applications when you buy your new PC with the new OS, why not buy the Mac version of those apps instead, and switch?
But then Microsoft bought VirtualPC, and a solution began to unfold. If they release a new OS, and don't call it Windows, then they don't have to maintain backwards compatibility with existing Win32 applications in the OS. They'll port the.Net runtime whatchamajigger, so new.Net apps will run seamlessly on either Windows XP, Windows Vista, or the new OS. Then they'll hack VirtualPC to make a stripped-down XP or Vista run transparently in the background, and run old applications inside of that (and new hardware will be fast enough that performance won't be a problem). It's basically the same idea that Apple did five years ago with Classic, the Mac OS 9 emulator that runs on Mac OS X. Chances are, just like Apple modified the Mac OS Toolbox, named it Carbon, implemented Carbon in the new OS and added the CarbonLib library to the old OS so Carbon apps could (sort of, in theory) run on both platforms with no modifications (it didn't actually work that well, but it did make it possible to port existing apps without rewriting the whole thing), Microsoft will probably come up with a derivative of Win32 that apps can be ported to that will run on the new OS. Meanwhile, they'll move as much as they can over to.Net.
And hey, if they move what they can to.Net and emulate Windows, then they'll have the flexibility to move to a different processor architecture if they want, without the compatibility problems that Apple is going through with that.
And by "some other language", you mean C++ or PHP, right?
I actually was thinking of Java, since it was while taking a Java programming class that OOP first clicked for me. I almost never recommend PHP for anything.:-P
1) The beef I guess is that unlike Python or Perl's other competitors, Perl modules don't come tightly integrated with the core distro. Agreed that Perl probably has a lot more modules than any of those other languages do, but a larger than ordinary de facto distribution (why not include important modules like Digest::MD5, Crypt modules, SSH modules etc?) would be desirable (especially in those situations where you don't have access to the internet directly from within corporate networks and can't install the modules with the "perl -MCPAN -e shell" option) . There might be those Perl veterans who would say -- "build your own distro with your custom modules already packaged" -- and while that might be a very smart thing to do, many a time (when one keeps moving from one environment to another -- some call it job hopping, it helps to be able to download one single perl distro package or rpm or the source+compile and have basic administrative scripts work -- especially those that rely on centralized automation (ssh-based trusts, copies across the network, etc).
I completely agree, this is a huge problem. Unfortunately, everyone has a different opinion of what "the important modules" are - for example, you mentioned SSH, and I don't think I've ever seen an SSH module, certainly never used one myself, and I don't think I've seen one required by anyone else's code. This is a good place to start, but several of the modules there have external dependencies (e.g. DBD::mysql, GD, and Net::SSLeay, all on the top-10 list) and you really can't expect the libraries they depend on to be installed on everything (although OpenSSL probably ought to be).
Slashdot Mirror
Coupled with the CinemaNow agreement, a deal with Apple would cement the internet as a viable distribution vehicle.
Can someone define "viable" as it is used here?
Ah, well, that's what I get for not RTFA - there was no mention of sponges in the summary, so I assumed they were only talking about tools. My bad.
You can count instruments but a pile of bloody sponges is much harder to count.
But the sponges won't be getting RFID chips anyway, so you still have the same problem.
Wow, a Soviet Russia joke that was actually funny! I'm shocked.
...the only one who has never heard of any of this before now?
Well with spam, you need to feed the Bayesian filter a bunch of "ham" (i.e. non-spam) messages, so it knows not to mark similar messages as spam...
So let's just monitor all e-mail going through major US ISPs, and compile it all into a large database, so we can feed the terrorism filter with non-terrorist mail.
What could be wrong with that?
...exactly the same way humanity survived the last hundred years?
Christianity (excluding Catholicism) isn't contradictory, if you understand it. It branched off from Judaism, obviously, but there's a lot of discussion in the New Testament about how you can be Christian without being Jewish (there was initially some confusion about this). Most of the hodge-podge traditions thrown in from other religions are things like holidays (e.g. Christmas and Easter) and are completely unimportant theologically.
