...that doesn't mean measures shouldn't be taken to try to prevent the attacks that can be prevented.
It does if those measures are as gross of a violation of human rights as what happened here.
Granted, it's nothing compared to some of the stuff that goes on in the world (torture, whatnot), but by the standards of a "western" country IMO this incident is a gross violation.
95 and 98 both had muliple profiles. Each user had a distinct HKCU registry tree and a directory in WINDOWS\Profiles that holds different desktops and Application Directory data.
It's not as secure as the *nix/NT multiple users because you can't put access controls, but there were multiple accounts.
we're talking about $66,666.67, which is probably not far off of their average wage.
Dude, I have a friend who had an *INTERNSHIP* at MS that, had he been there for a whole year, would have gotten paid almost that much. And that doesn't count benefits or anything like that.
Agreed. I flop caps and ctrl (even in Windows) and have never looked back.
The Sun layout with respect to that is, IMO, vastly superior to the PC layout even w/o the Emacs benefit.
(Of course, I suggest you don't actually get a Sun keyboard, because the location of backspace (no longer at the corner) is an abomination. If you have to use one, may I suggest the following: (global-set-key "`" 'backward-delete-char-untabify)
(Add that to ~/.emacs) That will fix that braindead decision. I've been known to run a shell from inside Emacs when I'm working on a Sun just so that I can press backspace in the normal location and it will work.
I'd have moded you up but I wanted to take that pot shot at the Sun layout.)
That said, the University of Chicago might want a cut of the revenue from the proprietary version of MPICH2.
If so, then they need to learn to read. They released their software under a BSDish license. It's well known that one of the consequences of this is that it would be able to be incorporated into a proprietary product. MS has even done it before.
There are "literally thousands upon thousands of hurricanes" anywhere on earth yearly?
Seems to me that the Atlantic hurricans almost never run out of letters, which bounds the number at 26. Double that to account for Pacific hurricanes and you're about 50. I don't know how the Pacific hurricanes are named, so we'll assume they are named just strike the US. So let's say double the number again for Pacific hurricanes that reach Asia. You're still only at 100. Let's say that still we've only counted those in the Northern Hemisphere, so double again to 200. And I think that is a severely high estimate.
So where's this "thousands"?
NOLA only gets hit with a couple hurricanes a year. Even most of the Atlantic hurricanes die before they make landfall, head upthe US East Coast, or turn down toward Central America.
Then they either a)make the backspace key normal size instead of double-width and put the pipe beside it (which mean's I'm constantly pressing \ when I want to back up) or put it down between the righthand ctrl and alt keys (which means I can't find it).
Or, c) put it to the right of the shift key, above right ctrl.
I think I like the same layout you do re. that, but c) isn't bad. I don't know that I've seen b). And a) is retarted.
Of course, none of this compares to the anguish of using a Sun keyboard, which basically just rearranges the whole world
Sun keyboards move the ~ key next to the backspace, making the latter a small key. To make matters worse, backspace isn't even the rightmost key; it goes backspace then ~. This is even more retarted than a) above. (Remapping ~ in Emacs to backward-delete-character or whatever it is helps a little, but isn't a solution.)
They also move the escape key to where ~ is on a PC keyboard. There's an unlabeled key in place of esc. I don't know what it does. I don't remember if it works like ESC on a PC.
However, they also swapped ctrl and caps lock. This takes some getting used to, but I swear that if you try it you'll never go back. It's so much more comfortable hitting ctrl with just a small motion rather than having to go way down to the corner. I swap them in both Windows and Linux, and never looked back. (The only problem comes when you go use someone else's computer and forget; but then again I also use Dvorak so I'm used to that sort of thing.)
Real geeks have all black keyboards because the white characters have all worn off from excesive use.
I have a Logitech mousman duo elite or something like that, and I must say that I'm very impressed with the staying power of the letters on the keyboard. It's now three years old and the print isn't even showing signs of fading. I've even polished a small part of the space bar from the slightly rough, matte finish it had when new from using it so much. (I almost always hit it with the same thumb. The other keys look like they may be "polished" too, but it's hard to tell because there's not a part right next to it that isn't polished.) And yet the letters are as bold as ever.
