TFA mentions things such as how to deal with road obstacles and other problems of real-world driving, with one of the solutions being to alert the driver. Great. The car will drive itself, but someone still has to sit behind the wheel and be alert enough to deal with situations. Heck, you probably couldn't even take your hands off the wheel or feet away from the pedals, because by the time you react and get them back where they need to be, it will be too late.
Self-driving car technology will be ready for prime time only when it's sufficiently advanced that I can get in the back seat, tell the car where to go, and take a nap while it gets me there. And yes, that takes into account needing to be so relaxed and confident in the entire process that I actually *can* fall asleep in the back of a car that's driving itself.
If that happens in my lifetime, I expect it to be about the time when I'm too old to safely drive myself, which will be a good ways past 2018.
On the desktop where *nobody is local but me* a local exploit is far less of a threat than a remote exploit. That even though I use Firefox with Noscript at tighter-than-default security settings. A local exploit is still less of a problem because you first need a local shell to even attempt it.
All of my systems are behind a NATting firewall and run local firewalls in addition. They don't listen on any ports. They have no users but me. My data is all encrypted on disk. I scan *everything* and have no Windows systems. Good luck with that local access. Let me no how it works out.
For desktop Mac users, which is who this is about (and Linux users, too, by extension), exploits that require local access aren't much of a problem. Of course, on a locked-down desktop, remote sploits aren't much of a problem either.
In addition to your well-taken points, I'd like to add that TFA also does not seem to designate between remotely exploitable flaws and ones that are only locally exploitable. A flaw that is only locally exploitable, even if it can give the attacker a full root shell if used, is of much less importance than one that can zombie a machine remotely.
I also give some weight to the "greater diligence in patching" argument. This diligence may or may not be Apple's. In many cases, these patches probably originated with the upstream maintainers of open-source software included with OS X and were subsequently tested and released by Apple, and the original vulnerabilities may have been found by the upstreams, or by third-parties auditing the code. This is a strength, not a weakness. The fact that 243 flaws in OS X have been patched this year, compared to 44 in XP and Vista, doesn't mean there aren't something like that number of flaws in Windows. It just means we don't know how many there are, but it's probably some number a lot larger than 44.
That said, it's entirely possible that the statistics are pretty accurate. XP is very mature and there aren't (or so we would hope) to many more serious bugs left to be found in it. Vista is still young and not all that common yet because it hasn't exactly been selling like hotcakes, so it hasn't yet been flogged as hard or or as long as XP has.
Finally, OS X includes a lot more "stuff" than Vista and XP. Much of what would be counted as a totally separate product under the Microsoft system, such as a development environment, etc., are either standard with OS X or easily installed from either ports or the OS X disc. It's kind of like comparing vulnerabilities in a Linux distro to vulnerabilities in Windows. Look at how much stuff is in, say, Debian, compared to how much stuff is in Windows. How do you normalize the patch numbers so that they are really meaningful and relevant. I think there's a lot of "Apples (heheh) Vs. Oranges" in the comparison.
If I were a smartass, I'd ask "If the Concorde never took off in the US, what did they do with all the ones that flew over from London and Paris? Ship them back?" but I'm not a smartass, so you're off the hook on that one;)
Europeans had the same dislike of the noise, so the Concorde was only ever used for flights over the Atlantic. Its main problem, though, was economics. The Concorde consumed huge amounts of fuel, parts were very expensive because of its very low production run, and it carried very few passengers compared to other trans-Atlantic jets. All of this made Concorde tickets very expensive, and even if the margin per seat were higher (I don't know if it was), it was more profitable to carry more people on a larger jet, even at a much lower ticket price.
I don't think this is really an issue with KDE 4 or OSS, at least not to the exclusion of other development models.
Remember when Windows 2000 was a 1.0 product? How about the first release of Windows XP? The first release of KDE 3? I'm a Mac user at work, working at a company that has over 4000 Mac users, a good number of which upgraded to Leopard before the ink was even dry on the packaging. The next day, there were lots of reports of bugs on our internal Mac mailing list. Leopard fixes some bugs from Tiger, of course, but it also adds so many new features that I consider it to be more or less a 1.0 product.
No surprise, then, that a release candidate for a 1.0 product that's been in development for a long time should have a lot of bugs open. And now, I won't be upgrading my Kubuntu boxes to KDE 4 right away, either:)
Ditto. I used to work there (not on IE, though), and will Billg really knows the ins and outs of every project getting under way (he'll read the whole spec, hundreds of pages, and people who've been to Billg briefings say he practically memorizes the whole thing), Microsoft is made up of fiefdoms, and its entirely possible that he doesn't get reports from the IE fiefdom on whether - and how much - they are communicating with developers.
I wonder if they realize what a two-edged sword that is? If federal officers can be sent after copyright infringers, copyright holders of GPLed software will be able to do a lot more than just sue.
Not that I favor a nuts law like this, but if they pass it, use it.
OK, let me get this straight. Telling the truth (as unpleasant as it may be for those about whom it is being told) generates hate, FUD, and viciousness? Then what should we call it when people repeatedly make public statements that could most charitably be called unfounded, and then file baseless lawsuits based on those statements?
Do many people have intense loathing of SCO's actions, and personal loathing of its executives? Sure. That's only natural, considering their actions. I'd be concerned if people who understood the situation didn't loathe them.
