> Most of those versions of Windows were not hated "when they came out".
Several more of them were than you want to admit. Windows 95 and 98 both got a lot of negative press at the time, and Windows XP was almost universally panned as *horrible* until SP1 came out. (Granted, it got better press than Windows Me. Art Modell got better press than Windows Me.) As for Seven, all the people who had upgraded to Vista jumped on Seven like college boys on free pizza, but among the overwhelming majority who were still using XP, reception of Seven was rather tepid for the first few months.
The bottom line is, a lot of people don't upgrade to new versions of Windows while they're still new. This hasn't changed, and it likely won't change in the near future.
As a web developer, I do enjoy when new versions of Internet Explorer come out.
I ain't sayin' I'm gonna make IE my main browser or nothin'. But I'm very glad to see IE10 finally released. I've been looking forward to it for months.
> How about muting all tabs except the one currently open
If by "open" you mean "in the foreground", then...
Wait, that's not already the default? WHY NOT? Why on earth would a background tab ever be permitted to play sound? Gah. Who would ever even want the option to enable that?
Re:Nintendo needs to rethink its place in the worl
on
Is the Wii U Already Dead?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
> How do you propose the DRM then?
Distribute the games on a medium that isn't designed to be easily created with ordinary consumer hardware. Back in the day that meant cartridges. These days it would probably look more like a USB flash drive (or maybe like a memory card), except instead of flash memory inside it would have a ROM chip. The device is designed to read the game software from that medium -- not from a CD, DVD, or hard drive.
This doesn't stop really determined pirates who have a lot of resources to throw at the problem, but nothing does. It *does* stop casual piracy in the short term, way more effectively than any software DRM ever devised.
In the long term people will figure out how to read and make images of the games that anyone can use in an emulator on a PC -- if you know where to look, you can easily find ROM images and emulators on the internet for all the old eight-bit consoles -- but that only becomes really practical once the console hardware is sufficiently obsolete to be easily emulated, i.e., after you're already selling at least the subsequent generation of console if not the one after that. From a business perspective, as a maker of proprietary systems, you're going to *say* that this hurts your business; but in practice it isn't actually important, because even if everyone knew about it (and not everyone does), people who might otherwise have bought the game don't generally wait 10+ years just because they know old games are often available in emulation. It might have some impact on your ability to sell titles like "Seven Classic Wii U Games for your Wii 2030", but that sort of nostalgia fodder is never going to be the bulk of your revenue stream in any case.
> A dead tree book has to be printed, bound, and shipped > someplace and there are inherent production costs.
For a mass-market paperback, all of those costs add up to about thirty cents. (Err, that's a several-year-old figure, so maybe it's up to forty or fifty cents now. Whatever.) For a hardback, it's more like a couple of bucks. (Yes, print-on-demand has a much higher unit cost. But the kinds of books that are "published" -- and I use the term loosely -- via print-on-demand are very much NOT the ones we're talking about in this story.)
The majority of the retail price of a traditional dead-tree book goes to promotion. Exactly how a book is promoted depends on what kind of book it is (novels, for instance, are promoted in a very different manner than textbooks), but in general if you want to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of a book, any kind of book, you have to put a lot of resources into promotion. This is what publishers do. Money is also poured into other things, of course. For example, you have to screen through tens of thousands of bad manuscripts submitted by aspiring authors in hopes of finding _one_ that's worth publishing. Then once you find it you have to pay, in addition to the author, an editor, as well as an agent who must hold the author's hand through the lengthy process of getting the book actually ready for publication, which is a lot more work than most prospective authors bargained for -- they tend to be already tired of looking at the manuscript by the time they finally get the publisher to look at it, so the last thing they want to do is spend three thousand hours editing it -- the agent must wheedle and cajole them into doing so anyway. And you have overhead and various other costs (cover art, typesetting, etc.)
But the big cost is promotion -- making sure that people are actually going to *buy* this book that you're printing a million copies of. That takes a lot of doing. Even if the author is already so well known that anything they write will be guaranteed to sell, there are still thousands of dollars' worth of various advertising costs just to get the word out that hey, Grisham wrote another one, here's the title, now go buy it. It's easy in such cases, but it still has to be done. If the author is NOT already a houshold name, there's a lot MORE promotion to do, and it's harder and more expensive. Didn't we just see an article on Slashdot the other day about buying a slot on the NYT Bestseller list? Or was that on Ars Technica? Either way, that's the tip of the iceberg. The book needs to be written up in Library Journal and six dozen other such sources. You've got to fly the author around the country on a book tour, convince radio and TV stations to _cover_ your book tour (which, if it doesn't mean paying the stations, does at least mean paying someone to pester them until they capitulate), convince stores to stock the thing (the holy grail here is Wal-Mart), and somehow you have to make sure individual readers here good things about the book... There's a reason publishing is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Yes, they do make a profit. But they also pour a lot of money into, you know, doing their job.
Printing and shipping are so incidental to the process that there is a fine long-standing tradition of subcontracting them out to another company.