(It looks like there's a little dab of something clear over the letters, so you don't touch the ink directly. This is probably why it's as successful as it is.)
Overall, disclosure of a problem is always in the USERS best interest
I disagree to an extent. There are a couple reasons.
First, spreading a virus or other malicious code would probably be easier than patching the problem, at least most of the time. This means that exploits for a vulnerability would be be out before fixes for them.
I'd prefer the uncertainty that hackers may or may not have found a vulnerability above the certainty that they can find it, even at the cost of being unaware of the vulnerability itself.
Second, what am I supposed to do if I do know about the vulnerability? Change software? Even for a home user this is a substantial undertaking, and sometimes impossible. (For instance, even though I like Linux and dual-boot with Gentoo, I do most of by stuff in Windows because there are a couple things I *can't* in Linux.) In a corporate world, the situation is even worse.
Again, in many cases, we're back to the same problem: I have to run software with a vulnerability (i.e. even if I know about it I can't do anything), do I want that vulnerability known by a lot of people or as few as possible?
Finally, what am I supposed to do even if I COULD change any software at will? Follow all the websites where security stuff would be posted to see if something was broken? Yeah right, many people don't even install patches. I don't have time to pay attention to security sites. Even if I did, I might not have the knowledge to evaluate how bad of a threat something was.
Now, I do think there comes a point where if the company is sitting on its hands and doing nothing that something has to be done and the vulnerability should be released to the world in an attempt to force it to take action, but as long as the company is making a good attempt I think that it should remain as secret as practical. (I also think that vulnerabilities should be released a couple weeks, maybe a month, after the patches are, both to give the public information about the general security of that company's products and so that developers can learn from the mistakes of others.)
What is better (if anything) about how OO handles styles? (This is a legitimate question BTW; I'm not trolling.)
I did note that they have more categories of styles; Word has character and paragraph styles but OO has list and a couple others.
(However, even if OO support for styles is better, I have a list of many other things that OO 2 *doesn't* have but Word does, or Word does better. For instance, OO writer doesn't have a view that equates with Word's normal view.)
So while the Window menu shows the other documents, the actual windows that are open and the style they use is COMPLETELY different. Word uses an almost entirely SDI interface, and only provides an additional way to raise/focus other documents. Excel uses an almost entirely MDI interface, just by default displaying multiple entries in the taskbar.
Because it's "even more" confusing than the MDI interface. And as demonstrated by myself and the others complaining about it, it's confusing to people who know what's going on. And finally, it goes against the conventions of every other program I know of except Acrobat Reader 7 (which was released after and follows that awful convention).
No, They all behave the same actually. Look at the window menu in Word. From any word doc you can see any other word doc that's open. That's the same as Excel - pseudo SDI. I think the change in Excel made it work more like Word, not the other way around.
NOT TRUE!
Open Word. Click the new document icon (menu, ctrl+n, whatever). New top level window! There's no container.
Open Excel. Click the new document icon. New window *within the container window*.
Of course the Soviets actually provide the most compelling evidence that we did go to the Moon - their utter and complete silence. It seems strange that at the height of the Cold War, the United States biggest enemy would be completely silent and not say a word. You would have thought that if it is so obvious from the photographic and video record that we didn't go to the Moon, that the evil commies would have been all over it. But there is nothing.
Agreed on the overall statement that the Soviet's silence provide the biggest evidence (though the videos come damn close), but for a different reason.
It seems to me that it would be possible to pretty accurately triangulate the position of the spacecraft using Earthbound radio stations. And if it was, I have no doubt the Soviets were doing it. Which means that we would have had to at least either:
* Carry out most of the mission with unmanned probes transmitting a recording while the astronauts remained in Earth orbit undetected, or
* Send the astronauts around the moon and just not land them on it.
It seems that probably both of these options would be nearly as complicated as doing the mission as stated.
You must be basing your comments on an older version of OO. If you toggle View/Print Layout, you'll find yourself in our beloved "normal" view.
The OO 2.0 betas make page layout the default on opening docs. I personally find this a minor vexation but understand it being a good choice for many other users. And pressing when I first open a document hasn't proven a particular hardship.
I just installed the latest beta, 1.9.125. It does not have normal mode.
