This kind of nonsense was tried on Chicago Hope, when they formed an unholy partnership with Cadillac and introduced a character named Lisa Catera ("Lease a Catera"). The result was pretty much about what you'd expect, and is widely acknowledged as the shark-jumping point for the show.
This sort of thing just doesn't work. Everyone ends up resenting it.
I've heard this accusation before, but I don't grok it at all. My limited understanding was that anti-pollution devices were supposed to squelch unburned hydrocarbons emitted by inefficient engines. However, if your engine is more efficient -- if it more completely burns hydrocarbons -- then the emissions controls should be superfluous.
Could you explain this to me? In concrete terms, how are contemporary emissions controls impeding the development and release of more efficient vehicles?
"Annoy the users so that they'll bludgeon the app vendors to fix their software." I'm sure that's what the engineering department told itself.
Snide Schwab has a different thought: Microsoft's legal department foresaw the day when the license "agreement" would be revealed for the fiction it always has been, and the clause disclaiming liability for product faults would be held invalid.
Windows "security" has been laughable since forever, and Microsoft's perennial incompetence in this regard is directly responsible for the millions of compromised computers all over the world spewing spam and attacking servers. It is entirely probable that, if the right lawsuit came along, Microsoft could be held liable for their long-standing incompetence -- unless they could claim they did something about it.
Enter UAC. "There. We did something about it. If the users disable it, or make bad decisions, well, we can't do anything about that." It obviously was the most childish, petulant "solution" that could be conceived to the problem, but that didn't matter, because it was never intended to actually solve the problem. It was supposed to be there to show to a judge that Microsoft wasn't negligent, and therefore not liable.
This is all, of course, entirely speculation on my part...
Okay, children, listen as hard as you fscking can:
It has been obvious since dialup-to-BBS days that bandwidth demands were only going to go up, and go up fast. Every new, faster modem was snapped up immediately, until the bandwidth of voice lines was saturated. And those of you with longer memories may recall the RBOCs/ILECs bitching along the lines of, "Oh noes! Our trunks and switches, they are overloaded! We can haz data tax?" Proposals to surcharge data traffic were floated, which were all greeted with hearty, derisive laughter.
Fast-forward not-at-all-many-years to the broadband age, and the RBOCs/ILECs are saying, "Oh noes! Our switches and routers, they are overloaded. We can haz content tax?" The only real difference between then and now is that now the cable television providers are joining in the chorus. This, however, does not make the argument any more valid.
Now, whether or not heavy users of the network should be surcharged, and how much they should be surcharged -- while a subject worthy of some discussion -- is nevertheless completely swamped by the Actual Point. Here is the Actual Point:
YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN BUILDING OUT YOUR NETWORK IN THE FIRST DAMNED PLACE!
Really, after watching dialup explode in popularity, after watching broadband explode in popularity, after watching other nations build out their digital infrastructure to some amazing levels... There is no fscking excuse for any RBOC/ILEC to be whining about overloaded networks!
You had plenty of warning, you had more than plenty of money, you even got $200 billion in handouts from the Fed... I mean, what the fsck have you been up to the last fifteen years?
The floor of your monthly fee structure should be covering not only maintenance, but also aggressive buildout. If they aren't, then you've deliberately kept your head in the sand this whole time (and you suck at math).
Tweak everyone's base rates, build out the network to the required capacities like you should have been doing, and stop trying to propogate this self-serving pathetic meme that some network users are more equal than others.
I, too, had the privilege of meeting Tom back in the Amiga days. Brilliant, brilliant guy. I think he also had a hand in the Amiga EMACS port.
I recall visiting his office in Marginal Hacks (Margaret Jacks) Hall on the Stanford campus. There was a printout on the wall showing several generations of Conway's Game of Life. What wasn't immediately apparent was that, just for the hell of it, Tom had written Life in nroff, the old document formatting language, and the printout was the result.
Back in the 1990's, he helped me with a curious binary math problem. The problem was thus: Assume you wish to find a binary number for which a given subset of bits must be in a certain state (e.g. bit position 3 must remain zero, etc.) -- the set of static bits and their required values may be arbitrary. Given an arbitrary starting value, find the next largest value that has the required bit pattern. I got about 80% of the way toward the solution, but he knocked it out almost immediately (and is left as an exercise for the reader:-) ).
I worked at MOTO for two years. Though I wasn't in the mobile division, I got to see a bit of the sausage factory, and was there when the iPhone was announced last year.