I have always intended at some point to try out BSD again -- although I may go for one of the other distributions next time (OpenBSD, perhaps), in order to broaden my experience base. However, with the level of customization that I'm accustomed to, I don't go for clean OS installs without a very solid reason. Installing a new OS from scratch means several weeks of annoyance that gradually tapers off as I find and fix thing after thing after thing after thing that wasn't quite the way I wanted it to be. Right now my system is very nearly perfect -- to the point where, when wheezy comes out, I'm probably going to procrastinate the upgrade for a few months, even though in-place upgrades (particularly with a halfway decent package system like apt) are nowhere near as painful as clean installs.
> when a library maintainer fixed a bug, it'd get fixed > in all the software that was using said library
That's the argument in favor of dynamic linking. If everything were statically linked, instead of dynamically linked, when the developers of libpng (or whatever) fixed a bug, you'd have to recompile every package that uses libpng *if* you want them all to have the fix.
That's irrelevant to the ports tree, though, because it *does* use dynamic linking. The reason you have to recompile everything both up and down the dependency chain in the ports tree is... actually, I'm not sure exactly why. Maybe it was just designed wrong, I don't know.
They were working on a system that was supposed to at least partly fix this, called "packages", wherein you could download pre-compiled versions of things, but at the time when I was using FreeBSD (back before Debian sarge was released -- FreeBSD was version 5.something IIRC) the packages system was not entirely ready for prime time. A lot of the ports didn't have corresponding packages, and using both ports and packages at the same time was problematic, and to make a long story short it didn't solve the problem.
It is likely that the packages system has improved since then. Whether it entirely solves the problem of needing to recompile eighty bazillion things every time you just want to upgrade one application, I don't know.
I will probably experiment with BSD of one flavor or another again at some point in the future, but I'm not in a big hurry about it. There's no fire. BSD isn't going anywhere. It'll still be around the next time I'm in the mood to do a fresh OS install, or the time after that. Right now my system is running Debian stable, and I'm comfortable with that.
You can address that (somewhat) with password policy. Among other things, all passwords should be at least thirty characters long. (If you can get your software to call it a "passphrase" instead of a "password", it makes this seem slightly more reasonable.) Also, any password that contains the username as a substring should be rejected.
It doesn't stop the sticky notes, though, which is why I am against requiring frequent password changes. I think anything more often than once a year is actively bad for security.
I am in *favor*, however, of setting up the OS so that the user must type both the username *and* password every time they log on. That way they'll actually *know* their username, and if somebody who actually understands computers logs into a different account for some reason, you won't get a phone call, "I can't log in, my password is broken" just because the OS is auto-filling the wrong thing.
I'm also in favor of configuring the screen saver to lock the screen after a reasonable amount of time. Users will generally complain about anything shorter than eight hours. I say, let 'em complain. (A grace period is good -- so if it kicks in while the user is sitting there using the thing, they can bump the mouse within say thirty seconds and not have to type a password. But when they walk away from the computer for extended periods of time the screen should lock and they should have to reauthenticate. That's just basic security. Otherwise you actually have no idea whether it's still the same person or not.)
Of course, if a user types their password into a form on a website (any website, whether it is actually a phishing site or not -- typing their password in a Slashdot comment would qualify just as well), then of course you must change their password immediately. Otherwise an unauthorized person might have a chance to use it. In that situation, you can't wait for the user to change their own password: you must preemptively change it for them. Put a paper memo in their paper mailbox (sealed in a nondescript envelope such as might be used for mundane mail)...
The campus security software noticed that your password was compromised due to a phishing attack. (Apparently you visited a website that does not belong to the university and entered your password.) To protect your account and the entire university network from harm, we have issued you a new password. Your new password is: BizzBuzz-Twoinkel-87-Marvie-Red-Bathoscape.
It's actually remarkably similar, in terms of the basics. (We both inherited a large body of existing case law from England, and a lot of the subsequent developments have been similar as well.)
There are numerous differences in the particulars, of course.
I used FreeBSD for a couple of years, and I really only had one major complaint about it.
My one complaint was, you have to recompile about 95% of the software on your computer from source every single time you want to upgrade anything at all. So, for example, if you want to upgrade your web browser, you'll be recompiling everything it depends on right down to the widget set plus everything that depends on any of that plus anything that depends on those things, and so on, recursively. Basically, you end up recompiling pretty much the entire ports tree every single time you upgrade anything. The only stuff you *don't* have to compile is the "base system" i.e., the stuff that's not in/usr/local. (Note for Linux users: this is a lot more stuff than you think. For example, bash is in/usr/local and would probably have to be recompiled. The base system is extremely limited. It includes the boot loader, the kernel, a handful of core libraries such as libc, some essential low-level things like init, and a few of the very oldest and most basic Unix commands, such as ls and cat.) I was on dialup at the time, so downloading fresh versions of every single thing, just to upgrade one thing, got old. (Gentoo has the same problem.) So once sarge came out I switched back to Debian.