Are some hardworking SCO employees going to wind up out of work? Probably, along with their wrongdoing executives. Do I feel sorry for them? On a personal level, yes. Does that mean justice shouldn't have been done to SCO. Of course not. SCO is getting its just desserts. OTOH, what's wrong with the few remaining SCO employees that they couldn't see the writing on the wall and go get jobs elsewhere? SCO management is primarily responsible for putting them in a difficult position, but they are not free of responsibility either. If I had been a SCO employee, I would have left a long time ago.
Thank you. That was my first thought as well, when I saw this. "Great, congress - whose authority it is to decide how our tax money is spent - decides that manned Mars exploration is not a place where that money should be spent. Then, right away, up pops a guide for NASA to subvert the law just because they feel like doing something else.
For everyone who thinks that's a good idea, try replacing NASA with NSA/CIA/Bush administration/DOJ or whatever other part of the government really bugs you and see if you still think it's a good idea. If you don't, then it's not a good idea for NASA either. If you do, then I guess I don't need to comment further.
Precisely. I used to work at Microsoft, and while my overall assessment of the experience is that it had more negatives than positives and I wouldn't do it again, the #1 thing in the positives column is that the Microsoft standard is a private office for everyone. There are some teams that choose something else (open seating, etc.), and some that are so cramped for space that people have to share offices (mine was one of those), but in principle, Microsoft employees get private offices.
Even better than a private office was the setup I had during my final year. My entire team was relocated to Redmond, a move I was unable to make. As a result, I spent my final year working from a home office over VPN, from the comfort of my enclosed patio in southern California. The peace, quiet, and convenience was very good for productivity.
I work in a cubicle again now. My job is the best I've ever had, working at the second best company I've ever worked for. I can't find anything to complain about except my cubicle. Cubicles in general suck, and this one is worse than most b/c it's next to both a stairway access door and a row of conference rooms. It's a noisy, distracting environment that regularly screws my concentration. I'd love it beyond words to have a private office again, but no one has those here, not even the CEO (senior management has shared offices).
That said, I'd rather have fully open seating than a cubicle. Cubicles have every disadvantage of open seating, with none of the advantages. They are the worst of both worlds and should be done away with entirely.
You can get them in the hands of (y)our schoolchildren right now, all you have to do is buy one for your kid under the OLPC program wherein your buy two - you get one and one goes to a kid in one of the countries where they are trying to get these things distributed. The government of (Canada|USA) does not need to be - and most definitely should not be - involved. I don't know how things are where you're at, but government involvement in education is fouling things up here in California pretty well without further help. Per-child spending on education in California is over $11,000/year and we have teachers buying classroom supplies out of their own pockets and regularly holding class sales and other fund-raisers to help make ends meet. Money for things like field trips is raised just by our PTA. The school has no money for that at all. And all this while the state is still getting record property tax revenues. If taxes were any higher, I couldn't afford my house.
It's hard to figure out where the money is going, but several things are sure: 1) It's not going into teacher salaries; 2) An awful lot of it's not getting to where it's needed, thus the fundraisers, teachers buying their own supplies, etc; 3) The system, overall, is doing less with more.
When I was in grade school in California, I don't recall my school ever having any kind of bake sale. Classroom supplies came from the supply room, not from teachers buying them out of their own pockets. And there were far fewer remedial programs in those days, too.
What's really hard to tell is exactly where all this money is going, but clearly, not enough of it is getting down to the local schools.
Within my overall employer, there are over 4,000 Mac users (a minority still, but growing), and within my particular business unit, almost the entire engineering division is Mac, and the few that aren't are mostly FreeBSD. A few Linux users and even fewer Windows users. In fact, the guy in the cube next to me, who just refreshed to a Mac, may have been the last one. Among those 4,000 people, quite a few have upgraded to Leopard already, and I've seen their discussions of various issues on our very high-traffic internal Mac mailing list.
Certainly, there have been some issues, but nobody has reported the level of crashes that he's been seeing. I think his unfortunate experience is an edge case.
That many crashes is, IMO, not really acceptable, especially for a *nix-based OS, but I don't think the Vista comparison is very apt. For starters, in TFA he says their own reviewer recommends not upgrading to 10.5.1. Pretty much everyone who already installed Leopard where I work has upgraded to the latest release, and the reports I hear are that it has made all problems better. Instead of listening to his reviewer, he should update.
If you're getting the idea that I'm still on Tiger, you're right. I know better than to install a.0 release of a new major version of an OS until it's been well flogged in the real world and a bunch of updates are out:-) Although, my colleagues who are on Leopard are happy with it, though. I haven't heard anyone say they wish they hadn't done it. My important Linux systems are still on Kubuntu Feisty, too, just in case. Gutsy seems very stable on the test machines, though.
The second point on which the Vista comparison fails is that unlike Vista, Leopard offers a number of compelling features that make people want to upgrade. Vista has been out a lot longer than Leopard, but I'd be very surprised if Leopard doesn't already have a higher percentage of upgraders than Vista has. XP Users seem to be sitting tight, for the most part. Among Tiger users, it's not a question of upgrading or not, but of how soon. The reason most XP users are not upgrading is they see no compelling reason to do so. Most of what Vista added is eye candy, and it has some downsides in the form of annoying security dialogs and a lot more DRM than XP has.