Note that 'web mode' (what it goes into if I choose View -> Print Layout for a reason I completely disagree with) is NOT the same as normal mode because it doesn't show page breaks, width, etc.
So you're saying that if all the other kids jump off a cliff...
If they teach me how to do it without hurting myself, sure.;-)
Would you consider that Word was better if it had a copy & paste facility that dropped 10% of the text at random, while OO.o had none?
If it'd be easy to determine if it pasted everything or not, yes.
(I have a very good working knowledge, so it's easy to determine if Word's suggestions are right or not. By "working knowledge," I mean that I know when things are right, when they are wrong, and how to fix mistakes, but I'm not always up on terms.)
Everyone I've ever seen "use" it either ignored all the results completely, apparently able to operate a computer while random lines and squigggles are drawn in their field of view... or they disabled half the grammar check options
Well, check me off as someone who uses it and does neither. Starting with Word XP I find the grammar check to be right more than it's wrong, so I leave it on. I did turn it off in previous versions though.
(BTW, I put your post into word, and the sole grammatical error it found was the comma before "that destroy the meaning" in paragraph four. That comma is incorrect, and it's the only error I can find, so the grammar checker is 100% accurate for your post. In the interest of full disclosure, I put my post in too, and it incorrectly reported that my first sentence is a fragment. So it's of course not always right. But, as I've said, I find it correct frequently enough and incorrect infrequently enough that I leave it on.)
Slides tend to be a distraction and kill off the ability to interact with the audience
I'm planning on becoming a professor and think I'm going to use electronic slides. It allows you to give the same talk a number of times without duplicating effort, allows you to distribute the slides to everyone for their own studying*, allows you to proofread and eliminates the chance of transcription errors**, allows you to avoid turning your back to the audience (or do other weird contortions) while you're writing, is probably easier to read, etc. And if you make segments appear gradually* as you go along I think you'd get many of the benefits of writing it on the board.
(YMMV, and I haven't really done much with either, so take my hunches with a bit of salt even as they'd apply to me.)
* And gives them just enough rope to hang themselves if they view them as a substitute for class, which you can view as a good or bad feature; I don't have a problem with it. There are students who would benefit from it, and that outweighs the chance that someone with poor planning would misuse them in my mind. In addition, a couple of my favorite classes have relied on people being able to look at the day's slides in advance (enforced by daily quizzes), which you can't do with board notes nearly as well.
** Although such errors could be viewed as a good thing. Then again, you could always deliberately introduce them into the slides if you wanted them there.
*** Note: NOT fly in, swirl in, or any of the other usually annoying transitions PPT gives you; I'm a big fan of the 'appear' effect. I also don't like most PPT templates. There aren't many good ones to begin with, and those that are good are overused.
And once you do any real work with LaTeX it is really hard to justify using anything else.
Eh, I don't really think so. I mean, sure, LaTeX does look better, but you have to deal with having it installed whereever you want to edit it, getting syntax errors in your letters, and a couple other annoyances. They both have their pros and cons.
Well, you can emulate the OO method by just working in page view from the start, unless that was just slow in general and not just when going to page view. (It sounds like that's the case.)
Second, I do think that the switch to and back from page view is a bit akward, and wish Word let you edit it in something like how they do footnotes (in the separate pane at the bottom).
Third, were you using master documents? If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's a way to make one document be in several files. Like you can put each chapter of a book in a separate file, but still be able to see the book as a whole by opening the master document. If you know C programming, think of it as #including the smaller files where you need them, though it actually works a lot differently. (I've only used it once a while ago and only lightly, so I don't actually know how well it works, just that you should look into it if you haven't already.)
Slashdot Mirror
...that doesn't mean measures shouldn't be taken to try to prevent the attacks that can be prevented.
It does if those measures are as gross of a violation of human rights as what happened here.
Granted, it's nothing compared to some of the stuff that goes on in the world (torture, whatnot), but by the standards of a "western" country IMO this incident is a gross violation.
95 and 98 both had muliple profiles. Each user had a distinct HKCU registry tree and a directory in WINDOWS\Profiles that holds different desktops and Application Directory data.
It's not as secure as the *nix/NT multiple users because you can't put access controls, but there were multiple accounts.
we're talking about $66,666.67, which is probably not far off of their average wage.