It was obvious to me when Apple announced the iPhone that MOTO was going to have a problem on its hands in very short order. Although the pricing made it unaffordable for Joe Sixpack, it was immediately apparent that Apple had, at a single stroke, completely redefined the cell phone experience. Every mobile product that was more than eight months from release should have been killed immediately, and all the freed up personnel should have then stared at the iPhone demo video for two weeks straight until the UI principles became ingrained. New design ideas could have then flowed out of that. It could even have been done inexpensively.
Had they done that last year, they would have had new prototypes to show by now, they could have started generating buzz, and could have remained relevant. Now, it will take a hugely expensive effort to keep the division -- possibly the entire company -- afloat.
The law that permits surveillance of foreign communications -- FISA -- did not expire last month, and remains in force. What actually expired was the Orwellian-named "Protect America Act," a temporary amendment to FISA which removed the requirement for any kind of warrant for certain surveillance targets "reasonably believed" to be outside the United States.
Surveillance of foreign targets may still be conducted under the auspices of FISA -- you'll just need to get a warrant. Up to three days after the fact. From the special secret FISA court. Which has never said no. Such hardship.
Although the article doesn't expressly say so, I'm guessing chip "activation" occurs at the factory long before it's put in a tube and shipped to an OEM. So end-users will (probably) never see this.
As I see it, this has two major problems with it. The first, of course, is that copy protection in any form is childish, stupid, and ultimately ineffective.
The second is a bit more down to earth -- this will become the bottleneck on the manufacturing line. Chips are manufactured in the millions, with hundreds of thousands falling off the line each day. These nimrods propose to authenticate every last one of them, using computationally non-trivial crypto, uniquely before they roll off the line.
Let's generously assume it takes one second to authenticate and activate a chip (not, that's not a ridiculously long time -- between crypto compute time and network latency to the Pacific Rim, this is entirely realistic). This means you can activate a maximum of 86400 chips per day. Maybe you can parallelize the process, and maybe you can't (depends on whether the people who wrote the authentication server were idiots or not). And if your OC-3 to the Internet gets a backhoe through it, "accidentally" or otherwise, all production in your facility stops dead. Wonderful idea.
This stunning idea also seems to assume only one patent holder will be interested in a given chip. The most cursory inspection of even a "simple" memory chip will reveal several patent holders, all of whom will doubtless insist on "activation" which, again, may or may not be parallelizeable.
Like all copy protection "solutions" presented throughout history, this is a really, really stupid idea. I can't think of any fab that would willingly sign on to this.
Several vulnerabilities have been found in Android's core libraries for processing graphic content in some of the most used image formats (PNG, GIF an BMP)
Having had the ignominious privilege of writing a BMP image parser some years ago, I can state without fear of meaningful contradiction that it's one of the worst image file formats ever devised by creatures claiming to be Man, and that it needs to die die die!
PNG does everything BMP does, and does it better. Just throw away the BMP library and save yourself the maintenance headache. No one will miss it.
So: How do you upgrade an existing system from FreeBSD 6.0 without wiping the entire system and installing from scratch?
And before anyone asks:
Yes, I know about the ports collection.
Yes, I know about the binary packages.
Yes, I know how to configure and compile the kernel.
No, I've never really tried to compile userspace.
All the docs I've read on the subject tend to suggest that the Real Way to keep a FreeBSD system current is to download the kernel and userspace core every so often and recompile them. And that's fine, sorta, except that it doesn't address how to deal with the "leftovers", such as config files that have been moved or eliminated. (I mean, honestly, compiling the world is not a realistic way to keep current on X.org.)
Who has practical experience doing this? How do you keep your machines current, particularly with security patches?
This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.
_____________
Okay, some more detail:
My game is QuakeWorld deathmatch/free-for-all, with occasional forays into Nexuiz. I used to also play TeamFortess Classic before Valve held a Flag Day and willfully broke all the clients. (No, I will not install Steam. But that's another flame.)
Perhaps I have some deep-seated pathology, but it doesn't take very many frags against me before I become absolutely livid. I become utterly convinced that the server/the other players/the Universe is out to get me. I mean, how many times can one realistically expect to approach a corner, only to have a grenade sail in from out of view, bounce off a floor and a wall... And score a direct hit? Not merely splash damage -- a direct hit? Honestly? One time in a hundred? One time in ten? Every other time?
Just how probable is it that a player can hit you with the lightning gun and keep it perfectly trained on you no matter how you're moving until you die? That a player can do that to everyone else on the map?