But that's really my only major complaint about FreeBSD, after using it as the only OS on my home computer for about two years.
I generally use the version that comes with my distribution. I think this is what most people do.
> at what point do you say "Yeah, that's good enough, let's ship it?"
Wait, are you asking from the perspective of a distributor?
In that case, I think the usual model is, when you fork/freeze each version of your distribution, you take the kernel version that's current at that time -- in fact, you take the version of every upstream package that's current at that time -- and from that point forward you generally only take newer versions for the trunk (i.e., for what will eventually be your _next_ version) unless there is an extremely compelling reason to import the newer version of a particular upstream package (e.g., major fundamental security or stability issues with fixes that can't be easily backported). For the most part at this point you just backport important bug fixes and continue testing internally until you are reasonably comfortable with the stability of the system, at which point you put out a beta release to get some wider testing. When the flow of incoming beta bug reports slows down and you've got the bugs all triaged and have fixed the ones you're going to fix, you put out a release candidate. Further bug reports that come in afterward can sometimes lead to point releases, but for the most part, once you release, your dev team should switch their focus over to the next version.
> I love how I get to customize every little detail with it
If you like to customize every detail of your user experience, Windows is really the wrong operating system for you. (Admittedly, Mac OS X would be even worse.) Any X11-based system can be customized to an extent that makes Windows 8, or any version of Windows, look like the proverbial single button that comes pre-pushed from the factory.
I was not aware that Seven had yet reached that level of penetration. Last I checked, a double-digit percentage of new PCs came with Windows XP installed. When did this change?
> WA is ignored because there is essentially zero chance it will go R in a national election
More particularly, there is essentially zero chance it will go Republican in a national election where its electoral votes, had they been cast the other way, would have any chance at all of changing the outcome.
Washington state does go GOP occasionally, but only when it doesn't matter at all to the outcome (e.g., they voted for Reagan in 1984, but so did everybody else -- Mondale got a grand total of thirteen electoral votes).
Compare this to Ohio, which has voted for losing candidates exactly twice, most recently in 1960. I live in Ohio, and the only way to survive a presidential election year here is to store the television in the attic and unplug your phone for sixteen months. Otherwise you'll end up slitting your wrists.
Like I said, they're talking about its value in orbit, based on the cost of lifting an equivalent amount of stuff there from Earth's surface.
The metal itself isn't worth all that much. The commodity price of iron ore is currently somewhere in the general vicinity of $150 per ton. They're presumably hoping the asteroid is richer in the target metal than most terrestrial ores, but even pig iron is less than $400 per ton.
At surface prices sixteen thousand tons of iron would be worth several million dollars, tops. Whooptie doo. At that rate it wouldn't be fiscally worthwhile to bring the stuff down from orbit even if it were sitting up there already captured.
Clearly, the big money figures they're talking about aren't based on the intrinsic value of the material. They're more interested in the theoretical value of having it be in orbit, as opposed to down here in a planet's gravity well. That's what the article is talking about. It's expensive to get things up into orbit, so they're thinking it would be valuable to have things already up there.
Of course, there are no facilities up there for doing anything with raw ores to turn them into anything useful, so currently the value of iron ore in orbit is essentially zero. They're imagining that if they could capture the thing, they could just start offering to sell the raw metals in space, and buyers would emerge. If you capture it, they will come, or something like that. In other words, they're dreaming up fantasies that have nothing to do with the real world.
> capturing an asteroid in the relatively short term should > actually mean capturing to keep within the Earth's orbit.
I suspect orbit around Earth's moon would be easier to achieve safely.
Either way, though, the obvious question is, "How, exactly, would that be achieved?" My assertion is that the equipment and materials required to do it would weigh very nearly as much as the asteroid itself and would have to be lifted to orbit from the surface. This makes it fundamentally grossly uneconomic to attempt for just the one asteroid.
If the same equipment could be used repeatedly, and if the people who funded the endeavor could reasonably expect to mine and sell material from at least the first several of them, then somebody might potentially venture it. Currently, there is no reason to suppose it would work out that way. We know of one asteroid that's going to pass through, and the capability of mining it has not been developed, and the market for selling raw materials in orbit does not exist.
This is obviously some new definition of the word "great", with which I was not previously familiar. I suffered the agony, in the early nineties, of using Word Perfect 5.1. Admittedly, in terms of usability (and particularly discoverability of UI features), the standards were somewhat lower back then. It wouldn't be fair to compare those versions of Word Perfect against modern software like OO.o. Nonetheless, I had *at the time* already been seeing, for years and years, word processing software that organized the different things it could do into meaningful categories that a human could understand and was capable of presenting the categories as menus, so that a user who did not yet know all the shortcut keys could one key to pull up the menu system plus one more key to select the appropriate menu category and then easily find the thing he wanted on the list. In Word Perfect, by contrast, the only way to find a feature for which you didn't already know the shortcut was to wade through dozens of very poorly organized help screens until you eventually got lucky and found it, and when you did finally find it, it would almost never work in quite exactly the same way you expected.
