I would have said Remote Desktop over dial-up would be excruciatingly slow. If you don't think so, I'm guessing you've never attempted it. Even consumer-grade broadband, like cable modem service, is often inadequate for remote desktop -- the downstream bandwidth is okay, but the upstream bandwidth is generally not, and the latency will make you want to throw your mouse across the room.
Realistically, if your connection is residential-grade, you're going to want a command-line interface for your remote shell. It's just less painful.
I don't care about a leap second, because if my computers are all within two minutes of one another (and within five minutes or so of the correct time) they'll be more precisely accurate than pretty much any other clock in this city, including the ones at the banks.
If they start talking about adding in any leap hours, let me know; I might have to do something about that.
Umm, how about the fact that version 10 is not even released yet (as of early 2012), and meanwhile support for the last version that any sane person would call stable officially ended in late 2008.
Support for long-term stable releases, which _don't_ have major show-stopping bugs (especially data-loss bugs) is supposed to overlap by quite a bit, to give people time, _after_ the new long-term stable version comes out, to plan upgrades ahead of time.
The overlap -- the amount of time each long-term stable release is still supported with security updates AFTER the next long-term stable release comes out -- is twelve months for Debian, twelve months for Ubuntu LTS releases, longer for Apple products, and MUCH longer for anything that comes out of Redmond.
Even if we are exceedingly generous and call Firefox 3.6 a "stable release" (which stretches the definition of the term rather thin, but similar stretches have been made for some other vendors' releases at various times, so okay), it would be expected to receive security updates for a year or so AFTER the next long-term stable release is, you know, actually _released_ (not merely preemptively announced as being in early alpha or whatever Firefox 10's status officially is this afternoon).
More to the point, if we're talking about what has already happened, Firefox 3.6 came out more than a year AFTER support for 2.0 was discontinued, not a year or so BEFORE as would be expected.
Even 3.0, which was about as stable as the Lebanese government, was released a mere six months before support for 2.0 ended, and no sane network administrator would have considered deploying 3.0 in any case.
What the blinkety blank is a QR code? The description in the summary makes it sound like one of those obscure two-dimensional barcode formats, none of which ever caught on to any meaningful extent, but then it starts talking about clicking on it, like it's a link in a web page or something. Wait, what? Who the heck clicks on barcodes? I'm missing something.
I would not have imagined that such a large and militarily-oriented nation as China -- a nuclear power for crying out loud -- with one of the world's longest national coastlines, would have waited this long to built an aircraft carrier, a piece of military technology that proved its value very conclusively in WWII, some sixty years ago. I mean, really, they went through the entire cold war era without building one?
In fact, it kind of seems anticlimactic and pointless for them start on that now, when they (China, I mean) have much more advanced, modern stuff, like satellites and electronic warfare capabilities.
Huh? We already know that the successor ship to the Enterprise was the Enterprise, followed by the Enterprise, then the Enterprise, then the Enterprise, and after that the Enterprise. What's the problem?
What I want to know is, is there going to be a third ship called the Defiant (excluding ones in the mirror universe and/or alternate timelines, which don't count)?
The main problem with the vmm in Windows is that it's monumentally horrible at deciding what to swap out. As best I can figure, it actually peeks one CPU timeslice into the future to see what information the next scheduled process is going to need as soon as it gets its timeslice and picks that to swap out now. Okay, okay, I exaggerate. Linux has me spoiled, because its vmm consistently finds any memory that you haven't used for an hour or so and swaps that out on the theory that you're probably not going to need it immediately, which is almost always correct. If you've got, like, a big spreadsheet or something that you're leaving minimized for days at a time, Linux invariably swaps it out; Windows seems more likely to pick something you're actively using and swap it out, only to need to swap it back in again a few seconds later. I don't know if Windows just keeps usage information for a much shorter amount of time and therefore guesses wrong more frequently, or what, but the bottom line is if you have (say) twice as much swap space as physical RAM, a Linux system will perform decently with up to half of that swap space being used (unless you're doing something pathological and rare, like really actively using all of it at once); whereas, a Windows system will always flog the swap file constantly the instant your virtual memory in use exceeds your physical RAM by even a tiny margin.