What are the chances that another player can take two direct rocket strikes, a nearby splash, and still survive to kill you? Especially when you yourself picked up the only red armor on the map less than 30 seconds ago?
And before you know-it-alls start shouting 'n00b', I've been playing the $*#@^&%!! game for well over ten years now, so I can hardly be called a n00b. I also have a respectable gaming rig with decent input peripherals. I can't blame my equipment, and I can't blame lack of experience, so there's no justification for me still sucking at the game. So either I suck for absolutely no good reason at all... or something else is going on.
"Relaxed?" "Relief from engagement?" I wish I knew how these people did it -- it's an experience unknown to me.
So, let me get this straight: Your über-133t h4xor-pr00f crypto-strength CD keys are being cracked or reverse-engineered, and your very expensive authentication server farms with very expensive redundant bandwidth are accepting them and allowing people to play the unsanctioned copies online? In other words, are you telling me that the CD authentication key, as a concept in itself, was a complete and utter waste of your time?
Sympathy, why dost thou elude me?
Not sure if I can share the exact numbers or percentage of PC players with you,
Hmm. Gee. Why is it that, every time we seem to get within spitting distance of actual, verifiable numbers, all the publishers suddenly clam up and say, "Ooo, uh, gosh, we can't share that with you."
Look, if you have a case to make, make it. Screw your "confidentiality agreements" and present the data. Allow it to be inspected, torn apart, and verified. And then, once actual hard data is in play (as opposed to shrill histrionics), we can work on solving the actual problem, as it actually presents itself.
If revoking the GPL were possible, Microsoft could simply buy the copyright to any GPL project it deemed a potential threat and revoke the licensing (existing users would get a license pricing break 12 months later on Microsoft LS, Microsoft CAT, Microsoft FIND, Microsoft IFCONFIG, etc...).
Frankly, I wonder what the causative factor was. Did someone threaten to sue him unless he pulled the code down?
They wouldn't be cracking your PIN to turn off your TV -- they would be cracking it so they could capture your credit card data or other authentication/authorization codes in-transit as you enter it to buy some video-on-demand or simply change over to the Playboy channel (what? you think you have no miscreants within your own walls?).
I was actually asked to analyze these vulnerabilities earlier this year on a (now dead) project. The conclusion I came to at that time was something like, "This can be cracked, but not trivially. The 'window of opportunity' for capturing The Good Stuff is very very narrow, which basically means you have to be monitoring and analyzing 24/7, possibly for days, to get any codes at all. Thus, doing anything more than basic encryption is probably not worth the effort at this time. This opinion should be revisited as technology and the market advance."
Okay, so the TSA Web site expressly discusses lithium batteries, and not lithium-ion batteries, the latter of which are used in laptops, cell phones, etc.
However, the confusion is understandable, since the TSA Web page has a picture of a fscking laptop computer as the article's headline.
But even given that, it's still fscking stupid. I suppose they imagine, by limiting power sources, they can do an end-run around that abject security failure that let simulated bomb parts through.
Is there an event horizon for national embarrassment? 'Cause I think we're getting damned close to it...
From an Administration whose keynote from the word Go has been, "Failure," this is just fscking retarded. What, exactly, is this supposed to accomplish?
I have LIon batteries in my laptop, my cell phone, my Bluetooth earpiece, my Nintendo DS, and probably my shoes for all I know. I already have to remove my screwdrivers from my carry-on bag and place them in checked baggage or leave them at home, because they are Official Threats To The Integrity Of The Republic ("Take this plane to Cuba or I'll unscrew the wings from the plane").
Someone needs to slap around the retards coming up with this stuff and force-feed them a clue.
Is this some kind of oblique FUD to attempt to build a stronger case for a nuclear power build-out in the US?
I'm all for re-examining scientific data to glean new meanings from it but, golly-gee willikers, what a stunning coincidence that this oh-so-new interpretation of the data should come out right about the time the country is considering shifting to nuclear (away from greenhouse gas-emitting coal).
I love the mealy-mouthed wording of the prompt: "Let this application know who I am..." No mention of third-party servers or code, just the term "application" whose meaning has been thinly parsed to cause confusion and misinterpretation. "Well, obviously the application needs to know that stuff, but since it's not leaving Facebook..." And yes, I do read those prompts, and typically never install "apps" as a result.
I'm an over-paranoid weirdo, but even I have trouble picking apart the double- and triple-meaning of some of Facebook's prompts and notices. The more detail I learn about this, the more I move to the opinion they're being deliberately deceptive.