Third, unlike Vista, Leopard didn't have to shed its most compelling features in order to ship. Vista was supposed to come with wonderful new technologies like WinFS, which was not only dropped from Vista, but has been completely dropped as a standalone product. A rumor went around that XFS would be the Leopard file system; that turned out to be just a rumor. And it is available in Leopard, it's just not the default file system. All the really cool stuff that was supposed to be in Vista mostly isn't. There are those who say the security model is better (and maybe it is, although those annoying dialogs are worse than useless), but what people mainly see in Vista is eye candy. Eye candy that takes a lot more horsepower to really make use of. Even there, Vista fails it compared to Leopard (or even Tiger) in terms of looks.
And that's without even getting started on functionality, reliability, ease of use, and consistency. For all of its.0 release faults, Leopard is still ahead of Vista, there, too.
Finally, what may be the biggest difference of all between Vista and Leopard: a year from now, Leopard will have achieved significant adoption in the Mac user base. I'll go out on a limb and say that a year from its release, Leopard will not only have a greater percentage of the Mac user base than Vista has of the Windows user base when it reaches 1 year of general public release on Jan. 30 2008, but that one year from its release, Leopard will have a greater percentage of the Mac market than Vista has of the Windows market at *two* years from its release.
That last may sound like a fanboy statement, but it's really not. It's just recognition of the facts that Mac users, unlike X
Since you've just publicly called me a liar, you can google your own corroborating links and post them back here if you feel like it. there's no shortage of them from parties who are not anti-spam vendors.
Your view is just too small. I work for one of the major anti-spam vendors, and we've seen the spam volume double in about the last four months. Less spam is being shot at your MX, but that's counter to the global trend.
It's not a matter of how fast a target on the ground may move. It's a matter of how fast:
A) SAMs move B) Enemy fighters aircraft move
If a bomber can fly by at Mach 2 at a high altitude and kick out its load of smart bombs, it becomes much harder to hit it with either a SAM or an air-launched missile. Let's say you make your bombing run at 40,000 feet going Mach 2 and a SAM battery a few miles away takes a shot at you. You kick out the bombs and firewall the throttle for any more speed you can get, and punch out chaff. The SAM is going maybe Mach 5 and you're maybe now at Mach 2.5. At a closure rate of only Mach 2.5, the SAM may run out of fuel before it reaches you, even if it doesn't get fooled by the chaff. If you'd had to slow down to sub-sonic speeds to make your bombing run, the SAM would have a much better chance of catching you.
If there is a CAP up, it's going to have a lot more trouble catching and firing on a bomber going Mach 2 than a bomber going Mach.7.
While these have not been particularly great threats recently (I believe the Viet Nam War was the last time an American heavy bomber was brought down by enemy fire), it wouldn't be wise to assume that the situation will always remain this way, so it's good to have that technology in our back pockets.
Even at lower altitudes, that would take a lot of light anti-aircraft systems off the table, and at least make it harder even for large SAM systems. Imagine being a guy with a shoulder-fired AA missile trying to get a bead on something going at Mach 2. Even if you get a successful lock on it and fire, it's unlikely your missile will be able to catch it even if it's on a low-level bombing run (something I wouldn't expect a B-2 to do, anyway).
While that may be true, I think the real problem most people have with Vista isn't so much that it's that bad, as that it's not that good.
For example, if I were to buy a PC that I intended to use as a Windows machine (my home network currently has 1 XP notebook, 1 XP desktop, 1 Linux notebook, 1 MacBook Pro, 3 Linux desktops and 1 FreeBSD file server) I would probably keep Vista on it (with the caveat that I haven't spent enough time with a Vista machine to be certain of that). However, I see no compelling reason at all to migrate either of the current XP machines to Vista. One is a Thinkpad T30 which runs XP very well with 1 GB of memory, and the other is a Sempron with 768K (also runs XP well). Either of those is pretty low-spec for a Vista machine.
Even setting the hardware specs aside, though, I can't think of a single reason to upgrade to Vista. The XP machines fully meet all of my Windows needs, I already have XP, and it will be supported for years to come. Even though I have a friend who works at Microsoft who would be happy to buy me a couple copies of Vista for Christmas from the company store, I have no plans to take him up on it. I just don't see the need, and that's exactly what a lot of Windows users are saying about Vista: that they just don't see the need.
Vista is a product that has spent five years in development by a very large team, only to ship without highly touted components such as WinFS (which has basically been abandoned) and to find many (most?) potential upgraders in both business and home environments having reactions running from "Never" to "Not for a long time" to "What's the point?", and it's difficult to not characterize that as at least a partial disaster. Compare that to adoption rates of upgrades to OS X or , where people practically stampede to upgrade (I'm not saying that's necessarily wise; I'm still running Tiger and will do so for at least another six months. But people do it).
That's the real problem with Vista: it's not that good.
> Tolerance is a funny idea. You ought only tolerate what doesn't harm you or others.
Well put. I find the emphasis that some place on tolerance to be a bit, well, misplaced.