Of course, with RAM quantities and prices being what they are these days, and the 4GB (less video RAM) limit having gone away with the transition to 64-bit OSes, it's not nearly as big a deal as it used to be, because it really has become practical for most users to just have enough physical RAM to cover all normal usage, so you scarcely ever use swap space at all.
The only way to get Chrome to install in Program Files is to specifically hunt down and install the "Enterprise MSI" version. I'm guessing that's probably not the version that got misclassified as malware.
The regular version of Chrome, which you get if you just search for "Google Chrome" or anything like that, installs in a folder that is not only user-writable but also hidden, and user-specific so each user has their own install of it -- exactly the same place, in fact, that things like AntiVirusSoft 2011 like to install themselves. As a network administrator, I categorically do not allow any software that does this, period.
This does not actually mean that Chrome is malware: it's not. But it does mean I have no sympathy whatsoever for it when it gets misclassified that way by security software.
> I thought the issue of whether you could copyright facts (e.g., phone > numbers, timezone values for specific locations) was already settled law.
It is, and so if the defendant(s) can afford to pay some lawyers enough money to see this through then the court will undoubtedly find in the defendant's favor.
That doesn't stop the plaintiff from dragging you through the courts for months and months and running your legal fees into six or seven figures, though.
> USB is explicitly supposed to be tolerant to hot plug/unplug
Hot-plug doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
USB is hot-plug in the sense that it does not (generally) require you to physically power down the computer in order to unplug or plug in the device, as PCI and IDE and some PS/2 implementations do, but that does NOT mean you can necessarily just yank it at any random time without warning. Among other things, operating systems do not guarantee that the higher-level USB-based standard interfaces (e.g., mass storage device or scanner-and-camera interface) will tolerate that from the software side, regardless of what the peripheral itself does or does not support.
Huh. The biggest quake I remember around here was the one back in the mid eighties (I want to say '85 or '86). The only people I knew who claimed to have felt it were sitting down at the time. That was a 4.9, IIRC. Admittedly I was down in Massillon when the quake hit, and the epicenter was up closer to the lake, in the eastern part of (greater) Cleveland, perhaps ninety minutes' drive north-northeast of my location. But I lived somewhat north of Massillon and knew a lot of people from the Akron area (Norton, Barberton, Ellet, Mogadore, Hartville,...), and like I said *nobody* claimed to have felt it standing up. Everyone who said they felt it was seated at the time.
Loyalty doesn't mean that you can't ever take another job. It does, however, mean that you should be nice about it. Give your existing company as much notice as you possibly can (in a situation like this, I'd recommend at least a month if at all possible). Be respectful, and don't burn any bridges you can leave standing. If the new company has even an ounce of brain, they'll respect this, or at least accept it.
If you want to do a little more than that for them, you could offer to do a _few_ hours of consulting afterward (paid, of course), working around your new work schedule -- not coming back to work for them part time long-term or anything, just helping their new guys out a little here or there at first when they have questions that only you can answer on account of the fact that they weren't up to speed yet when you left. So if two days after you leave they realize "Oh, man, we totally forgot to ask him anything about how the frobnicator is set up" they don't have to panic and slit their wrists.
If *that* doesn't sound like enough, maybe you're so into your current job that you might consider staying. But that's up to you. You're under no obligation to stay. (I'm assuming here that your employment is at-will, as is usual in the US, not contracted for some predetermined amount of time.)
> In seriousness, generally there isn't much you can do in an > earthquake. Try to find something that has a relatively strong > structure above you, such as a strong desk or a doorjamb.
See, that's counterintuitive to me. My gut instinct, if I had two minutes' warning of an earthquake, would be to head straight for the nearest parking lot and hope that by sitting palms-down on the asphalt I might be able to actually feel the quake's vibrations. Actually, I'd probably get on my knees, on the grounds that the knees have less "padding" (fat) than other portions of my anatomy, so I'd be more likely to be able to feel the quake, which would be really neat.
But my level of experience with earthquakes is kind of limited, on account of the fact that I live in Ohio. If you're from California, you doubtless know WAY more about earthquakes than I ever will.
Huh? Linux has *thousands* of games, so many I don't think anyone has ever managed to try playing all of them.