I just opened an account on Facebook recently -- mostly to see what the big deal was. It seemed harmless enough until I got a request to join a particular Facebook "app", in this case an app that compares tastes in movies.
I use Firefox exclusively with NoScript installed. I clicked on the link, and... What the hell am I doing on this completely different site? And why is it trying to run JavaScript at me? Further, why is it trying to run a cross-site script from Facebook?
It was at this point that I began to suspect that the pages Facebook is presenting me are not, in fact, always generated by Facebook's servers, but instead can be cobbled together from any number of sites and servers located anywhere, and that these sites all exchange data transparently with Facebook.
I haven't read their developer's pages or their API specification, so I'm only guessing here. Does anyone know if this is in fact true?
Because if it is -- to borrow one of Jon Stewart's terms -- then it's an absolute catastrofuck of a design, and everyone but everyone should run screaming from Facebook as fast as they can.
[May I remind you] That the Intel Clasmate PC run Linux, not windows?
Incorrect. It runs Windoze XP. I know; I saw it first-hand.
While the XO's design goals make it a poor choice for a laptop user of the First World, the Classmate PC is just a complete joke. The machine is overall larger and heavier, the screen is smaller and not intended for use in direct daylight, the battery lasts barely an hour, the keyboard is not water- or dust-proof, it has a fan fer cryin' out loud (great for sucking in dust and dirt), it has a mechanical hard drive (how many times can you drop that on the ground again?), and it crashes frequently.
The Classmate is FUD incarnate. It is completely inappropriate for use in the Third World.
Slashdot Mirror
This sort of thing just doesn't work. Everyone ends up resenting it.
Schwab
I've heard this accusation before, but I don't grok it at all. My limited understanding was that anti-pollution devices were supposed to squelch unburned hydrocarbons emitted by inefficient engines. However, if your engine is more efficient -- if it more completely burns hydrocarbons -- then the emissions controls should be superfluous.
Could you explain this to me? In concrete terms, how are contemporary emissions controls impeding the development and release of more efficient vehicles?
Schwab
Schwab
Snide Schwab has a different thought: Microsoft's legal department foresaw the day when the license "agreement" would be revealed for the fiction it always has been, and the clause disclaiming liability for product faults would be held invalid.
Windows "security" has been laughable since forever, and Microsoft's perennial incompetence in this regard is directly responsible for the millions of compromised computers all over the world spewing spam and attacking servers. It is entirely probable that, if the right lawsuit came along, Microsoft could be held liable for their long-standing incompetence -- unless they could claim they did something about it.
Enter UAC. "There. We did something about it. If the users disable it, or make bad decisions, well, we can't do anything about that." It obviously was the most childish, petulant "solution" that could be conceived to the problem, but that didn't matter, because it was never intended to actually solve the problem. It was supposed to be there to show to a judge that Microsoft wasn't negligent, and therefore not liable.
This is all, of course, entirely speculation on my part...
Schwab
It has been obvious since dialup-to-BBS days that bandwidth demands were only going to go up, and go up fast. Every new, faster modem was snapped up immediately, until the bandwidth of voice lines was saturated. And those of you with longer memories may recall the RBOCs/ILECs bitching along the lines of, "Oh noes! Our trunks and switches, they are overloaded! We can haz data tax?" Proposals to surcharge data traffic were floated, which were all greeted with hearty, derisive laughter.
Fast-forward not-at-all-many-years to the broadband age, and the RBOCs/ILECs are saying, "Oh noes! Our switches and routers, they are overloaded. We can haz content tax?" The only real difference between then and now is that now the cable television providers are joining in the chorus. This, however, does not make the argument any more valid.
Now, whether or not heavy users of the network should be surcharged, and how much they should be surcharged -- while a subject worthy of some discussion -- is nevertheless completely swamped by the Actual Point. Here is the Actual Point:
YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN BUILDING OUT YOUR NETWORK IN THE FIRST DAMNED PLACE!
Really, after watching dialup explode in popularity, after watching broadband explode in popularity, after watching other nations build out their digital infrastructure to some amazing levels... There is no fscking excuse for any RBOC/ILEC to be whining about overloaded networks!
You had plenty of warning, you had more than plenty of money, you even got $200 billion in handouts from the Fed... I mean, what the fsck have you been up to the last fifteen years?
The floor of your monthly fee structure should be covering not only maintenance, but also aggressive buildout. If they aren't, then you've deliberately kept your head in the sand this whole time (and you suck at math).
Tweak everyone's base rates, build out the network to the required capacities like you should have been doing, and stop trying to propogate this self-serving pathetic meme that some network users are more equal than others.