However, I don't really see where creationists are harming anyone, really. I mean, yeah, I think they are (grossly) misinterpreting Genesis, but I don't see where anyone is going to go to hell, prison or even the unemployment line on the basis of that. I confess to not paying much attention to them, and maybe they're doing something I don't know about (totally possible), but apart from the copyright infringement + plagiarism case (for which they ought to be ashamed, since it strikes me that it probably falls within the bounds of "Thou shalt not steal"), I'm not sure that they're actually harming anyone. Are they?
Thailand is richer (by a good ways) than Vietnam, and at least in the cities, pretty much any one who wants regular Internet access has it. Internet cafes are dirt cheap, and computer ownership is not unusual among the growing middle class, either. Computer shops are all over the place in Saigon. I expect that most urban teens in Thailand have regular Internet access if they want it.
The prior art is even more clear than that. Businesses have, for a very long time (we're talking centuries here) given the best service to their best customers. Less good customers will, by that definition, get some lower level of service than those best customers, even if their service is still good. It's astonishing that such an idea could get a patent, no matter what kind of lawyer-speak they wrapped around it.
Heck, there may be prior art at Best Buy, even. It was in the news some time back that they will fire customers who aren't good enough, where not good enough = only buying the cheapest specials.
If it was anybody but Microsoft, maybe. The problem with MSFT positioning itself as an anti-anything is that nobody thinks "I'm a loner. A rebel. And Microsoft is building the product to help me let the world know it."
Anyway, they couldn't done it, IMO. There's a saying attributed to Ford Motor Company that says, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." I used to work at Microsoft, and Microsoft's culture eats everything for breakfast. When they acquired my former employer, the first thing they did was wipe out our culture, and our culture was a lot of what helped us to make a product good enough to make Microsoft want us.
I left after a year and a half and know work for another company that was recently acquired. Our new parent wants to preserve our culture no matter what, so that we keep making the great product that made them want to buy us. What a night and day difference.
It's quite clear that no one should care what Mark Cuban says about anything other than basketball.
In TFA, he makes the ludicrous statement that "I think the position that "you pay for the bandwidth, so you can use it any way you want" isn't reality and very flawed when it comes to P2."
No, it's not flawed. I use P2P to get most of my ISO images, and every bit of the bandwidth involved was paid for.
I paid for my download bandwidth. I pay for my upload bandwidth. Do did everyone else hosting any given ISO. All the bandwidth is bought and paid for, so no matter what Cuban says, I can do anything I want with the bandwidth that's not prevented by the AUP. I am fortunate to be able to choose from among several local ISPs, none of whom restrict P22. If one of them did, I'd switch to a competitor in a heartbeat and let them know why.
I lived in Japan for 8 years, speak/read/write the language well, and still use it regularly in my job today. I love Japan and at some future point, might take a posting there with my current employer. And I'm fine with them fingerprinting all non-Japanese on entry. I lived there long enough ago that I had my thumb print on my gaijin card. No big deal. When I worked for a bank in the U.S., all 10 of my fingerprints were taken and put on file with the FBI. It's a condition of employment. No big deal. If I didn't like it, I had the option of not working at a bank. If I didn't like having my thumb print on my gaijin card, I had the option of not living in Japan. Nobody made me go there. I went because I wanted to, accepting that a lot of things are different there than back home. Some I'm not so keen on, some I like very much. If the bad outweighed the good, I had the option to not go, or to not stay.
Opinion, aside, there are a number of factual inaccuracies in your comments:
1) Fingerprinting in Japan is not reserved only for proven criminals. Anyone charged with a crime will be fingerprinted, and Japan also has previous history with fingerprinting foreigners (maybe you've even had a thumb-print gaijin card yourself).
2) This fingerprinting is not un-Japanese at all. If you think so, you understand both Japan and the Japanese rather poorly.
Apart from those errors, you present a mix of arguments that aren't even being made, plus some evidence that seems to support fingerprinting, rather than oppose it:
"drunken fighting Russians (in my area), Pot smoking teachers from my USA (also arrested in my area)"
(Aside: sounds like you live in Hokkaido.)
"Don't get me wrong- I speak Japanese bilingually (unlike most of my fellow teachers), but just because the others cannot does not make them anymore of a security risk than I."
AFAIK no one in the Japanese government is making that claim. Certainly, the fingerprinting law doesn't provide an exemption for people who can speak Japanese.
Sure, Japan has a strong safety culture, but so what? During my eight years in Japan, I always knew the way to Narita airport, in case I decided that I didn't like it there anymore. If you don't like the safety culture, try SE Asia. I lived there, too, and people seem to go about with casual disregard for safety, doing a lot of really dangerous stuff all the time. Maybe you'll like it better. It's certainly a change of pace, and I mostly liked SEA, except for the heavy traffic and air pollution.
If you really believe your personal biometric data is none of your business, you have a simple solution, the same one I had. Make your way to the airport. Clearly, the Japanese government disagrees with you on that issue, and the majority of Japanese also either do so, or at least do not agree with you strongly enough to require their government not do this, after all.
At the end of the day, it's their country, not yours or mine, and they make the rules. If you don't like the rules they make, you should get out or you'll wind up hating the place. That's not a troll, just a piece of friendly (and correct) advice from someone who lived there a long time and would have been a lifer if I hadn't married another foreigner while I was there.
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TFA mentions things such as how to deal with road obstacles and other problems of real-world driving, with one of the solutions being to alert the driver. Great. The car will drive itself, but someone still has to sit behind the wheel and be alert enough to deal with situations. Heck, you probably couldn't even take your hands off the wheel or feet away from the pedals, because by the time you react and get them back where they need to be, it will be too late.