What are you doing, trying to buy software at the store? We don't do things that way in the Linux world, son -- and the reason we don't do things that way is because that way sucks rocks. Not only is it expensive, but it's a royal hassle as well.
What we do is, we use this thing called a "package manager", which retrieves software from an online repository (which contains a MUCH larger selection of available software than any store I've ever seen). You don't need a three-foot stack of install disks, and you don't have to tediously install one game at a time, and they don't take forever for no reason, and you don't have to reboot after each one, and just in general it doesn't take all day. What you do is, you just open up your package manager (Synaptic, if it's a Debian-style distribution; rpm-based distros have an equivalent, but I forget what it's called), find the stuff you want, checkmark it, hit the go button, and then click the "yes, go ahead and install the dependencies as well" button. A couple of minutes later your new software is installed and ready to use. You generally don't even need to restart the computer *once*, let alone for every single individual title you install.
The Wikimedia Foundation is not headquarted in Italy, so if the servers aren't there either, I don't see how the Italian government would enforce anything. I suppose they could go after the individual editor (if an Italian had written the article), but overseas moderators would be able to undo any mischief that causes.
At worst, it might become necessary to ban people who are actually located in Italy from editing Italian Wikipedia articles (a feat that could be _mostly_ accomplished by a gross IP-range edit ban, and then individual Italian editors who work around that (e.g. by using an overseas proxy (one that is not itself banned (e.g. because it's not open to the public (yes I have programmed in lisp (why do you ask?))))) and manage to cause problems could be handled in the usual way). This would be terribly detrimental to the Italian Wikipedia, but it would fall short of a complete shutdown, since there are doubtless many Italian-speaking people living in countries other than Italy.
Installing in a user-writable location is a good start. Add heavy network activity and automatically updating itself without administrator approval on top of that, and heuristically speaking it starts to look very much indeed like malware.
Indeed. Google asked for this by the illegitimate, worst-practice way Chrome installs itself (specifically, the fact that it installs in a user-writable location, something legitimate software is never EVER supposed to do). That's just begging to be classified as malware.
What's left of Palm? There was something _left_ of Palm? I thought they were bought out and gutted and what was left of their assets absorbed by a company that had no interest in maintaining their product line a long time ago (well, a long time ago in internet time -- months and months and months).
It's been that way since they were introduced. The operating cost of cellphones was initially so ridiculously much higher than for landlines that there was no way on earth regular phone users would have ever been convinced that they should be willing to pay to call cellphones. A cellphone wouldn't have been nearly as useful if you couldn't receive calls on it, so the pay structure was worked out so that the few people who actually needed to be able to receive calls when they weren't in the office (or who could afford to pay for the privilege of *feeling* like they were that important) paid the entire operating cost of the cellular network.
It's not like idea of the recipient paying for the call was unprecedented. Businesses had been using 800 numbers for a while already. If they could afford a public 800 number that any random person off the street could call, why not pay-to-receive cellphones for the top execs? (The idea that regular working-class people would have any need for cellphones had not yet occurred. Even in Star Trek: The Next Generation, only officers ranked Lieutenant or higher, and away team members, were issued mobile communicators; everyone else used stationary panels, with a couple of rare exceptions. The middle-class cellphone is a phenomenon that happened gradually and caught a lot of people totally by surprise, and the billing structure wasn't planned around it because it was not widely forseen.)
Frankly, cellphones still cost significantly more than regular phones -- just not by nearly as much as the difference used to be, and I think the difference is continuing to decrease. Eventually there probably won't be much of a cost difference any more, or landlines may even start to cost more. But the payment structure wherein incoming and outgoing calls are treated identically on cellphones has been firmly established for several decades, so it seems unlikely to change at this point.
The most prominent Java applet of which I am aware is the clock at nist.time.gov, but yeah, in general, Java is at least a hundred times more widely deployed on the web than Silverlight. (Granted, Flash is at least a hundred times more widely deployed on the web than Java.)