For software to be *worse* than WordPerfect for DOS, it would either have to go very far out of its way to make the user jump through pointless hoops to do anything ("To complete the operation of making the selected text bold, hold down the right mouse button while typing the characters you see in this CAPTCHA"), or else just plain fail to have the features you need at all.
> So, why does France issue Driver's Licenses to people subject to epileptic seizures?
Probably for the same reason many American states do so. (Some states will even issue a driver's license to a person who is legally blind. Indiana, for instance, issued a license to my sister's college roommate. Note that "legally blind" here does not mean absolutely completely blind. There does have to be some vision. But it can be *remarkably* poor -- like, say, 20/400 vision in the good eye and two pupils in the essentially-worthless other eye, for instance. Remarkably, when she moved to Florida after graduation, she was unable to get a driver's license there.)
> you couldn't hire one engineer for 10k let alone team of engineers.
Perhaps you are thinking per year. I don't imagine it would take an entire year to design a cellphone. (If it did, new models wouldn't come out every few weeks and then routinely be taken off the market just a handful of weeks later.)
> it is not the case that individual users face grave financial risk.
Note the word "financial" there.
You as an individual do face a grave risk, albeit perhaps of a non-financial nature. If your financial identity is stolen and abused, the money may eventually be refunded to you, but the hours you have to spend getting the whole thing straightened out will NOT be refunded, and most victims find it to be a significantly unpleasant experience. In extreme cases you can end up spending hundreds of (sometimes very frustrating) hours restoring everything to the way it should be.
> It is not like it is possible to make the economic > situation in North Korea any worse than it already is.
Oh, it's *possible*. (Fundamental law of human existence: no matter HOW bad things are, they can ALWAYS be made worse.)
Just for starters, the inflation rate for the won is only high if you're comparing it to more or less stable currencies and in its entire history has only been "revalued" once (in 2009), and the ratio was only 100-to-one, which is just about the lowest currency reissue/reevaluation ratio I've ever heard of. (1000-to-one is more common, and in severe cases higher powers of ten have been used: ten thousand to one, a million to one, etc.) Admittedly, the DPRK's limit on how much of the old currency any given family was allowed to exchange, effectively wiping out everyone's savings if it was in cash or a bank account, was a devious touch, but, again, they've only done it once. There's no economic situation so dire that it can't be made more severe with a nice round of hyperinflation. I'm thinking six-digit or maybe seven-digit inflation rates (as opposed to two-digit ones seen now), so that the currency can be "revalued" 3-5 times in the space of a couple of years, at ratios of a thousand to one or higher. (This tends to happen automatically when a government is actively and imminently in danger of no longer existing at all due to war, but it can also be caused by mismanagement of monetary policy. For historical precedent, see the monetary history of Zimbabwe.) I'm not sure how the US could *cause* this situation (or why we would want to), but that's just details. In theory, it is certainly possible for such a thing to happen, and if it did, it would most definitely make the economic situation in North Korea worse.
Getting China to cut off their foreign aid would also do the trick. (That's where most of North Korea's economic resources come from, currently.) That's a tall order that might require a lot of political wrangling, but again the details of how to get it to happen are just details. There's no question but what it's theoretically possible.
Introducing high-interest credit and getting most of the upper and middle classes (which isn't that much of the population) in debt up to their eyeballs would also exacerbate the situation.
Thing is, HTML doesn't need a lot of work. XHTML 1.0 Transitional was basically good. I really only want one change from it: I want to be able to embed block-level elements within paragraphs, so we don't have to keep using as a workaround. That's it. With that change, HTML would be a mature standard. Very few additional changes are needed, and a glacial pace (which admittedly does describe the W3C, and most other large standards bodies) would then not be a problem, for HTML.
There are other web-development improvements I want, but they wouldn't belong in the markup.
CSS, for instance, is a markedly immature standard with lots of room for enhancement. I also want web browsers to support more image formats for the src of the img element -- notably, SVG. (This is only, what, fifteen years overdue? No standards work is needed for this. All that's needed is for browser developers to take their *existing* SVG rendering stuff and say, oh, yes, obviously, if an img tag brings in an SVG image, we'll render it and insert it into the layout, just like we would do for any other image format we support.) Javascript could probably use some enhancements. Unicode should have support for built-in ruby characters (e.g., for furigana) that combine with a base character like diacritical marks. (Imagine being able to take text that has ruby glosses and copy and paste it between applications, just like other text.)
There are other things too. Pretty much none of them require significant changes to HTML. HTML is fine. It does what it needs to do. Stop messing with it.
Slashdot Mirror
> Most of those versions of Windows were not hated "when they came out".
Several more of them were than you want to admit. Windows 95 and 98 both got a lot of negative press at the time, and Windows XP was almost universally panned as *horrible* until SP1 came out. (Granted, it got better press than Windows Me. Art Modell got better press than Windows Me.) As for Seven, all the people who had upgraded to Vista jumped on Seven like college boys on free pizza, but among the overwhelming majority who were still using XP, reception of Seven was rather tepid for the first few months.