Self-driving car technology will be ready for prime time only when it's sufficiently advanced that I can get in the back seat, tell the car where to go, and take a nap while it gets me there. And yes, that takes into account needing to be so relaxed and confident in the entire process that I actually *can* fall asleep in the back of a car that's driving itself.
If that happens in my lifetime, I expect it to be about the time when I'm too old to safely drive myself, which will be a good ways past 2018.
I can't let that pass without challenge.
On the desktop where *nobody is local but me* a local exploit is far less of a threat than a remote exploit. That even though I use Firefox with Noscript at tighter-than-default security settings. A local exploit is still less of a problem because you first need a local shell to even attempt it.
All of my systems are behind a NATting firewall and run local firewalls in addition. They don't listen on any ports. They have no users but me. My data is all encrypted on disk. I scan *everything* and have no Windows systems. Good luck with that local access. Let me no how it works out.
For desktop Mac users, which is who this is about (and Linux users, too, by extension), exploits that require local access aren't much of a problem. Of course, on a locked-down desktop, remote sploits aren't much of a problem either.
That's very interesting, have you (or anyone here) tried it?
In addition to your well-taken points, I'd like to add that TFA also does not seem to designate between remotely exploitable flaws and ones that are only locally exploitable. A flaw that is only locally exploitable, even if it can give the attacker a full root shell if used, is of much less importance than one that can zombie a machine remotely.
I also give some weight to the "greater diligence in patching" argument. This diligence may or may not be Apple's. In many cases, these patches probably originated with the upstream maintainers of open-source software included with OS X and were subsequently tested and released by Apple, and the original vulnerabilities may have been found by the upstreams, or by third-parties auditing the code. This is a strength, not a weakness. The fact that 243 flaws in OS X have been patched this year, compared to 44 in XP and Vista, doesn't mean there aren't something like that number of flaws in Windows. It just means we don't know how many there are, but it's probably some number a lot larger than 44.
That said, it's entirely possible that the statistics are pretty accurate. XP is very mature and there aren't (or so we would hope) to many more serious bugs left to be found in it. Vista is still young and not all that common yet because it hasn't exactly been selling like hotcakes, so it hasn't yet been flogged as hard or or as long as XP has.
Finally, OS X includes a lot more "stuff" than Vista and XP. Much of what would be counted as a totally separate product under the Microsoft system, such as a development environment, etc., are either standard with OS X or easily installed from either ports or the OS X disc. It's kind of like comparing vulnerabilities in a Linux distro to vulnerabilities in Windows. Look at how much stuff is in, say, Debian, compared to how much stuff is in Windows. How do you normalize the patch numbers so that they are really meaningful and relevant. I think there's a lot of "Apples (heheh) Vs. Oranges" in the comparison.
If I were a smartass, I'd ask "If the Concorde never took off in the US, what did they do with all the ones that flew over from London and Paris? Ship them back?" but I'm not a smartass, so you're off the hook on that one ;)
Europeans had the same dislike of the noise, so the Concorde was only ever used for flights over the Atlantic. Its main problem, though, was economics. The Concorde consumed huge amounts of fuel, parts were very expensive because of its very low production run, and it carried very few passengers compared to other trans-Atlantic jets. All of this made Concorde tickets very expensive, and even if the margin per seat were higher (I don't know if it was), it was more profitable to carry more people on a larger jet, even at a much lower ticket price.
I don't think this is really an issue with KDE 4 or OSS, at least not to the exclusion of other development models.
:)
Remember when Windows 2000 was a 1.0 product? How about the first release of Windows XP? The first release of KDE 3? I'm a Mac user at work, working at a company that has over 4000 Mac users, a good number of which upgraded to Leopard before the ink was even dry on the packaging. The next day, there were lots of reports of bugs on our internal Mac mailing list. Leopard fixes some bugs from Tiger, of course, but it also adds so many new features that I consider it to be more or less a 1.0 product.
No surprise, then, that a release candidate for a 1.0 product that's been in development for a long time should have a lot of bugs open. And now, I won't be upgrading my Kubuntu boxes to KDE 4 right away, either
Ditto. I used to work there (not on IE, though), and will Billg really knows the ins and outs of every project getting under way (he'll read the whole spec, hundreds of pages, and people who've been to Billg briefings say he practically memorizes the whole thing), Microsoft is made up of fiefdoms, and its entirely possible that he doesn't get reports from the IE fiefdom on whether - and how much - they are communicating with developers.
I wonder if they realize what a two-edged sword that is? If federal officers can be sent after copyright infringers, copyright holders of GPLed software will be able to do a lot more than just sue.
Not that I favor a nuts law like this, but if they pass it, use it.
OK, let me get this straight. Telling the truth (as unpleasant as it may be for those about whom it is being told) generates hate, FUD, and viciousness? Then what should we call it when people repeatedly make public statements that could most charitably be called unfounded, and then file baseless lawsuits based on those statements?
Do many people have intense loathing of SCO's actions, and personal loathing of its executives? Sure. That's only natural, considering their actions. I'd be concerned if people who understood the situation didn't loathe them.