My personal preference would be to eliminate content-handling plugins entirely and switch everything totally over to a helper-apps model, wherein non-web content opens in a separate process in a separate window using the operating system's normal "file associations" model to determine which application to use. Sharing the browser's process, memory space, and window with a third-party program is just asking for trouble. It would be a bad idea from a stability standpoint even if deliberate abuse were impossible, which it isn't. It's also bad for usability, because the user's expectations (that everything in the browser window will behave similarly -- just for example, that if it looks like part of the web page it will print along with the rest of the page when the user hits the print button on the browser's toolbar) are shattered six ways to Sunday. Launching such content in its own window external to the browser and letting the OS decide what app to send it to solves several whole categories of problems in one fell swoop.
As a rule, the major publishers are doing everything in their power to make sure borrowing ebooks from libraries never catches on in any significant way. For one thing, they've only allowed one (1) vendor to offer them to libraries, and they made darned sure it wasn't a company that would be capable of delivering a convenient experience. The hoops a patron has to go through in order to actually check out an ebook and get it onto their device and read it make federal government red tape look simple.
Either two or four weeks, depending on which option the user selects. (The reason someone might pick two weeks is because you can only have so many ebooks checked out at once, typically ten, although that depends on the library.)
> Surely this was the point of the.NET virtual machine
If that had been what.NET had been about,.NET would have potentially made a modicum of sense and some people with functioning brains might have shown some interest in it.
But no, that was never what.NET was about..NET was partly about marketing but mostly about getting ISVs to rely on components that Microsoft could control -- new updated ones that would take a few more years to be figured out and emulated by third parties, and which were flexible and maintainable enough on Microsoft's side that they could continue to be evolved to support newer technologies as required in a way that was beginning to be problematic for some of Microsoft's older proprietary APIs.
> You ask them what operating system they have and they'll say "Windows" without any qualifiers.
That's only the tech-savvy ones, people who actually know what an operating system is -- about 1% of the population. More common answers from regular folks include "What's that?", "I don't know", "Microsoft XP", "Word", "Dell", "HP", "Umm... Microsoft?", "Microsoft Works", "Firefox", and "Yahoo".
Yes, SIGNIFICANTLY more potent. (Actually, carbon dioxide barely works as a greenhouse gas at all. You need, like, gazillions of tons of it to even make a difference.)
Slashdot Mirror
I would have said Remote Desktop over dial-up would be excruciatingly slow. If you don't think so, I'm guessing you've never attempted it. Even consumer-grade broadband, like cable modem service, is often inadequate for remote desktop -- the downstream bandwidth is okay, but the upstream bandwidth is generally not, and the latency will make you want to throw your mouse across the room.
Realistically, if your connection is residential-grade, you're going to want a command-line interface for your remote shell. It's just less painful.
I don't care about a leap second, because if my computers are all within two minutes of one another (and within five minutes or so of the correct time) they'll be more precisely accurate than pretty much any other clock in this city, including the ones at the banks.
If they start talking about adding in any leap hours, let me know; I might have to do something about that.
Umm, how about the fact that version 10 is not even released yet (as of early 2012), and meanwhile support for the last version that any sane person would call stable officially ended in late 2008.
Support for long-term stable releases, which _don't_ have major show-stopping bugs (especially data-loss bugs) is supposed to overlap by quite a bit, to give people time, _after_ the new long-term stable version comes out, to plan upgrades ahead of time.
The overlap -- the amount of time each long-term stable release is still supported with security updates AFTER the next long-term stable release comes out -- is twelve months for Debian, twelve months for Ubuntu LTS releases, longer for Apple products, and MUCH longer for anything that comes out of Redmond.
Even if we are exceedingly generous and call Firefox 3.6 a "stable release" (which stretches the definition of the term rather thin, but similar stretches have been made for some other vendors' releases at various times, so okay), it would be expected to receive security updates for a year or so AFTER the next long-term stable release is, you know, actually _released_ (not merely preemptively announced as being in early alpha or whatever Firefox 10's status officially is this afternoon).
More to the point, if we're talking about what has already happened, Firefox 3.6 came out more than a year AFTER support for 2.0 was discontinued, not a year or so BEFORE as would be expected.
Even 3.0, which was about as stable as the Lebanese government, was released a mere six months before support for 2.0 ended, and no sane network administrator would have considered deploying 3.0 in any case.