The bottom line is, a lot of people don't upgrade to new versions of Windows while they're still new. This hasn't changed, and it likely won't change in the near future.
As a web developer, I do enjoy when new versions of Internet Explorer come out.
I ain't sayin' I'm gonna make IE my main browser or nothin'. But I'm very glad to see IE10 finally released. I've been looking forward to it for months.
> How about muting all tabs except the one currently open
If by "open" you mean "in the foreground", then...
Wait, that's not already the default? WHY NOT? Why on earth would a background tab ever be permitted to play sound? Gah. Who would ever even want the option to enable that?
> How do you propose the DRM then?
Distribute the games on a medium that isn't designed to be easily created with ordinary consumer hardware. Back in the day that meant cartridges. These days it would probably look more like a USB flash drive (or maybe like a memory card), except instead of flash memory inside it would have a ROM chip. The device is designed to read the game software from that medium -- not from a CD, DVD, or hard drive.
This doesn't stop really determined pirates who have a lot of resources to throw at the problem, but nothing does. It *does* stop casual piracy in the short term, way more effectively than any software DRM ever devised.
In the long term people will figure out how to read and make images of the games that anyone can use in an emulator on a PC -- if you know where to look, you can easily find ROM images and emulators on the internet for all the old eight-bit consoles -- but that only becomes really practical once the console hardware is sufficiently obsolete to be easily emulated, i.e., after you're already selling at least the subsequent generation of console if not the one after that. From a business perspective, as a maker of proprietary systems, you're going to *say* that this hurts your business; but in practice it isn't actually important, because even if everyone knew about it (and not everyone does), people who might otherwise have bought the game don't generally wait 10+ years just because they know old games are often available in emulation. It might have some impact on your ability to sell titles like "Seven Classic Wii U Games for your Wii 2030", but that sort of nostalgia fodder is never going to be the bulk of your revenue stream in any case.
> A dead tree book has to be printed, bound, and shipped
> someplace and there are inherent production costs.
For a mass-market paperback, all of those costs add up to about thirty cents. (Err, that's a several-year-old figure, so maybe it's up to forty or fifty cents now. Whatever.) For a hardback, it's more like a couple of bucks. (Yes, print-on-demand has a much higher unit cost. But the kinds of books that are "published" -- and I use the term loosely -- via print-on-demand are very much NOT the ones we're talking about in this story.)
The majority of the retail price of a traditional dead-tree book goes to promotion. Exactly how a book is promoted depends on what kind of book it is (novels, for instance, are promoted in a very different manner than textbooks), but in general if you want to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of a book, any kind of book, you have to put a lot of resources into promotion. This is what publishers do. Money is also poured into other things, of course. For example, you have to screen through tens of thousands of bad manuscripts submitted by aspiring authors in hopes of finding _one_ that's worth publishing. Then once you find it you have to pay, in addition to the author, an editor, as well as an agent who must hold the author's hand through the lengthy process of getting the book actually ready for publication, which is a lot more work than most prospective authors bargained for -- they tend to be already tired of looking at the manuscript by the time they finally get the publisher to look at it, so the last thing they want to do is spend three thousand hours editing it -- the agent must wheedle and cajole them into doing so anyway. And you have overhead and various other costs (cover art, typesetting, etc.)
But the big cost is promotion -- making sure that people are actually going to *buy* this book that you're printing a million copies of. That takes a lot of doing. Even if the author is already so well known that anything they write will be guaranteed to sell, there are still thousands of dollars' worth of various advertising costs just to get the word out that hey, Grisham wrote another one, here's the title, now go buy it. It's easy in such cases, but it still has to be done. If the author is NOT already a houshold name, there's a lot MORE promotion to do, and it's harder and more expensive. Didn't we just see an article on Slashdot the other day about buying a slot on the NYT Bestseller list? Or was that on Ars Technica? Either way, that's the tip of the iceberg. The book needs to be written up in Library Journal and six dozen other such sources. You've got to fly the author around the country on a book tour, convince radio and TV stations to _cover_ your book tour (which, if it doesn't mean paying the stations, does at least mean paying someone to pester them until they capitulate), convince stores to stock the thing (the holy grail here is Wal-Mart), and somehow you have to make sure individual readers here good things about the book... There's a reason publishing is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Yes, they do make a profit. But they also pour a lot of money into, you know, doing their job.
Printing and shipping are so incidental to the process that there is a fine long-standing tradition of subcontracting them out to another company.
I have always intended at some point to try out BSD again -- although I may go for one of the other distributions next time (OpenBSD, perhaps), in order to broaden my experience base. However, with the level of customization that I'm accustomed to, I don't go for clean OS installs without a very solid reason. Installing a new OS from scratch means several weeks of annoyance that gradually tapers off as I find and fix thing after thing after thing after thing that wasn't quite the way I wanted it to be. Right now my system is very nearly perfect -- to the point where, when wheezy comes out, I'm probably going to procrastinate the upgrade for a few months, even though in-place upgrades (particularly with a halfway decent package system like apt) are nowhere near as painful as clean installs.
