*ahem* Python is defined by it's C implementation. That implementation is the specification.
Interesting. That's officially true of Perl 5 as well, and is one of the things they're changing in Perl 6. Perl 6 will be defined by the language specification, not by any implementation (and there will be multiple implementations that conform to the spec, we hope).
That's all fine and good if you both are hired at a company, for instance, and have to work as coworkers. If, on the other hand, you're paying good money, you shouldn't have to cater to other peoples' needs in a learning environment.
On the other hand, if you're paying good money, you might want an opportunity to develop a skill which will help you when you eventually are hired at a company and have to work as somebody's coworker.
Ah, I was thinking there was somebody else doing the same thing, but I didn't realize Apple copied it from them. How disappointing.
Interestingly, this functionality on Mac OS was originally not part of the OS; it was provided by a third-party application called Internet Config. It became a de-facto standard, and most applications supported it, even though the OS itself offered no means of selecting default applications for anything. Apple started bundling Internet Config with Mac OS, then wrote their own front-end to it that they included as part of Mac OS 8.5. Mac OS X now implements the IC API as a front-end for various native services and whatnot, but there is no centralized GUI.
Open the Control Panel, click "Programs and Features", then click "Turn Windows features on or off" in the sidebar on the left. Uncheck the box for "Internet Explorer 8" and click OK. You'll get a warning that removing IE could break things (but nothing you care about), then it'll ask you to reboot.
This does not remove IE's rendering engine (Trident/MSHTML), which is embedded in a bazillion other applications. There are still going to be security holes in that, and you really should patch them, because you have no idea which other applications those are going to be (Valve's Steam and Google Talk are a couple of examples, according to Wikipedia). However, removing the application should prevent you from getting any further updates to Internet Explorer itself.
Personally, I don't see why an application is setting itself as the default anyway. That should be left up to the user and the OS.
Originally it was done as a convenience, because most users didn't know how to set it in the OS settings, and it's somewhat cumbersome to do anyway. Many apps have a "set me as default" option.
Then Apple stupidly decided every application should expose this system-wide preference in the application's own preferences dialog, and the system-wide preference option should be removed entirely. Until other browser manufacturers caught up, this meant that in order to choose something other than Safari as your default browser on Mac OS X, you had to launch Safari, open its preferences, and select your preferred browser there. Ditto for Mail. I can't imagine what they were thinking. Unfortunately everybody else will probably try to copy this.
If it's a fresh installation, fine go ahead and toggle it by default, that's a good way to minimize user confusion ("I just installed Thingy 8, where the hell is it?"). If it's an upgrade, just replace those damned files and leave my settings the way they are.
IE can't be a fresh installation (on XP or Vista), because everyone already has IE installed. If someone has IE7 installed but never uses it because their default browser is Firefox, and one day they decide they want to ditch Firefox and switch to IE8, they should be presented with the option to make IE8 their default browser, even though it's technically an upgrade.
However, until now, instead of asking whether you want to set IE as your default browser, the IE installer was instead asking "hey, do you want to just skip all these questions and set it up normally?" The fine print does tell you that this will include setting IE as your default browser, but it's easy to miss if you're not looking for it. Microsoft has decided to make that a separate question now, as it should be.
If you've got four hard drives, I would use two in a RAID-1 for the live system, and rotate the other two, using rsync to copy the changes. Don't mirror your backups; it's a waste (compared to the benefits of having twice as many snapshots available).
Anyway, although it does seem that [Joss Whedon's] involvement, while not lowering quality imho, does seem to doom some shows. Why is that?
If you listen to what fans are saying about Dollhouse, a lot of people think the first few episodes were pretty mediocre - one fan said the first five episodes were like five different pilots. But then things started to improve, and by the end of the season the show was absolutely great. Alan Tudyk's performance in the last two episodes was brilliant.
Now look at the ratings. The first few episodes did pretty well, but then the numbers start going downhill, and the final episode got the worst ratings of the season.
If Joss' involvement dooms a show, it's not because he lowers the quality. It's because the majority of the audience would rather be watching Friends reruns.
The iTunes Store doesn't sell MP3s, they sell AAC files (.m4a), and no, they don't play everywhere. There are still devices that can play MP3s just fine, but cannot play AAC. If you have an MP3 CD player in your car, that might a pretty good reason not to buy from iTunes.
It seems to me I've seen a browser extension somewhere that lets users add their own comments to any arbitrary web page, and those comments can be made public so anyone else running the same browser extension will see them when they load the same page. I bet you could use something like that, with all your users having a browser plugin that pulls URL-based content from an internal server.