Yeah, more than once I've gotten five negative moderations in a row, on posts that shouldn't have been modded that way (e.g. an off-topic mod on a post that was clearly on-topic). Not complaining about one or two wayward mods, but these were obviously personal attacks.
are you some sort of hitler loving neo-nazi or a godless sodomite communist?
Didn't you get the memo? We call them "terrorists" now.
"Do you know a cool trick that I don't?" means he's not reading a script, he's just incompetent.
Hiding extensions is a dumb idea WHEN THE OS DECIDES WHAT TO DO BY THE EXTENSION.
.txt extension all the time (even if they don't normally see it in Explorer on their PC), they accept it without question.
Hiding extensions is a dumb idea when users as accustomed to seeing extensions anyway. If users never saw any extensions anywhere, then a file named virus.txt.exe displayed as virus.txt would look out of place, but since users see files with a
If extensions were never visible anywhere, users would use some other means of determining what a file is. But of course that's not the case, so hiding the extensions is retarded, and I'm very disappointed that Apple has chosen to imitate this "feature" in Mac OS X.
I blame Intel for being morons.
I've started buying exclusively Belkin cat5/6 cables, because they have little protective plastic bits to keep the clip from breaking off when you drag the cable across the floor, but the protective plastic bits don't actually cover the clip, so you can still easily unplug them without a pair of pliers.
Never thought I'd shop for a specific brand of network cables, but I haven't found another manufacturer that does this.
The Finder's well-known to be almost total crap. However, so is your example. It's not even possible! In OS X, you can't manually layer the windows of different applications because bringing any of an application's windows to the foreground will bring the entire application forward. (I think iChat behaves differently under some circumstances, but that appears to be bug.)
If you use Cmd-Tab to switch between applications, or you click the Dock icon, it brings all windows of that application to the front. If you click a window with the mouse, only that individual window comes to the front. This behavior is consistent(ly inconsistent) across all apps I know of, including iChat.
Note that clicking the Dock icon will have the additional effect of, well, whatever the app wants to do. In most apps, if there's already a document window open, clicking the Dock icon will only bring the app to the front. If no documents are open, it will open a new window (whatever Cmd-N would normally do). In Mail, clicking the Dock icon opens a new viewer window if there isn't one open already, regardless of whether there are any other windows (e.g. messages) open. In QuickTime Player, nothing happens.
Also while many may see July 4th as a feel-good day to launch (National pride and all that) if anything goes wrong there are religious types both Christian and Muslim that will see it as a sign validating whatever their view of the world is.
:-)
I'd be willing to bet there are non-religious types, as well as religious types not Christian or Muslim, who will see it as a sign validating whatever their view of the world is too.
You're an idiot.
When google will let my customers pay without having a google account I will switch.
You don't have to switch - you can support both. Customers who already have a Google account can pay through Google's new system; customers who already have a PayPal account can use PayPal; customers who aren't already signed up with anything can go through PayPal as well, or can sign up with Google.
Perhaps I should mention that I dropped out of the class and never used Java again?
They're keeping your http logs (like every ISP out there),
Um, no, not every ISP keeps HTTP logs. Some ISPs, including the one I use, just give you access to the Internet (gasp!), without redirecting port 80 through a transparent proxy server.
Sorry, but you just described OS X! Take OS X, run XP in VirtualPC, and add Mono, and you'll have exactly what you asked for -- it's not even called Windows!
What part of "It's basically the same idea that Apple did five years ago" did you miss?
Clearly people aren't abandoning Windows in droves to go to OS X, so it's obviously not a very good strategy.
Yet clearly people are abandoning Windows 98 in droves to go to Windows XP, and Microsoft expects people to abandon Windows XP to go to Windows Vista, so people abandoning Windows Vista to go to whatever new OS Dell and HP are shipping is really not such an unreasonable idea.
Making an OS that only runs new apps well is like making a car that only runs well on new roads.
Which is why I mentioned using VirtualPC, which should be able to run the old apps just as well as they ran on old hardware.
Believe it or not, people don't just use an OS because MS makes it. If that were the case, MS would have been able to sell OS/2 in 1987 or Windows NT in 1993. OS/2 was not sufficiently better than Windows to get people to switch, and it took NT 10 years for widespread adoption.