Dude, I have a friend who had an *INTERNSHIP* at MS that, had he been there for a whole year, would have gotten paid almost that much. And that doesn't count benefits or anything like that.
Agreed. I flop caps and ctrl (even in Windows) and have never looked back.
The Sun layout with respect to that is, IMO, vastly superior to the PC layout even w/o the Emacs benefit.
(Of course, I suggest you don't actually get a Sun keyboard, because the location of backspace (no longer at the corner) is an abomination. If you have to use one, may I suggest the following:
(global-set-key "`" 'backward-delete-char-untabify)
(Add that to ~/.emacs) That will fix that braindead decision. I've been known to run a shell from inside Emacs when I'm working on a Sun just so that I can press backspace in the normal location and it will work.
I'd have moded you up but I wanted to take that pot shot at the Sun layout.)
That said, the University of Chicago might want a cut of the revenue from the proprietary version of MPICH2.
If so, then they need to learn to read. They released their software under a BSDish license. It's well known that one of the consequences of this is that it would be able to be incorporated into a proprietary product. MS has even done it before.
As opposed to being chained to Sun?
At least the Word widgets look reasonably like the rest of windows (pre-office 12).
The Quicktime/Winamp/Office 12 UIs are entirely different. They (maybe except Office) don't even keep the window title bar!
Um, maybe you didn't notice, but even Apple is moving away from the one button mouse.
I personally think context menus (which to be done properly should have a right button) are a boon to speed use.
It's also possible he was confusing it with ISA. You know, sort of the chip's API.
There are "literally thousands upon thousands of hurricanes" anywhere on earth yearly?
Seems to me that the Atlantic hurricans almost never run out of letters, which bounds the number at 26. Double that to account for Pacific hurricanes and you're about 50. I don't know how the Pacific hurricanes are named, so we'll assume they are named just strike the US. So let's say double the number again for Pacific hurricanes that reach Asia. You're still only at 100. Let's say that still we've only counted those in the Northern Hemisphere, so double again to 200. And I think that is a severely high estimate.
So where's this "thousands"?
NOLA only gets hit with a couple hurricanes a year. Even most of the Atlantic hurricanes die before they make landfall, head upthe US East Coast, or turn down toward Central America.
Then they either a)make the backspace key normal size instead of double-width and put the pipe beside it (which mean's I'm constantly pressing \ when I want to back up) or put it down between the righthand ctrl and alt keys (which means I can't find it).
Or, c) put it to the right of the shift key, above right ctrl.
I think I like the same layout you do re. that, but c) isn't bad. I don't know that I've seen b). And a) is retarted.
Of course, none of this compares to the anguish of using a Sun keyboard, which basically just rearranges the whole world
Sun keyboards move the ~ key next to the backspace, making the latter a small key. To make matters worse, backspace isn't even the rightmost key; it goes backspace then ~. This is even more retarted than a) above. (Remapping ~ in Emacs to backward-delete-character or whatever it is helps a little, but isn't a solution.)
They also move the escape key to where ~ is on a PC keyboard. There's an unlabeled key in place of esc. I don't know what it does. I don't remember if it works like ESC on a PC.
However, they also swapped ctrl and caps lock. This takes some getting used to, but I swear that if you try it you'll never go back. It's so much more comfortable hitting ctrl with just a small motion rather than having to go way down to the corner. I swap them in both Windows and Linux, and never looked back. (The only problem comes when you go use someone else's computer and forget; but then again I also use Dvorak so I'm used to that sort of thing.)
Anyone know if you can get the feel of a buckling spring keyboard w/o the noise of one?
I'd like to have one, I really would, but they are entirely too noisy. (Less so now that I don't have a roommate, but I still find them annoying.)
Real geeks have all black keyboards because the white characters have all worn off from excesive use.
I have a Logitech mousman duo elite or something like that, and I must say that I'm very impressed with the staying power of the letters on the keyboard. It's now three years old and the print isn't even showing signs of fading. I've even polished a small part of the space bar from the slightly rough, matte finish it had when new from using it so much. (I almost always hit it with the same thumb. The other keys look like they may be "polished" too, but it's hard to tell because there's not a part right next to it that isn't polished.) And yet the letters are as bold as ever.