But yeah, eventually I'll try out BSD again.
> when a library maintainer fixed a bug, it'd get fixed
> in all the software that was using said library
That's the argument in favor of dynamic linking. If everything were statically linked, instead of dynamically linked, when the developers of libpng (or whatever) fixed a bug, you'd have to recompile every package that uses libpng *if* you want them all to have the fix.
That's irrelevant to the ports tree, though, because it *does* use dynamic linking. The reason you have to recompile everything both up and down the dependency chain in the ports tree is... actually, I'm not sure exactly why. Maybe it was just designed wrong, I don't know.
They were working on a system that was supposed to at least partly fix this, called "packages", wherein you could download pre-compiled versions of things, but at the time when I was using FreeBSD (back before Debian sarge was released -- FreeBSD was version 5.something IIRC) the packages system was not entirely ready for prime time. A lot of the ports didn't have corresponding packages, and using both ports and packages at the same time was problematic, and to make a long story short it didn't solve the problem.
It is likely that the packages system has improved since then. Whether it entirely solves the problem of needing to recompile eighty bazillion things every time you just want to upgrade one application, I don't know.
I will probably experiment with BSD of one flavor or another again at some point in the future, but I'm not in a big hurry about it. There's no fire. BSD isn't going anywhere. It'll still be around the next time I'm in the mood to do a fresh OS install, or the time after that. Right now my system is running Debian stable, and I'm comfortable with that.
You can address that (somewhat) with password policy. Among other things, all passwords should be at least thirty characters long. (If you can get your software to call it a "passphrase" instead of a "password", it makes this seem slightly more reasonable.) Also, any password that contains the username as a substring should be rejected.
It doesn't stop the sticky notes, though, which is why I am against requiring frequent password changes. I think anything more often than once a year is actively bad for security.
I am in *favor*, however, of setting up the OS so that the user must type both the username *and* password every time they log on. That way they'll actually *know* their username, and if somebody who actually understands computers logs into a different account for some reason, you won't get a phone call, "I can't log in, my password is broken" just because the OS is auto-filling the wrong thing.
I'm also in favor of configuring the screen saver to lock the screen after a reasonable amount of time. Users will generally complain about anything shorter than eight hours. I say, let 'em complain. (A grace period is good -- so if it kicks in while the user is sitting there using the thing, they can bump the mouse within say thirty seconds and not have to type a password. But when they walk away from the computer for extended periods of time the screen should lock and they should have to reauthenticate. That's just basic security. Otherwise you actually have no idea whether it's still the same person or not.)
Of course, if a user types their password into a form on a website (any website, whether it is actually a phishing site or not -- typing their password in a Slashdot comment would qualify just as well), then of course you must change their password immediately. Otherwise an unauthorized person might have a chance to use it. In that situation, you can't wait for the user to change their own password: you must preemptively change it for them. Put a paper memo in their paper mailbox (sealed in a nondescript envelope such as might be used for mundane mail)...
The campus security software noticed that your password was compromised due to a phishing attack. (Apparently you visited a website that does not belong to the university and entered your password.) To protect your account and the entire university network from harm, we have issued you a new password. Your new password is: BizzBuzz-Twoinkel-87-Marvie-Red-Bathoscape.
It's actually remarkably similar, in terms of the basics. (We both inherited a large body of existing case law from England, and a lot of the subsequent developments have been similar as well.)
There are numerous differences in the particulars, of course.
Honestly, I would probably refuse to speak to a lawyer. I'm pretty sure I'd rather be imprisoned than have to deal with a lawyer.
So far, I've managed to avoid any legal entanglements.
I used FreeBSD for a couple of years, and I really only had one major complaint about it.
/usr/local. (Note for Linux users: this is a lot more stuff than you think. For example, bash is in /usr/local and would probably have to be recompiled. The base system is extremely limited. It includes the boot loader, the kernel, a handful of core libraries such as libc, some essential low-level things like init, and a few of the very oldest and most basic Unix commands, such as ls and cat.) I was on dialup at the time, so downloading fresh versions of every single thing, just to upgrade one thing, got old. (Gentoo has the same problem.) So once sarge came out I switched back to Debian.
My one complaint was, you have to recompile about 95% of the software on your computer from source every single time you want to upgrade anything at all. So, for example, if you want to upgrade your web browser, you'll be recompiling everything it depends on right down to the widget set plus everything that depends on any of that plus anything that depends on those things, and so on, recursively. Basically, you end up recompiling pretty much the entire ports tree every single time you upgrade anything. The only stuff you *don't* have to compile is the "base system" i.e., the stuff that's not in
But that's really my only major complaint about FreeBSD, after using it as the only OS on my home computer for about two years.