In Windows Vista, you cannot remove IE. You can upgrade from 7 to 8, of course, but there's no way to remove it, and things will break if you try, because it was never designed to operate without IE present, although it's certainly better than XP was in that respect.
In Windows 7, you can remove IE. Control Panel, Programs and Features, click the link in the sidebar to "Turn Windows features on or off", uncheck Internet Explorer 8, click Yes to the warning that this might break stuff, let it reboot, wait a few extra seconds while it "configures" things, and it's gone. The rendering engine is still there, of course, but the application is gone.
Presumably, after you have upgraded from Vista to 7, this is still true; you can still remove IE by following the above steps.
So how hard is it to just automatically add the uninstall to the upgrade process? Make it optional: after completing an upgrade, ask the user whether they'd like to remove IE or keep it.
And hey, if I recall correctly, they were planning to offer two versions anyway: you could either have IE preinstalled, or not. So, they could make the no-IE version clean-install-only, and the with-IE version could be clean-install or upgrade.
That's not $0.29 profit, that's $0.29 net income after they've paid the record label. Apple still has to pay for bandwidth, storage, server hardware, system administration, software development, QA testing, customer service, and don't forget the Visa/Mastercard merchant fees.
Simple, did you try their unsubscribe form with a fake email address? It doesn't work. (broken path in the form action)
Ah, I hadn't tried it. Most forms like this will accept any e-mail address and give you a confirmation screen saying it's been removed from their list.
What are you waiting for? You could make some money:-).
Because I've been blocking the spam instead of capturing it, I don't have any real evidence collected. How would I make money from this, though?
Every so often I go through my spam folder, it's pretty funny. I've noticed lately that a lot of them don't even have links, it's like they're just trying to annoy us. For example, I received this yesterday:
Forge your huge love sword
and that was it. No link, no pictures. My theory is I have a really good friend who goes through a whole lot of effort just to make me smile. Either that, or it's an insult on my manhood designed to make me feel inadequate.
A lot of spammers aren't very smart. They use pre-built off-the-shelf tools, and sometimes they click the wrong button and end up accidentally sending a mal-formed message to three million people by mistake. Sometimes there's a bug in the software, or it's just misconfigured. It doesn't really matter to them - after all, it doesn't cost them anything to send the spam, because they're stealing resources from others.
What disturbs me isn't the spam that comes from botnets of infected Windows PCs on residential broadband connections. I expect that. What bothers me is the spam that comes from dedicated servers colocated in actual datacenters, with static IP addresses, domain names, reverse DNS properly configured, and valid SPF records.
For example, these are apparently all owned by one spammer, that I've received spam from in the past few days: mx5.mit9zinger.com mx2.finogento.com mx1.finogento.com mx4.pinchmir.com mx1.travel1soe.com mx2.kintopuzi.com mx1.petchin.com mx1.abaganawena.com mx1.tineraset.com mx2.kimbolimbo.com mx2.greenzetrain.com
From a technical standpoint, everything looks legitimate. Because they offer an apparently-working opt-out mechanism (I'm sure it really just marks your address as "confirmed", but you'd have to come up with a way to prove that) and they're not spoofing any headers, they're probably not in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.
Please please please for the sake of ${DEITY:-everybody} do not say that out loud. There's bound to be a PHB somewhere who thinks that's a good idea....
Explain why it isn't a good idea?
I mean, it's clearly not a great idea. It means you're stuck on XP (or 2k) and can't switch to a better OS. It reduces pressure on the vendors to fix their crap, and reduces the incentive for competitors to come along and offer a better alternative. It means any broken apps that launch web sites in IE instead of respecting your default browser settings will either have to be permitted through the proxy server as well, despite the security implications, or will just be broken. It means users who are used to doing weird things with IE that you've never even thought of will have to be trained on how to get by with Firefox.
But if you can't get the vendors to upgrade their crap anyway, it sounds to me like a much better solution than just sticking with IE6 for everything.
I know quite a few LARGE corporate environments that won't be upgrading any time soon since IE7/8 "breaks" their intranet web apps and they aren't about to budget for updating apps that work on the existing browser.
Dropping support in YouTube is a VERY positive step. Whatever sites the managers in those corporate environments go to for fun need to drop support for IE6, and then the problem will magically go away.
Quite true. But I will not be satisfied until IE7 support is phased out. The UI is fine, but the engine is still crap. IE8 at least brings Microsoft up to about Firefox 1.5, if not 2.0.