What the blinkety blank is a QR code? The description in the summary makes it sound like one of those obscure two-dimensional barcode formats, none of which ever caught on to any meaningful extent, but then it starts talking about clicking on it, like it's a link in a web page or something. Wait, what? Who the heck clicks on barcodes? I'm missing something.
I would not have imagined that such a large and militarily-oriented nation as China -- a nuclear power for crying out loud -- with one of the world's longest national coastlines, would have waited this long to built an aircraft carrier, a piece of military technology that proved its value very conclusively in WWII, some sixty years ago. I mean, really, they went through the entire cold war era without building one?
In fact, it kind of seems anticlimactic and pointless for them start on that now, when they (China, I mean) have much more advanced, modern stuff, like satellites and electronic warfare capabilities.
Huh? We already know that the successor ship to the Enterprise was the Enterprise, followed by the Enterprise, then the Enterprise, then the Enterprise, and after that the Enterprise. What's the problem?
What I want to know is, is there going to be a third ship called the Defiant (excluding ones in the mirror universe and/or alternate timelines, which don't count)?
The main problem with the vmm in Windows is that it's monumentally horrible at deciding what to swap out. As best I can figure, it actually peeks one CPU timeslice into the future to see what information the next scheduled process is going to need as soon as it gets its timeslice and picks that to swap out now. Okay, okay, I exaggerate. Linux has me spoiled, because its vmm consistently finds any memory that you haven't used for an hour or so and swaps that out on the theory that you're probably not going to need it immediately, which is almost always correct. If you've got, like, a big spreadsheet or something that you're leaving minimized for days at a time, Linux invariably swaps it out; Windows seems more likely to pick something you're actively using and swap it out, only to need to swap it back in again a few seconds later. I don't know if Windows just keeps usage information for a much shorter amount of time and therefore guesses wrong more frequently, or what, but the bottom line is if you have (say) twice as much swap space as physical RAM, a Linux system will perform decently with up to half of that swap space being used (unless you're doing something pathological and rare, like really actively using all of it at once); whereas, a Windows system will always flog the swap file constantly the instant your virtual memory in use exceeds your physical RAM by even a tiny margin.
Of course, with RAM quantities and prices being what they are these days, and the 4GB (less video RAM) limit having gone away with the transition to 64-bit OSes, it's not nearly as big a deal as it used to be, because it really has become practical for most users to just have enough physical RAM to cover all normal usage, so you scarcely ever use swap space at all.
The only way to get Chrome to install in Program Files is to specifically hunt down and install the "Enterprise MSI" version. I'm guessing that's probably not the version that got misclassified as malware.
The regular version of Chrome, which you get if you just search for "Google Chrome" or anything like that, installs in a folder that is not only user-writable but also hidden, and user-specific so each user has their own install of it -- exactly the same place, in fact, that things like AntiVirusSoft 2011 like to install themselves. As a network administrator, I categorically do not allow any software that does this, period.
This does not actually mean that Chrome is malware: it's not. But it does mean I have no sympathy whatsoever for it when it gets misclassified that way by security software.
> I thought the issue of whether you could copyright facts (e.g., phone
> numbers, timezone values for specific locations) was already settled law.
It is, and so if the defendant(s) can afford to pay some lawyers enough money to see this through then the court will undoubtedly find in the defendant's favor.
That doesn't stop the plaintiff from dragging you through the courts for months and months and running your legal fees into six or seven figures, though.
> USB is explicitly supposed to be tolerant to hot plug/unplug
Hot-plug doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
USB is hot-plug in the sense that it does not (generally) require you to physically power down the computer in order to unplug or plug in the device, as PCI and IDE and some PS/2 implementations do, but that does NOT mean you can necessarily just yank it at any random time without warning. Among other things, operating systems do not guarantee that the higher-level USB-based standard interfaces (e.g., mass storage device or scanner-and-camera interface) will tolerate that from the software side, regardless of what the peripheral itself does or does not support.
Huh. The biggest quake I remember around here was the one back in the mid eighties (I want to say '85 or '86). The only people I knew who claimed to have felt it were sitting down at the time. That was a 4.9, IIRC. Admittedly I was down in Massillon when the quake hit, and the epicenter was up closer to the lake, in the eastern part of (greater) Cleveland, perhaps ninety minutes' drive north-northeast of my location. But I lived somewhat north of Massillon and knew a lot of people from the Akron area (Norton, Barberton, Ellet, Mogadore, Hartville, ...), and like I said *nobody* claimed to have felt it standing up. Everyone who said they felt it was seated at the time.