Uhh, if Microsoft had sold OS/2, people would have bought it. IBM couldn't sell OS/2 precisely because Microsoft convinced people to wait for NT instead.
BTW, Windows NT/XP has at times run on the following architectures in the order of when it was ported: i860, MIPS, i386, Alpha, PPC, Itanium, and x86-64.
Yes, but the applications haven't. I've seen one or two apps that had NT/Alpha support; I think NCSA Mosaic might have been one of them. Microsoft can port the OS to whatever they want, it's the apps that are a pain in the ass.
People have a love-hate relationship with Windows. Just like feuding couples won't easily split-up if they have kids, the market will stick with Windows.
This is the current situation. However, Microsoft hasn't spent $billions marketing a new OS from the makers of Windows, that's better than Windows, runs old Windows apps, runs cool new apps that don't run on Windows, and is ready for the future.
I actually find this really interesting. Not that Microsoft is talking about a new OS after Vista, but that they're talking about it being a successor to Windows, not a new version of Windows.
.Net runtime whatchamajigger, so new .Net apps will run seamlessly on either Windows XP, Windows Vista, or the new OS. Then they'll hack VirtualPC to make a stripped-down XP or Vista run transparently in the background, and run old applications inside of that (and new hardware will be fast enough that performance won't be a problem). It's basically the same idea that Apple did five years ago with Classic, the Mac OS 9 emulator that runs on Mac OS X. Chances are, just like Apple modified the Mac OS Toolbox, named it Carbon, implemented Carbon in the new OS and added the CarbonLib library to the old OS so Carbon apps could (sort of, in theory) run on both platforms with no modifications (it didn't actually work that well, but it did make it possible to port existing apps without rewriting the whole thing), Microsoft will probably come up with a derivative of Win32 that apps can be ported to that will run on the new OS. Meanwhile, they'll move as much as they can over to .Net.
.Net and emulate Windows, then they'll have the flexibility to move to a different processor architecture if they want, without the compatibility problems that Apple is going through with that.
Microsoft has been trying to dig themselves out of the hole that they dug themselves into for several years now, and they can't do it (i.e. fix Windows) without breaking backwards compatibility with old applications, and as long as they keep releasing new versions of Windows, they have to maintain that backwards compatibility, or word will spread quickly and people won't buy it. Besides, if you have to buy new applications when you buy your new PC with the new OS, why not buy the Mac version of those apps instead, and switch?
But then Microsoft bought VirtualPC, and a solution began to unfold. If they release a new OS, and don't call it Windows, then they don't have to maintain backwards compatibility with existing Win32 applications in the OS. They'll port the
And hey, if they move what they can to
Flame on!
Right, I've heard of that. Thanks for the reminder... but like I said, it's not a problem if I just choose not to access the internals of the object.
And by "some other language", you mean C++ or PHP, right?
:-P
I actually was thinking of Java, since it was while taking a Java programming class that OOP first clicked for me. I almost never recommend PHP for anything.
1) The beef I guess is that unlike Python or Perl's other competitors, Perl modules don't come tightly integrated with the core distro. Agreed that Perl probably has a lot more modules than any of those other languages do, but a larger than ordinary de facto distribution (why not include important modules like Digest::MD5, Crypt modules, SSH modules etc?) would be desirable (especially in those situations where you don't have access to the internet directly from within corporate networks and can't install the modules with the "perl -MCPAN -e shell" option) . There might be those Perl veterans who would say -- "build your own distro with your custom modules already packaged" -- and while that might be a very smart thing to do, many a time (when one keeps moving from one environment to another -- some call it job hopping, it helps to be able to download one single perl distro package or rpm or the source+compile and have basic administrative scripts work -- especially those that rely on centralized automation (ssh-based trusts, copies across the network, etc).
I completely agree, this is a huge problem. Unfortunately, everyone has a different opinion of what "the important modules" are - for example, you mentioned SSH, and I don't think I've ever seen an SSH module, certainly never used one myself, and I don't think I've seen one required by anyone else's code. This is a good place to start, but several of the modules there have external dependencies (e.g. DBD::mysql, GD, and Net::SSLeay, all on the top-10 list) and you really can't expect the libraries they depend on to be installed on everything (although OpenSSL probably ought to be).