Fortunately, it will be easy to gradually phase out IE7. Nobody is stuck relying on IE7 the way they're stuck relying on IE6. Anything that works in IE7 but not in other browsers should be very easy to make work in IE8's compatibility mode, if indeed any changes are required at all, although hopefully that won't be a common situation. When IE7 came out, I think most people with IE6-only web sites realized that rebuilding them to support standards-compliant browsers wouldn't really be any harder than rebuilding them to support just IE7, and with Firefox's significant market share, it made sense to do so.
Basically, anyone who's running IE7 can switch to another browser if they want to. That wasn't true of IE6 at all.
I'm fairly certain that just because a server in the UK was controlling the botnet, that doesn't necessarily mean a Brit was controlling that server, nor does it rule out that a North Korean was behind it.
OK, when did Apple start selling an OS that Dell (or HP) could install on computers that they manufacture and sell?
In 1995. Well, OK, it didn't run on the computers that Dell or HP sold, but other manufacturers like Motorola and Umax and Power Computing and DayStar manufactured and sold computers that Apple's OS ran on. A friend of mine had a Motorola StarMax. It looked pretty much like a normal PC in a mid-tower case. It ran Mac OS 7.6 and he later upgraded it to 8.1, 8.5, and 8.6.
Of course, this was terribly unprofitable for Apple, so they stopped licensing new versions of the Mac OS to these OEMs in 1997 when Steve Jobs took over.
" It also begs the question as to all the negative press about a yet to be delivered platform and the total silence regarding Apples offerings.
When did Apple release an OS I could install on my computer? I thought you had to buy an Apple computer to use the Apple OS (legally).
How many people ever install an operating system? Seriously? Outside of the Slashdot crowd, I mean. Most people use the OS that came preinstalled, and they'll choose a computer based on which OS that is.
Slashdot Mirror
*ahem* Python is defined by it's C implementation. That implementation is the specification.
Interesting. That's officially true of Perl 5 as well, and is one of the things they're changing in Perl 6. Perl 6 will be defined by the language specification, not by any implementation (and there will be multiple implementations that conform to the spec, we hope).
That's all fine and good if you both are hired at a company, for instance, and have to work as coworkers. If, on the other hand, you're paying good money, you shouldn't have to cater to other peoples' needs in a learning environment.
On the other hand, if you're paying good money, you might want an opportunity to develop a skill which will help you when you eventually are hired at a company and have to work as somebody's coworker.
Ah, I was thinking there was somebody else doing the same thing, but I didn't realize Apple copied it from them. How disappointing.
Interestingly, this functionality on Mac OS was originally not part of the OS; it was provided by a third-party application called Internet Config. It became a de-facto standard, and most applications supported it, even though the OS itself offered no means of selecting default applications for anything. Apple started bundling Internet Config with Mac OS, then wrote their own front-end to it that they included as part of Mac OS 8.5. Mac OS X now implements the IC API as a front-end for various native services and whatnot, but there is no centralized GUI.
As others have pointed out, you're a moron.
Open the Control Panel, click "Programs and Features", then click "Turn Windows features on or off" in the sidebar on the left. Uncheck the box for "Internet Explorer 8" and click OK. You'll get a warning that removing IE could break things (but nothing you care about), then it'll ask you to reboot.
This does not remove IE's rendering engine (Trident/MSHTML), which is embedded in a bazillion other applications. There are still going to be security holes in that, and you really should patch them, because you have no idea which other applications those are going to be (Valve's Steam and Google Talk are a couple of examples, according to Wikipedia). However, removing the application should prevent you from getting any further updates to Internet Explorer itself.
Personally, I don't see why an application is setting itself as the default anyway. That should be left up to the user and the OS.
Originally it was done as a convenience, because most users didn't know how to set it in the OS settings, and it's somewhat cumbersome to do anyway. Many apps have a "set me as default" option.
Then Apple stupidly decided every application should expose this system-wide preference in the application's own preferences dialog, and the system-wide preference option should be removed entirely. Until other browser manufacturers caught up, this meant that in order to choose something other than Safari as your default browser on Mac OS X, you had to launch Safari, open its preferences, and select your preferred browser there. Ditto for Mail. I can't imagine what they were thinking. Unfortunately everybody else will probably try to copy this.
If it's a fresh installation, fine go ahead and toggle it by default, that's a good way to minimize user confusion ("I just installed Thingy 8, where the hell is it?"). If it's an upgrade, just replace those damned files and leave my settings the way they are.