> How do you go about choosing a kernel version?
I generally use the version that comes with my distribution. I think this is what most people do.
> at what point do you say "Yeah, that's good enough, let's ship it?"
Wait, are you asking from the perspective of a distributor?
In that case, I think the usual model is, when you fork/freeze each version of your distribution, you take the kernel version that's current at that time -- in fact, you take the version of every upstream package that's current at that time -- and from that point forward you generally only take newer versions for the trunk (i.e., for what will eventually be your _next_ version) unless there is an extremely compelling reason to import the newer version of a particular upstream package (e.g., major fundamental security or stability issues with fixes that can't be easily backported). For the most part at this point you just backport important bug fixes and continue testing internally until you are reasonably comfortable with the stability of the system, at which point you put out a beta release to get some wider testing. When the flow of incoming beta bug reports slows down and you've got the bugs all triaged and have fixed the ones you're going to fix, you put out a release candidate. Further bug reports that come in afterward can sometimes lead to point releases, but for the most part, once you release, your dev team should switch their focus over to the next version.
I'm running Debian stable, and yeah:
nathan@donalbain:~$ uname -a
Linux donalbain 2.6.32-5-486 #1 Mon Oct 3 03:34:28 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux
Though, doesn't wheezy also still have Linux 2.6? I could've sworn.
That's why I use Emacs. Currently I have version 23.2, but I'm thinking about upgrading to version 24.
> I love how I get to customize every little detail with it
If you like to customize every detail of your user experience, Windows is really the wrong operating system for you. (Admittedly, Mac OS X would be even worse.) Any X11-based system can be customized to an extent that makes Windows 8, or any version of Windows, look like the proverbial single button that comes pre-pushed from the factory.
I was not aware that Seven had yet reached that level of penetration. Last I checked, a double-digit percentage of new PCs came with Windows XP installed. When did this change?
> WA is ignored because there is essentially zero chance it will go R in a national election
More particularly, there is essentially zero chance it will go Republican in a national election where its electoral votes, had they been cast the other way, would have any chance at all of changing the outcome.
Washington state does go GOP occasionally, but only when it doesn't matter at all to the outcome (e.g., they voted for Reagan in 1984, but so did everybody else -- Mondale got a grand total of thirteen electoral votes).
Compare this to Ohio, which has voted for losing candidates exactly twice, most recently in 1960. I live in Ohio, and the only way to survive a presidential election year here is to store the television in the attic and unplug your phone for sixteen months. Otherwise you'll end up slitting your wrists.
Like I said, they're talking about its value in orbit, based on the cost of lifting an equivalent amount of stuff there from Earth's surface.
The metal itself isn't worth all that much. The commodity price of iron ore is currently somewhere in the general vicinity of $150 per ton. They're presumably hoping the asteroid is richer in the target metal than most terrestrial ores, but even pig iron is less than $400 per ton.
At surface prices sixteen thousand tons of iron would be worth several million dollars, tops. Whooptie doo. At that rate it wouldn't be fiscally worthwhile to bring the stuff down from orbit even if it were sitting up there already captured.
Clearly, the big money figures they're talking about aren't based on the intrinsic value of the material. They're more interested in the theoretical value of having it be in orbit, as opposed to down here in a planet's gravity well. That's what the article is talking about. It's expensive to get things up into orbit, so they're thinking it would be valuable to have things already up there.
Of course, there are no facilities up there for doing anything with raw ores to turn them into anything useful, so currently the value of iron ore in orbit is essentially zero. They're imagining that if they could capture the thing, they could just start offering to sell the raw metals in space, and buyers would emerge. If you capture it, they will come, or something like that. In other words, they're dreaming up fantasies that have nothing to do with the real world.
> capturing an asteroid in the relatively short term should
> actually mean capturing to keep within the Earth's orbit.
I suspect orbit around Earth's moon would be easier to achieve safely.
Either way, though, the obvious question is, "How, exactly, would that be achieved?" My assertion is that the equipment and materials required to do it would weigh very nearly as much as the asteroid itself and would have to be lifted to orbit from the surface. This makes it fundamentally grossly uneconomic to attempt for just the one asteroid.
If the same equipment could be used repeatedly, and if the people who funded the endeavor could reasonably expect to mine and sell material from at least the first several of them, then somebody might potentially venture it. Currently, there is no reason to suppose it would work out that way. We know of one asteroid that's going to pass through, and the capability of mining it has not been developed, and the market for selling raw materials in orbit does not exist.
> WordPerfect was great for DOS.
This is obviously some new definition of the word "great", with which I was not previously familiar. I suffered the agony, in the early nineties, of using Word Perfect 5.1. Admittedly, in terms of usability (and particularly discoverability of UI features), the standards were somewhat lower back then. It wouldn't be fair to compare those versions of Word Perfect against modern software like OO.o. Nonetheless, I had *at the time* already been seeing, for years and years, word processing software that organized the different things it could do into meaningful categories that a human could understand and was capable of presenting the categories as menus, so that a user who did not yet know all the shortcut keys could one key to pull up the menu system plus one more key to select the appropriate menu category and then easily find the thing he wanted on the list. In Word Perfect, by contrast, the only way to find a feature for which you didn't already know the shortcut was to wade through dozens of very poorly organized help screens until you eventually got lucky and found it, and when you did finally find it, it would almost never work in quite exactly the same way you expected.