(It looks like there's a little dab of something clear over the letters, so you don't touch the ink directly. This is probably why it's as successful as it is.)
Overall, disclosure of a problem is always in the USERS best interest
I disagree to an extent. There are a couple reasons.
First, spreading a virus or other malicious code would probably be easier than patching the problem, at least most of the time. This means that exploits for a vulnerability would be be out before fixes for them.
I'd prefer the uncertainty that hackers may or may not have found a vulnerability above the certainty that they can find it, even at the cost of being unaware of the vulnerability itself.
Second, what am I supposed to do if I do know about the vulnerability? Change software? Even for a home user this is a substantial undertaking, and sometimes impossible. (For instance, even though I like Linux and dual-boot with Gentoo, I do most of by stuff in Windows because there are a couple things I *can't* in Linux.) In a corporate world, the situation is even worse.
Again, in many cases, we're back to the same problem: I have to run software with a vulnerability (i.e. even if I know about it I can't do anything), do I want that vulnerability known by a lot of people or as few as possible?
Finally, what am I supposed to do even if I COULD change any software at will? Follow all the websites where security stuff would be posted to see if something was broken? Yeah right, many people don't even install patches. I don't have time to pay attention to security sites. Even if I did, I might not have the knowledge to evaluate how bad of a threat something was.
Now, I do think there comes a point where if the company is sitting on its hands and doing nothing that something has to be done and the vulnerability should be released to the world in an attempt to force it to take action, but as long as the company is making a good attempt I think that it should remain as secret as practical. (I also think that vulnerabilities should be released a couple weeks, maybe a month, after the patches are, both to give the public information about the general security of that company's products and so that developers can learn from the mistakes of others.)
Word has styles!
This has come up a couple times in the past.
What is better (if anything) about how OO handles styles? (This is a legitimate question BTW; I'm not trolling.)
I did note that they have more categories of styles; Word has character and paragraph styles but OO has list and a couple others.
(However, even if OO support for styles is better, I have a list of many other things that OO 2 *doesn't* have but Word does, or Word does better. For instance, OO writer doesn't have a view that equates with Word's normal view.)
I hit submit by accident before I was ready...
So while the Window menu shows the other documents, the actual windows that are open and the style they use is COMPLETELY different. Word uses an almost entirely SDI interface, and only provides an additional way to raise/focus other documents. Excel uses an almost entirely MDI interface, just by default displaying multiple entries in the taskbar.
(This BTW is tested with Word 2K3 SP1)
Why? Because you don't like it?
Because it's "even more" confusing than the MDI interface. And as demonstrated by myself and the others complaining about it, it's confusing to people who know what's going on. And finally, it goes against the conventions of every other program I know of except Acrobat Reader 7 (which was released after and follows that awful convention).
No, They all behave the same actually. Look at the window menu in Word. From any word doc you can see any other word doc that's open. That's the same as Excel - pseudo SDI. I think the change in Excel made it work more like Word, not the other way around.
NOT TRUE!
Open Word. Click the new document icon (menu, ctrl+n, whatever). New top level window! There's no container.
Open Excel. Click the new document icon. New window *within the container window*.
Do you work here?
Of course the Soviets actually provide the most compelling evidence that we did go to the Moon - their utter and complete silence. It seems strange that at the height of the Cold War, the United States biggest enemy would be completely silent and not say a word. You would have thought that if it is so obvious from the photographic and video record that we didn't go to the Moon, that the evil commies would have been all over it. But there is nothing.
Agreed on the overall statement that the Soviet's silence provide the biggest evidence (though the videos come damn close), but for a different reason.
It seems to me that it would be possible to pretty accurately triangulate the position of the spacecraft using Earthbound radio stations. And if it was, I have no doubt the Soviets were doing it. Which means that we would have had to at least either:
* Carry out most of the mission with unmanned probes transmitting a recording while the astronauts remained in Earth orbit undetected, or
* Send the astronauts around the moon and just not land them on it.
It seems that probably both of these options would be nearly as complicated as doing the mission as stated.
You must be basing your comments on an older version of OO. If you toggle View/Print Layout, you'll find yourself in our beloved "normal" view.
;-)
The OO 2.0 betas make page layout the default on opening docs. I personally find this a minor vexation but understand it being a good choice for many other users. And pressing when I first open a document hasn't proven a particular hardship.