Loyalty doesn't mean that you can't ever take another job. It does, however, mean that you should be nice about it. Give your existing company as much notice as you possibly can (in a situation like this, I'd recommend at least a month if at all possible). Be respectful, and don't burn any bridges you can leave standing. If the new company has even an ounce of brain, they'll respect this, or at least accept it.
If you want to do a little more than that for them, you could offer to do a _few_ hours of consulting afterward (paid, of course), working around your new work schedule -- not coming back to work for them part time long-term or anything, just helping their new guys out a little here or there at first when they have questions that only you can answer on account of the fact that they weren't up to speed yet when you left. So if two days after you leave they realize "Oh, man, we totally forgot to ask him anything about how the frobnicator is set up" they don't have to panic and slit their wrists.
If *that* doesn't sound like enough, maybe you're so into your current job that you might consider staying. But that's up to you. You're under no obligation to stay. (I'm assuming here that your employment is at-will, as is usual in the US, not contracted for some predetermined amount of time.)
> In seriousness, generally there isn't much you can do in an
> earthquake. Try to find something that has a relatively strong
> structure above you, such as a strong desk or a doorjamb.
See, that's counterintuitive to me. My gut instinct, if I had two minutes' warning of an earthquake, would be to head straight for the nearest parking lot and hope that by sitting palms-down on the asphalt I might be able to actually feel the quake's vibrations. Actually, I'd probably get on my knees, on the grounds that the knees have less "padding" (fat) than other portions of my anatomy, so I'd be more likely to be able to feel the quake, which would be really neat.
But my level of experience with earthquakes is kind of limited, on account of the fact that I live in Ohio. If you're from California, you doubtless know WAY more about earthquakes than I ever will.
Huh? Linux has *thousands* of games, so many I don't think anyone has ever managed to try playing all of them.
What are you doing, trying to buy software at the store? We don't do things that way in the Linux world, son -- and the reason we don't do things that way is because that way sucks rocks. Not only is it expensive, but it's a royal hassle as well.
What we do is, we use this thing called a "package manager", which retrieves software from an online repository (which contains a MUCH larger selection of available software than any store I've ever seen). You don't need a three-foot stack of install disks, and you don't have to tediously install one game at a time, and they don't take forever for no reason, and you don't have to reboot after each one, and just in general it doesn't take all day. What you do is, you just open up your package manager (Synaptic, if it's a Debian-style distribution; rpm-based distros have an equivalent, but I forget what it's called), find the stuff you want, checkmark it, hit the go button, and then click the "yes, go ahead and install the dependencies as well" button. A couple of minutes later your new software is installed and ready to use. You generally don't even need to restart the computer *once*, let alone for every single individual title you install.
The Wikimedia Foundation is not headquarted in Italy, so if the servers aren't there either, I don't see how the Italian government would enforce anything. I suppose they could go after the individual editor (if an Italian had written the article), but overseas moderators would be able to undo any mischief that causes.
At worst, it might become necessary to ban people who are actually located in Italy from editing Italian Wikipedia articles (a feat that could be _mostly_ accomplished by a gross IP-range edit ban, and then individual Italian editors who work around that (e.g. by using an overseas proxy (one that is not itself banned (e.g. because it's not open to the public (yes I have programmed in lisp (why do you ask?))))) and manage to cause problems could be handled in the usual way). This would be terribly detrimental to the Italian Wikipedia, but it would fall short of a complete shutdown, since there are doubtless many Italian-speaking people living in countries other than Italy.
Installing in a user-writable location is a good start. Add heavy network activity and automatically updating itself without administrator approval on top of that, and heuristically speaking it starts to look very much indeed like malware.
Indeed. Google asked for this by the illegitimate, worst-practice way Chrome installs itself (specifically, the fact that it installs in a user-writable location, something legitimate software is never EVER supposed to do). That's just begging to be classified as malware.