Schwab
No. Harold P. Warren is the worst director ever.
Schwab
Schwab
I recall visiting his office in Marginal Hacks (Margaret Jacks) Hall on the Stanford campus. There was a printout on the wall showing several generations of Conway's Game of Life. What wasn't immediately apparent was that, just for the hell of it, Tom had written Life in nroff, the old document formatting language, and the printout was the result.
Back in the 1990's, he helped me with a curious binary math problem. The problem was thus: Assume you wish to find a binary number for which a given subset of bits must be in a certain state (e.g. bit position 3 must remain zero, etc.) -- the set of static bits and their required values may be arbitrary. Given an arbitrary starting value, find the next largest value that has the required bit pattern. I got about 80% of the way toward the solution, but he knocked it out almost immediately (and is left as an exercise for the reader :-) ).
Simply amazing guy.
Schwab
It was obvious to me when Apple announced the iPhone that MOTO was going to have a problem on its hands in very short order. Although the pricing made it unaffordable for Joe Sixpack, it was immediately apparent that Apple had, at a single stroke, completely redefined the cell phone experience. Every mobile product that was more than eight months from release should have been killed immediately, and all the freed up personnel should have then stared at the iPhone demo video for two weeks straight until the UI principles became ingrained. New design ideas could have then flowed out of that. It could even have been done inexpensively.
Had they done that last year, they would have had new prototypes to show by now, they could have started generating buzz, and could have remained relevant. Now, it will take a hugely expensive effort to keep the division -- possibly the entire company -- afloat.
Schwab
Surveillance of foreign targets may still be conducted under the auspices of FISA -- you'll just need to get a warrant. Up to three days after the fact. From the special secret FISA court. Which has never said no. Such hardship.
Schwab
As I see it, this has two major problems with it. The first, of course, is that copy protection in any form is childish, stupid, and ultimately ineffective.
The second is a bit more down to earth -- this will become the bottleneck on the manufacturing line. Chips are manufactured in the millions, with hundreds of thousands falling off the line each day. These nimrods propose to authenticate every last one of them, using computationally non-trivial crypto, uniquely before they roll off the line.
Let's generously assume it takes one second to authenticate and activate a chip (not, that's not a ridiculously long time -- between crypto compute time and network latency to the Pacific Rim, this is entirely realistic). This means you can activate a maximum of 86400 chips per day. Maybe you can parallelize the process, and maybe you can't (depends on whether the people who wrote the authentication server were idiots or not). And if your OC-3 to the Internet gets a backhoe through it, "accidentally" or otherwise, all production in your facility stops dead. Wonderful idea.
This stunning idea also seems to assume only one patent holder will be interested in a given chip. The most cursory inspection of even a "simple" memory chip will reveal several patent holders, all of whom will doubtless insist on "activation" which, again, may or may not be parallelizeable.
Like all copy protection "solutions" presented throughout history, this is a really, really stupid idea. I can't think of any fab that would willingly sign on to this.
Schwab
Having had the ignominious privilege of writing a BMP image parser some years ago, I can state without fear of meaningful contradiction that it's one of the worst image file formats ever devised by creatures claiming to be Man, and that it needs to die die die!
PNG does everything BMP does, and does it better. Just throw away the BMP library and save yourself the maintenance headache. No one will miss it.
Schwab
And before anyone asks:
All the docs I've read on the subject tend to suggest that the Real Way to keep a FreeBSD system current is to download the kernel and userspace core every so often and recompile them. And that's fine, sorta, except that it doesn't address how to deal with the "leftovers", such as config files that have been moved or eliminated. (I mean, honestly, compiling the world is not a realistic way to keep current on X.org.)
Who has practical experience doing this? How do you keep your machines current, particularly with security patches?
Schwab
No.
This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.
_____________
Okay, some more detail:
My game is QuakeWorld deathmatch/free-for-all, with occasional forays into Nexuiz. I used to also play TeamFortess Classic before Valve held a Flag Day and willfully broke all the clients. (No, I will not install Steam. But that's another flame.)
Perhaps I have some deep-seated pathology, but it doesn't take very many frags against me before I become absolutely livid. I become utterly convinced that the server/the other players/the Universe is out to get me. I mean, how many times can one realistically expect to approach a corner, only to have a grenade sail in from out of view, bounce off a floor and a wall... And score a direct hit? Not merely splash damage -- a direct hit? Honestly? One time in a hundred? One time in ten? Every other time?