Are some hardworking SCO employees going to wind up out of work? Probably, along with their wrongdoing executives. Do I feel sorry for them? On a personal level, yes. Does that mean justice shouldn't have been done to SCO. Of course not. SCO is getting its just desserts. OTOH, what's wrong with the few remaining SCO employees that they couldn't see the writing on the wall and go get jobs elsewhere? SCO management is primarily responsible for putting them in a difficult position, but they are not free of responsibility either. If I had been a SCO employee, I would have left a long time ago.
Thank you. That was my first thought as well, when I saw this. "Great, congress - whose authority it is to decide how our tax money is spent - decides that manned Mars exploration is not a place where that money should be spent. Then, right away, up pops a guide for NASA to subvert the law just because they feel like doing something else.
For everyone who thinks that's a good idea, try replacing NASA with NSA/CIA/Bush administration/DOJ or whatever other part of the government really bugs you and see if you still think it's a good idea. If you don't, then it's not a good idea for NASA either. If you do, then I guess I don't need to comment further.
Precisely. I used to work at Microsoft, and while my overall assessment of the experience is that it had more negatives than positives and I wouldn't do it again, the #1 thing in the positives column is that the Microsoft standard is a private office for everyone. There are some teams that choose something else (open seating, etc.), and some that are so cramped for space that people have to share offices (mine was one of those), but in principle, Microsoft employees get private offices.
Even better than a private office was the setup I had during my final year. My entire team was relocated to Redmond, a move I was unable to make. As a result, I spent my final year working from a home office over VPN, from the comfort of my enclosed patio in southern California. The peace, quiet, and convenience was very good for productivity.
I work in a cubicle again now. My job is the best I've ever had, working at the second best company I've ever worked for. I can't find anything to complain about except my cubicle. Cubicles in general suck, and this one is worse than most b/c it's next to both a stairway access door and a row of conference rooms. It's a noisy, distracting environment that regularly screws my concentration. I'd love it beyond words to have a private office again, but no one has those here, not even the CEO (senior management has shared offices).
That said, I'd rather have fully open seating than a cubicle. Cubicles have every disadvantage of open seating, with none of the advantages. They are the worst of both worlds and should be done away with entirely.
You can get them in the hands of (y)our schoolchildren right now, all you have to do is buy one for your kid under the OLPC program wherein your buy two - you get one and one goes to a kid in one of the countries where they are trying to get these things distributed. The government of (Canada|USA) does not need to be - and most definitely should not be - involved. I don't know how things are where you're at, but government involvement in education is fouling things up here in California pretty well without further help. Per-child spending on education in California is over $11,000/year and we have teachers buying classroom supplies out of their own pockets and regularly holding class sales and other fund-raisers to help make ends meet. Money for things like field trips is raised just by our PTA. The school has no money for that at all. And all this while the state is still getting record property tax revenues. If taxes were
any higher, I couldn't afford my house.
It's hard to figure out where the money is going, but several things are sure: 1) It's not going into teacher salaries; 2) An awful lot of it's not getting to where it's needed, thus the fundraisers, teachers buying their own supplies, etc; 3) The system, overall, is doing less with more.
When I was in grade school in California, I don't recall my school ever having any kind of bake sale. Classroom supplies came from the supply room, not from teachers buying them out of their own pockets. And there were far fewer remedial programs in those days, too.
What's really hard to tell is exactly where all this money is going, but clearly, not enough of it is getting down to the local schools.
>They've done something similar to SpamCop, asking to have the use of the word referring to junk email use only lower case "s".
And we still spell it SpamCop:
http://www.spamcop.net/
Within my overall employer, there are over 4,000 Mac users (a minority still, but growing), and within my particular business unit, almost the entire engineering division is Mac, and the few that aren't are mostly FreeBSD. A few Linux users and even fewer Windows users. In fact, the guy in the cube next to me, who just refreshed to a Mac, may have been the last one. Among those 4,000 people, quite a few have upgraded to Leopard already, and I've seen their discussions of various issues on our very high-traffic internal Mac mailing list.
.0 release of a new major version of an OS until it's been well flogged in the real world and a bunch of updates are out :-) Although, my colleagues who are on Leopard are happy with it, though. I haven't heard anyone say they wish they hadn't done it. My important Linux systems are still on Kubuntu Feisty, too, just in case. Gutsy seems very stable on the test machines, though.
.0 release faults, Leopard is still ahead of Vista, there, too.
Certainly, there have been some issues, but nobody has reported the level of crashes that he's been seeing. I think his unfortunate experience is an edge case.
That many crashes is, IMO, not really acceptable, especially for a *nix-based OS, but I don't think the Vista comparison is very apt. For starters, in TFA he says their own reviewer recommends not upgrading to 10.5.1. Pretty much everyone who already installed Leopard where I work has upgraded to the latest release, and the reports I hear are that it has made all problems better. Instead of listening to his reviewer, he should update.
If you're getting the idea that I'm still on Tiger, you're right. I know better than to install a
The second point on which the Vista comparison fails is that unlike Vista, Leopard offers a number of compelling features that make people want to upgrade. Vista has been out a lot longer than Leopard, but I'd be very surprised if Leopard doesn't already have a higher percentage of upgraders than Vista has. XP Users seem to be sitting tight, for the most part. Among Tiger users, it's not a question of upgrading or not, but of how soon. The reason most XP users are not upgrading is they see no compelling reason to do so. Most of what Vista added is eye candy, and it has some downsides in the form of annoying security dialogs and a lot more DRM than XP has.