What's left of Palm? There was something _left_ of Palm? I thought they were bought out and gutted and what was left of their assets absorbed by a company that had no interest in maintaining their product line a long time ago (well, a long time ago in internet time -- months and months and months).
It's been that way since they were introduced. The operating cost of cellphones was initially so ridiculously much higher than for landlines that there was no way on earth regular phone users would have ever been convinced that they should be willing to pay to call cellphones. A cellphone wouldn't have been nearly as useful if you couldn't receive calls on it, so the pay structure was worked out so that the few people who actually needed to be able to receive calls when they weren't in the office (or who could afford to pay for the privilege of *feeling* like they were that important) paid the entire operating cost of the cellular network.
It's not like idea of the recipient paying for the call was unprecedented. Businesses had been using 800 numbers for a while already. If they could afford a public 800 number that any random person off the street could call, why not pay-to-receive cellphones for the top execs? (The idea that regular working-class people would have any need for cellphones had not yet occurred. Even in Star Trek: The Next Generation, only officers ranked Lieutenant or higher, and away team members, were issued mobile communicators; everyone else used stationary panels, with a couple of rare exceptions. The middle-class cellphone is a phenomenon that happened gradually and caught a lot of people totally by surprise, and the billing structure wasn't planned around it because it was not widely forseen.)
Frankly, cellphones still cost significantly more than regular phones -- just not by nearly as much as the difference used to be, and I think the difference is continuing to decrease. Eventually there probably won't be much of a cost difference any more, or landlines may even start to cost more. But the payment structure wherein incoming and outgoing calls are treated identically on cellphones has been firmly established for several decades, so it seems unlikely to change at this point.
The most prominent Java applet of which I am aware is the clock at nist.time.gov, but yeah, in general, Java is at least a hundred times more widely deployed on the web than Silverlight. (Granted, Flash is at least a hundred times more widely deployed on the web than Java.)
My personal preference would be to eliminate content-handling plugins entirely and switch everything totally over to a helper-apps model, wherein non-web content opens in a separate process in a separate window using the operating system's normal "file associations" model to determine which application to use. Sharing the browser's process, memory space, and window with a third-party program is just asking for trouble. It would be a bad idea from a stability standpoint even if deliberate abuse were impossible, which it isn't. It's also bad for usability, because the user's expectations (that everything in the browser window will behave similarly -- just for example, that if it looks like part of the web page it will print along with the rest of the page when the user hits the print button on the browser's toolbar) are shattered six ways to Sunday. Launching such content in its own window external to the browser and letting the OS decide what app to send it to solves several whole categories of problems in one fell swoop.
As a rule, the major publishers are doing everything in their power to make sure borrowing ebooks from libraries never catches on in any significant way. For one thing, they've only allowed one (1) vendor to offer them to libraries, and they made darned sure it wasn't a company that would be capable of delivering a convenient experience. The hoops a patron has to go through in order to actually check out an ebook and get it onto their device and read it make federal government red tape look simple.
Either two or four weeks, depending on which option the user selects. (The reason someone might pick two weeks is because you can only have so many ebooks checked out at once, typically ten, although that depends on the library.)
> Surely this was the point of the .NET virtual machine
.NET had been about, .NET would have potentially made a modicum of sense and some people with functioning brains might have shown some interest in it.
.NET was about. .NET was partly about marketing but mostly about getting ISVs to rely on components that Microsoft could control -- new updated ones that would take a few more years to be figured out and emulated by third parties, and which were flexible and maintainable enough on Microsoft's side that they could continue to be evolved to support newer technologies as required in a way that was beginning to be problematic for some of Microsoft's older proprietary APIs.
If that had been what
But no, that was never what
> You ask them what operating system they have and they'll say "Windows" without any qualifiers.
That's only the tech-savvy ones, people who actually know what an operating system is -- about 1% of the population. More common answers from regular folks include "What's that?", "I don't know", "Microsoft XP", "Word", "Dell", "HP", "Umm... Microsoft?", "Microsoft Works", "Firefox", and "Yahoo".
Yes, SIGNIFICANTLY more potent. (Actually, carbon dioxide barely works as a greenhouse gas at all. You need, like, gazillions of tons of it to even make a difference.)