For software to be *worse* than WordPerfect for DOS, it would either have to go very far out of its way to make the user jump through pointless hoops to do anything ("To complete the operation of making the selected text bold, hold down the right mouse button while typing the characters you see in this CAPTCHA"), or else just plain fail to have the features you need at all.
> So, why does France issue Driver's Licenses to people subject to epileptic seizures?
Probably for the same reason many American states do so. (Some states will even issue a driver's license to a person who is legally blind. Indiana, for instance, issued a license to my sister's college roommate. Note that "legally blind" here does not mean absolutely completely blind. There does have to be some vision. But it can be *remarkably* poor -- like, say, 20/400 vision in the good eye and two pupils in the essentially-worthless other eye, for instance. Remarkably, when she moved to Florida after graduation, she was unable to get a driver's license there.)
> you couldn't hire one engineer for 10k let alone team of engineers.
Perhaps you are thinking per year. I don't imagine it would take an entire year to design a cellphone. (If it did, new models wouldn't come out every few weeks and then routinely be taken off the market just a handful of weeks later.)
> it is not the case that individual users face grave financial risk.
Note the word "financial" there.
You as an individual do face a grave risk, albeit perhaps of a non-financial nature. If your financial identity is stolen and abused, the money may eventually be refunded to you, but the hours you have to spend getting the whole thing straightened out will NOT be refunded, and most victims find it to be a significantly unpleasant experience. In extreme cases you can end up spending hundreds of (sometimes very frustrating) hours restoring everything to the way it should be.
> It is not like it is possible to make the economic
> situation in North Korea any worse than it already is.
Oh, it's *possible*. (Fundamental law of human existence: no matter HOW bad things are, they can ALWAYS be made worse.)
Just for starters, the inflation rate for the won is only high if you're comparing it to more or less stable currencies and in its entire history has only been "revalued" once (in 2009), and the ratio was only 100-to-one, which is just about the lowest currency reissue/reevaluation ratio I've ever heard of. (1000-to-one is more common, and in severe cases higher powers of ten have been used: ten thousand to one, a million to one, etc.) Admittedly, the DPRK's limit on how much of the old currency any given family was allowed to exchange, effectively wiping out everyone's savings if it was in cash or a bank account, was a devious touch, but, again, they've only done it once. There's no economic situation so dire that it can't be made more severe with a nice round of hyperinflation. I'm thinking six-digit or maybe seven-digit inflation rates (as opposed to two-digit ones seen now), so that the currency can be "revalued" 3-5 times in the space of a couple of years, at ratios of a thousand to one or higher. (This tends to happen automatically when a government is actively and imminently in danger of no longer existing at all due to war, but it can also be caused by mismanagement of monetary policy. For historical precedent, see the monetary history of Zimbabwe.) I'm not sure how the US could *cause* this situation (or why we would want to), but that's just details. In theory, it is certainly possible for such a thing to happen, and if it did, it would most definitely make the economic situation in North Korea worse.
Getting China to cut off their foreign aid would also do the trick. (That's where most of North Korea's economic resources come from, currently.) That's a tall order that might require a lot of political wrangling, but again the details of how to get it to happen are just details. There's no question but what it's theoretically possible.
Introducing high-interest credit and getting most of the upper and middle classes (which isn't that much of the population) in debt up to their eyeballs would also exacerbate the situation.
Thing is, HTML doesn't need a lot of work. XHTML 1.0 Transitional was basically good. I really only want one change from it: I want to be able to embed block-level elements within paragraphs, so we don't have to keep using as a workaround. That's it. With that change, HTML would be a mature standard. Very few additional changes are needed, and a glacial pace (which admittedly does describe the W3C, and most other large standards bodies) would then not be a problem, for HTML.
There are other web-development improvements I want, but they wouldn't belong in the markup.
CSS, for instance, is a markedly immature standard with lots of room for enhancement. I also want web browsers to support more image formats for the src of the img element -- notably, SVG. (This is only, what, fifteen years overdue? No standards work is needed for this. All that's needed is for browser developers to take their *existing* SVG rendering stuff and say, oh, yes, obviously, if an img tag brings in an SVG image, we'll render it and insert it into the layout, just like we would do for any other image format we support.) Javascript could probably use some enhancements. Unicode should have support for built-in ruby characters (e.g., for furigana) that combine with a base character like diacritical marks. (Imagine being able to take text that has ruby glosses and copy and paste it between applications, just like other text.)
There are other things too. Pretty much none of them require significant changes to HTML. HTML is fine. It does what it needs to do. Stop messing with it.