I just installed the latest beta, 1.9.125. It does not have normal mode.
Note that 'web mode' (what it goes into if I choose View -> Print Layout for a reason I completely disagree with) is NOT the same as normal mode because it doesn't show page breaks, width, etc.
So you're saying that if all the other kids jump off a cliff...
If they teach me how to do it without hurting myself, sure.
Would you consider that Word was better if it had a copy & paste facility that dropped 10% of the text at random, while OO.o had none?
If it'd be easy to determine if it pasted everything or not, yes.
(I have a very good working knowledge, so it's easy to determine if Word's suggestions are right or not. By "working knowledge," I mean that I know when things are right, when they are wrong, and how to fix mistakes, but I'm not always up on terms.)
Everyone I've ever seen "use" it either ignored all the results completely, apparently able to operate a computer while random lines and squigggles are drawn in their field of view... or they disabled half the grammar check options
Well, check me off as someone who uses it and does neither. Starting with Word XP I find the grammar check to be right more than it's wrong, so I leave it on. I did turn it off in previous versions though.
(BTW, I put your post into word, and the sole grammatical error it found was the comma before "that destroy the meaning" in paragraph four. That comma is incorrect, and it's the only error I can find, so the grammar checker is 100% accurate for your post. In the interest of full disclosure, I put my post in too, and it incorrectly reported that my first sentence is a fragment. So it's of course not always right. But, as I've said, I find it correct frequently enough and incorrect infrequently enough that I leave it on.)
Slides tend to be a distraction and kill off the ability to interact with the audience
I'm planning on becoming a professor and think I'm going to use electronic slides. It allows you to give the same talk a number of times without duplicating effort, allows you to distribute the slides to everyone for their own studying*, allows you to proofread and eliminates the chance of transcription errors**, allows you to avoid turning your back to the audience (or do other weird contortions) while you're writing, is probably easier to read, etc. And if you make segments appear gradually* as you go along I think you'd get many of the benefits of writing it on the board.
(YMMV, and I haven't really done much with either, so take my hunches with a bit of salt even as they'd apply to me.)
* And gives them just enough rope to hang themselves if they view them as a substitute for class, which you can view as a good or bad feature; I don't have a problem with it. There are students who would benefit from it, and that outweighs the chance that someone with poor planning would misuse them in my mind. In addition, a couple of my favorite classes have relied on people being able to look at the day's slides in advance (enforced by daily quizzes), which you can't do with board notes nearly as well.
** Although such errors could be viewed as a good thing. Then again, you could always deliberately introduce them into the slides if you wanted them there.
*** Note: NOT fly in, swirl in, or any of the other usually annoying transitions PPT gives you; I'm a big fan of the 'appear' effect. I also don't like most PPT templates. There aren't many good ones to begin with, and those that are good are overused.
And once you do any real work with LaTeX it is really hard to justify using anything else.
Eh, I don't really think so. I mean, sure, LaTeX does look better, but you have to deal with having it installed whereever you want to edit it, getting syntax errors in your letters, and a couple other annoyances. They both have their pros and cons.
Okay, sorry. I don't know if I just didn't read carefully enough (3:18am, cut me some slack ;-) ) or decided the 2.0 didn't apply to there.
I wish I had that file so I could open it in Impress 2.0, resave it, and see if PPT still crashes...
Ohhhh, I see. And it goes under the insert menu too. (Insert -> Copied Cells)
I guess that makes sense, but I still think I'd prefer it in the edit menu so that it's with all the other cut/copy/paste functions.
But learning how to do stuff... good. Thanks.
Well, you can emulate the OO method by just working in page view from the start, unless that was just slow in general and not just when going to page view. (It sounds like that's the case.)
Second, I do think that the switch to and back from page view is a bit akward, and wish Word let you edit it in something like how they do footnotes (in the separate pane at the bottom).
Third, were you using master documents? If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's a way to make one document be in several files. Like you can put each chapter of a book in a separate file, but still be able to see the book as a whole by opening the master document. If you know C programming, think of it as #including the smaller files where you need them, though it actually works a lot differently. (I've only used it once a while ago and only lightly, so I don't actually know how well it works, just that you should look into it if you haven't already.)