Third, unlike Vista, Leopard didn't have to shed its most compelling features in order to ship. Vista was supposed to come with wonderful new technologies like WinFS, which was not only dropped from Vista, but has been completely dropped as a standalone product. A rumor went around that XFS would be the Leopard file system; that turned out to be just a rumor. And it is available in Leopard, it's just not the default file system. All the really cool stuff that was supposed to be in Vista mostly isn't. There are those who say the security model is better (and maybe it is, although those annoying dialogs are worse than useless), but what people mainly see in Vista is eye candy. Eye candy that takes a lot more horsepower to really make use of. Even there, Vista fails it compared to Leopard (or even Tiger) in terms of looks.
And that's without even getting started on functionality, reliability, ease of use, and consistency. For all of its
Finally, what may be the biggest difference of all between Vista and Leopard: a year from now, Leopard will have achieved significant adoption in the Mac user base. I'll go out on a limb and say that a year from its release, Leopard will not only have a greater percentage of the Mac user base than Vista has of the Windows user base when it reaches 1 year of general public release on Jan. 30 2008, but that one year from its release, Leopard will have a greater percentage of the Mac market than Vista has of the Windows market at *two* years from its release.
That last may sound like a fanboy statement, but it's really not. It's just recognition of the facts that Mac users, unlike X
Since you've just publicly called me a liar, you can google your own corroborating links and post them back here if you feel like it. there's no shortage of them from parties who are not anti-spam vendors.
Your view is just too small. I work for one of the major anti-spam vendors, and we've seen the spam volume double in about the last four months. Less spam is being shot at your MX, but that's counter to the global trend.
It's not a matter of how fast a target on the ground may move. It's a matter of how fast:
.7.
A) SAMs move
B) Enemy fighters aircraft move
If a bomber can fly by at Mach 2 at a high altitude and kick out its load of smart bombs, it becomes much harder to hit it with either a SAM or an air-launched missile. Let's say you make your bombing run at 40,000 feet going Mach 2 and a SAM battery a few miles away takes a shot at you. You kick out the bombs and firewall the throttle for any more speed you can get, and punch out chaff. The SAM is going maybe Mach 5 and you're maybe now at Mach 2.5. At a closure rate of only Mach 2.5, the SAM may run out of fuel before it reaches you, even if it doesn't get fooled by the chaff. If you'd had to slow down to sub-sonic speeds to make your bombing run, the SAM would have a much better chance of catching you.
If there is a CAP up, it's going to have a lot more trouble catching and firing on a bomber going Mach 2 than a bomber going Mach
While these have not been particularly great threats recently (I believe the Viet Nam War was the last time an American heavy bomber was brought down by enemy fire), it wouldn't be wise to assume that the situation will always remain this way, so it's good to have that technology in our back pockets.
Even at lower altitudes, that would take a lot of light anti-aircraft systems off the table, and at least make it harder even for large SAM systems. Imagine being a guy with a shoulder-fired AA missile trying to get a bead on something going at Mach 2. Even if you get a successful lock on it and fire, it's unlikely your missile will be able to catch it even if it's on a low-level bombing run (something I wouldn't expect a B-2 to do, anyway).
While that may be true, I think the real problem most people have with Vista isn't so much that it's that bad, as that it's not that good.
For example, if I were to buy a PC that I intended to use as a Windows machine (my home network currently has 1 XP notebook, 1 XP desktop, 1 Linux notebook, 1 MacBook Pro, 3 Linux desktops and 1 FreeBSD file server) I would probably keep Vista on it (with the caveat that I haven't spent enough time with a Vista machine to be certain of that). However, I see no compelling reason at all to migrate either of the current XP machines to Vista. One is a Thinkpad T30 which runs XP very well with 1 GB of memory, and the other is a Sempron with 768K (also runs XP well). Either of those is pretty low-spec for a Vista machine.
Even setting the hardware specs aside, though, I can't think of a single reason to upgrade to Vista. The XP machines fully meet all of my Windows needs, I already have XP, and it will be supported for years to come. Even though I have a friend who works at Microsoft who would be happy to buy me a couple copies of Vista for Christmas from the company store, I have no plans to take him up on it. I just don't see the need, and that's exactly what a lot of Windows users are saying about Vista: that they just don't see the need.
Vista is a product that has spent five years in development by a very large team, only to ship without highly touted components such as WinFS (which has basically been abandoned) and to find many (most?) potential upgraders in both business and home environments having reactions running from "Never" to "Not for a long time" to "What's the point?", and it's difficult to not characterize that as at least a partial disaster. Compare that to adoption rates of upgrades to OS X or , where people practically stampede to upgrade (I'm not saying that's necessarily wise; I'm still running Tiger and will do so for at least another six months. But people do it).
That's the real problem with Vista: it's not that good.
I live in San Bruno, we were just down past there today. Beautiful drive. I'll make sure to stay off the rocks.
> Tolerance is a funny idea. You ought only tolerate what doesn't harm you or others.
Well put. I find the emphasis that some place on tolerance to be a bit, well, misplaced.