IE can't be a fresh installation (on XP or Vista), because everyone already has IE installed. If someone has IE7 installed but never uses it because their default browser is Firefox, and one day they decide they want to ditch Firefox and switch to IE8, they should be presented with the option to make IE8 their default browser, even though it's technically an upgrade.
However, until now, instead of asking whether you want to set IE as your default browser, the IE installer was instead asking "hey, do you want to just skip all these questions and set it up normally?" The fine print does tell you that this will include setting IE as your default browser, but it's easy to miss if you're not looking for it. Microsoft has decided to make that a separate question now, as it should be.
If you've got four hard drives, I would use two in a RAID-1 for the live system, and rotate the other two, using rsync to copy the changes. Don't mirror your backups; it's a waste (compared to the benefits of having twice as many snapshots available).
Anyway, although it does seem that [Joss Whedon's] involvement, while not lowering quality imho, does seem to doom some shows. Why is that?
If you listen to what fans are saying about Dollhouse, a lot of people think the first few episodes were pretty mediocre - one fan said the first five episodes were like five different pilots. But then things started to improve, and by the end of the season the show was absolutely great. Alan Tudyk's performance in the last two episodes was brilliant.
Now look at the ratings. The first few episodes did pretty well, but then the numbers start going downhill, and the final episode got the worst ratings of the season.
If Joss' involvement dooms a show, it's not because he lowers the quality. It's because the majority of the audience would rather be watching Friends reruns.
Because if you have a large enough customer base, people will pay you money to show them advertisements.
Who cares? What are they going to do about it? They have no power to stop them.
Amazing how the Apple zealots come out for DRM and such when someone tries to compete with Apple.
They can refuse to license the USB logo to Palm in the future, and sue them for trademark infringement if Palm decides to use it anyway.
The iTunes Store doesn't sell MP3s, they sell AAC files (.m4a), and no, they don't play everywhere. There are still devices that can play MP3s just fine, but cannot play AAC. If you have an MP3 CD player in your car, that might a pretty good reason not to buy from iTunes.
It seems to me I've seen a browser extension somewhere that lets users add their own comments to any arbitrary web page, and those comments can be made public so anyone else running the same browser extension will see them when they load the same page. I bet you could use something like that, with all your users having a browser plugin that pulls URL-based content from an internal server.
Alright, here's where I'm confused:
In Windows Vista, you cannot remove IE. You can upgrade from 7 to 8, of course, but there's no way to remove it, and things will break if you try, because it was never designed to operate without IE present, although it's certainly better than XP was in that respect.
In Windows 7, you can remove IE. Control Panel, Programs and Features, click the link in the sidebar to "Turn Windows features on or off", uncheck Internet Explorer 8, click Yes to the warning that this might break stuff, let it reboot, wait a few extra seconds while it "configures" things, and it's gone. The rendering engine is still there, of course, but the application is gone.
Presumably, after you have upgraded from Vista to 7, this is still true; you can still remove IE by following the above steps.
So how hard is it to just automatically add the uninstall to the upgrade process? Make it optional: after completing an upgrade, ask the user whether they'd like to remove IE or keep it.
And hey, if I recall correctly, they were planning to offer two versions anyway: you could either have IE preinstalled, or not. So, they could make the no-IE version clean-install-only, and the with-IE version could be clean-install or upgrade.
This is definitely not a technical problem.
That's not $0.29 profit, that's $0.29 net income after they've paid the record label. Apple still has to pay for bandwidth, storage, server hardware, system administration, software development, QA testing, customer service, and don't forget the Visa/Mastercard merchant fees.
iTunes doesn't make Apple any significant amount of money. iPod and iPhone sales do. iTunes exists for the purpose of driving hardware sales.
Simple, did you try their unsubscribe form with a fake email address? It doesn't work. (broken path in the form action)
Ah, I hadn't tried it. Most forms like this will accept any e-mail address and give you a confirmation screen saying it's been removed from their list.
What are you waiting for? You could make some money :-).
Because I've been blocking the spam instead of capturing it, I don't have any real evidence collected. How would I make money from this, though?
Every so often I go through my spam folder, it's pretty funny. I've noticed lately that a lot of them don't even have links, it's like they're just trying to annoy us. For example, I received this yesterday:
and that was it. No link, no pictures. My theory is I have a really good friend who goes through a whole lot of effort just to make me smile. Either that, or it's an insult on my manhood designed to make me feel inadequate.
A lot of spammers aren't very smart. They use pre-built off-the-shelf tools, and sometimes they click the wrong button and end up accidentally sending a mal-formed message to three million people by mistake. Sometimes there's a bug in the software, or it's just misconfigured. It doesn't really matter to them - after all, it doesn't cost them anything to send the spam, because they're stealing resources from others.
What disturbs me isn't the spam that comes from botnets of infected Windows PCs on residential broadband connections. I expect that. What bothers me is the spam that comes from dedicated servers colocated in actual datacenters, with static IP addresses, domain names, reverse DNS properly configured, and valid SPF records.
For example, these are apparently all owned by one spammer, that I've received spam from in the past few days:
mx5.mit9zinger.com
mx2.finogento.com
mx1.finogento.com
mx4.pinchmir.com
mx1.travel1soe.com
mx2.kintopuzi.com
mx1.petchin.com
mx1.abaganawena.com
mx1.tineraset.com
mx2.kimbolimbo.com
mx2.greenzetrain.com
From a technical standpoint, everything looks legitimate. Because they offer an apparently-working opt-out mechanism (I'm sure it really just marks your address as "confirmed", but you'd have to come up with a way to prove that) and they're not spoofing any headers, they're probably not in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.
Please please please for the sake of ${DEITY:-everybody} do not say that out loud. There's bound to be a PHB somewhere who thinks that's a good idea....
Explain why it isn't a good idea?
I mean, it's clearly not a great idea. It means you're stuck on XP (or 2k) and can't switch to a better OS. It reduces pressure on the vendors to fix their crap, and reduces the incentive for competitors to come along and offer a better alternative. It means any broken apps that launch web sites in IE instead of respecting your default browser settings will either have to be permitted through the proxy server as well, despite the security implications, or will just be broken. It means users who are used to doing weird things with IE that you've never even thought of will have to be trained on how to get by with Firefox.
But if you can't get the vendors to upgrade their crap anyway, it sounds to me like a much better solution than just sticking with IE6 for everything.
I know quite a few LARGE corporate environments that won't be upgrading any time soon since IE7/8 "breaks" their intranet web apps and they aren't about to budget for updating apps that work on the existing browser.
Dropping support in YouTube is a VERY positive step. Whatever sites the managers in those corporate environments go to for fun need to drop support for IE6, and then the problem will magically go away.
Quite true. But I will not be satisfied until IE7 support is phased out. The UI is fine, but the engine is still crap. IE8 at least brings Microsoft up to about Firefox 1.5, if not 2.0.
Fortunately, it will be easy to gradually phase out IE7. Nobody is stuck relying on IE7 the way they're stuck relying on IE6. Anything that works in IE7 but not in other browsers should be very easy to make work in IE8's compatibility mode, if indeed any changes are required at all, although hopefully that won't be a common situation. When IE7 came out, I think most people with IE6-only web sites realized that rebuilding them to support standards-compliant browsers wouldn't really be any harder than rebuilding them to support just IE7, and with Firefox's significant market share, it made sense to do so.
Basically, anyone who's running IE7 can switch to another browser if they want to. That wasn't true of IE6 at all.
Slackware Linux skipped from 4.0 to 7.0, because they wanted number parity with RedHat and other popular distros.
I'm fairly certain that just because a server in the UK was controlling the botnet, that doesn't necessarily mean a Brit was controlling that server, nor does it rule out that a North Korean was behind it.
OK, when did Apple start selling an OS that Dell (or HP) could install on computers that they manufacture and sell?
In 1995. Well, OK, it didn't run on the computers that Dell or HP sold, but other manufacturers like Motorola and Umax and Power Computing and DayStar manufactured and sold computers that Apple's OS ran on. A friend of mine had a Motorola StarMax. It looked pretty much like a normal PC in a mid-tower case. It ran Mac OS 7.6 and he later upgraded it to 8.1, 8.5, and 8.6.
Of course, this was terribly unprofitable for Apple, so they stopped licensing new versions of the Mac OS to these OEMs in 1997 when Steve Jobs took over.
" It also begs the question as to all the negative press about a yet to be delivered platform and the total silence regarding Apples offerings.
When did Apple release an OS I could install on my computer? I thought you had to buy an Apple computer to use the Apple OS (legally).
How many people ever install an operating system? Seriously? Outside of the Slashdot crowd, I mean. Most people use the OS that came preinstalled, and they'll choose a computer based on which OS that is.