However, I don't really see where creationists are harming anyone, really. I mean, yeah, I think they are (grossly) misinterpreting Genesis, but I don't see where anyone is going to go to hell, prison or even the unemployment line on the basis of that. I confess to not paying much attention to them, and maybe they're doing something I don't know about (totally possible), but apart from the copyright infringement + plagiarism case (for which they ought to be ashamed, since it strikes me that it probably falls within the bounds of "Thou shalt not steal"), I'm not sure that they're actually harming anyone. Are they?
Thailand is richer (by a good ways) than Vietnam, and at least in the cities, pretty much any one who wants regular Internet access has it. Internet cafes are dirt cheap, and computer ownership is not unusual among the growing middle class, either. Computer shops are all over the place in Saigon. I expect that most urban teens in Thailand have regular Internet access if they want it.
The prior art is even more clear than that. Businesses have, for a very long time (we're talking centuries here) given the best service to their best customers. Less good customers will, by that definition, get some lower level of service than those best customers, even if their service is still good. It's astonishing that such an idea could get a patent, no matter what kind of lawyer-speak they wrapped around it.
Heck, there may be prior art at Best Buy, even. It was in the news some time back that they will fire customers who aren't good enough, where not good enough = only buying the cheapest specials.
If it was anybody but Microsoft, maybe. The problem with MSFT positioning itself as an anti-anything is that nobody thinks "I'm a loner. A rebel. And Microsoft is building the product to help me let the world know it."
Anyway, they couldn't done it, IMO. There's a saying attributed to Ford Motor Company that says, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." I used to work at Microsoft, and Microsoft's culture eats everything for breakfast. When they acquired my former employer, the first thing they did was wipe out our culture, and our culture was a lot of what helped us to make a product good enough to make Microsoft want us.
I left after a year and a half and know work for another company that was recently acquired. Our new parent wants to preserve our culture no matter what, so that we keep making the great product that made them want to buy us. What a night and day difference.
It's quite clear that no one should care what Mark Cuban says about anything other than basketball.
In TFA, he makes the ludicrous statement that "I think the position that "you pay for the bandwidth, so you can use it any way you want" isn't reality and very flawed when it comes to P2."
No, it's not flawed. I use P2P to get most of my ISO images, and every bit of the bandwidth involved was paid for.
I paid for my download bandwidth. I pay for my upload bandwidth. Do did everyone else hosting any given ISO. All the bandwidth is bought and paid for, so no matter what Cuban says, I can do anything I want with the bandwidth that's not prevented by the AUP. I am fortunate to be able to choose from among several local ISPs, none of whom restrict P22. If one of them did, I'd switch to a competitor in a heartbeat and let them know why.
MC, this bird's for you.
I lived in Japan for 8 years, speak/read/write the language well, and still use it regularly in my job today. I love Japan and at some future point, might take a posting there with my current employer. And I'm fine with them fingerprinting all non-Japanese on entry. I lived there long enough ago that I had my thumb print on my gaijin card. No big deal. When I worked for a bank in the U.S., all 10 of my fingerprints were taken and put on file with the FBI. It's a condition of employment. No big deal. If I didn't like it, I had the option of not working at a bank. If I didn't like having my thumb print on my gaijin card, I had the option of not living in Japan. Nobody made me go there. I went because I wanted to, accepting that a lot of things are different there than back home. Some I'm not so keen on, some I like very much. If the bad outweighed the good, I had the option to not go, or to not stay.
Opinion, aside, there are a number of factual inaccuracies in your comments:
1) Fingerprinting in Japan is not reserved only for proven criminals. Anyone charged with a crime will be fingerprinted, and Japan also has previous history with fingerprinting foreigners (maybe you've even had a thumb-print gaijin card yourself).
2) This fingerprinting is not un-Japanese at all. If you think so, you understand both Japan and the Japanese rather poorly.
Apart from those errors, you present a mix of arguments that aren't even being made, plus some evidence that seems to support fingerprinting, rather than oppose it:
"drunken fighting Russians (in my area), Pot smoking teachers from my USA (also arrested in my area)"
(Aside: sounds like you live in Hokkaido.)
"Don't get me wrong- I speak Japanese bilingually (unlike most of my fellow teachers), but just because the others
cannot does not make them anymore of a security risk than I."
AFAIK no one in the Japanese government is making that claim. Certainly, the fingerprinting law doesn't provide an exemption for people who can speak Japanese.
Sure, Japan has a strong safety culture, but so what? During my eight years in Japan, I always knew the way to Narita airport, in case I decided that I didn't like it there anymore. If you don't like the safety culture, try SE Asia. I lived there, too, and people seem to go about with casual disregard for safety, doing a lot of really dangerous stuff all the time. Maybe you'll like it better. It's certainly a change of pace, and I mostly liked SEA, except for the heavy traffic and air pollution.
If you really believe your personal biometric data is none of your business, you have a simple solution, the same one I had. Make your way to the airport. Clearly, the Japanese government disagrees with you on that issue, and the majority of Japanese also either do so, or at least do not agree with you strongly enough to require their government not do this, after all.
At the end of the day, it's their country, not yours or mine, and they make the rules. If you don't like the rules they make, you should get out or you'll wind up hating the place. That's not a troll, just a piece of friendly (and correct) advice from someone who lived there a long time and would have been a lifer if I hadn't married another foreigner while I was there.