Just how probable is it that a player can hit you with the lightning gun and keep it perfectly trained on you no matter how you're moving until you die? That a player can do that to everyone else on the map?
What are the chances that another player can take two direct rocket strikes, a nearby splash, and still survive to kill you? Especially when you yourself picked up the only red armor on the map less than 30 seconds ago?
And before you know-it-alls start shouting 'n00b', I've been playing the $*#@^&%!! game for well over ten years now, so I can hardly be called a n00b. I also have a respectable gaming rig with decent input peripherals. I can't blame my equipment, and I can't blame lack of experience, so there's no justification for me still sucking at the game. So either I suck for absolutely no good reason at all... or something else is going on.
"Relaxed?" "Relief from engagement?" I wish I knew how these people did it -- it's an experience unknown to me.
Schwab
...Because that would be cool in the extreme.
Schwab
Sympathy, why dost thou elude me?
Hmm. Gee. Why is it that, every time we seem to get within spitting distance of actual, verifiable numbers, all the publishers suddenly clam up and say, "Ooo, uh, gosh, we can't share that with you."
Look, if you have a case to make, make it. Screw your "confidentiality agreements" and present the data. Allow it to be inspected, torn apart, and verified. And then, once actual hard data is in play (as opposed to shrill histrionics), we can work on solving the actual problem, as it actually presents itself.
Schwab
Frankly, I wonder what the causative factor was. Did someone threaten to sue him unless he pulled the code down?
Schwab
I was actually asked to analyze these vulnerabilities earlier this year on a (now dead) project. The conclusion I came to at that time was something like, "This can be cracked, but not trivially. The 'window of opportunity' for capturing The Good Stuff is very very narrow, which basically means you have to be monitoring and analyzing 24/7, possibly for days, to get any codes at all. Thus, doing anything more than basic encryption is probably not worth the effort at this time. This opinion should be revisited as technology and the market advance."
Schwab
Schwab
However, the confusion is understandable, since the TSA Web page has a picture of a fscking laptop computer as the article's headline.
But even given that, it's still fscking stupid. I suppose they imagine, by limiting power sources, they can do an end-run around that abject security failure that let simulated bomb parts through.
Is there an event horizon for national embarrassment? 'Cause I think we're getting damned close to it...
Schwab
I have LIon batteries in my laptop, my cell phone, my Bluetooth earpiece, my Nintendo DS, and probably my shoes for all I know. I already have to remove my screwdrivers from my carry-on bag and place them in checked baggage or leave them at home, because they are Official Threats To The Integrity Of The Republic ("Take this plane to Cuba or I'll unscrew the wings from the plane").
Someone needs to slap around the retards coming up with this stuff and force-feed them a clue.
Schwab
I'm all for re-examining scientific data to glean new meanings from it but, golly-gee willikers, what a stunning coincidence that this oh-so-new interpretation of the data should come out right about the time the country is considering shifting to nuclear (away from greenhouse gas-emitting coal).
See, "Denmark, Something Rotten In."
Schwab
I'm an over-paranoid weirdo, but even I have trouble picking apart the double- and triple-meaning of some of Facebook's prompts and notices. The more detail I learn about this, the more I move to the opinion they're being deliberately deceptive.
Schwab
I use Firefox exclusively with NoScript installed. I clicked on the link, and... What the hell am I doing on this completely different site? And why is it trying to run JavaScript at me? Further, why is it trying to run a cross-site script from Facebook?
It was at this point that I began to suspect that the pages Facebook is presenting me are not, in fact, always generated by Facebook's servers, but instead can be cobbled together from any number of sites and servers located anywhere, and that these sites all exchange data transparently with Facebook.
I haven't read their developer's pages or their API specification, so I'm only guessing here. Does anyone know if this is in fact true?
Because if it is -- to borrow one of Jon Stewart's terms -- then it's an absolute catastrofuck of a design, and everyone but everyone should run screaming from Facebook as fast as they can.
Schwab
Incorrect. It runs Windoze XP. I know; I saw it first-hand.
While the XO's design goals make it a poor choice for a laptop user of the First World, the Classmate PC is just a complete joke. The machine is overall larger and heavier, the screen is smaller and not intended for use in direct daylight, the battery lasts barely an hour, the keyboard is not water- or dust-proof, it has a fan fer cryin' out loud (great for sucking in dust and dirt), it has a mechanical hard drive (how many times can you drop that on the ground again?), and it crashes frequently.
The Classmate is FUD incarnate. It is completely inappropriate for use in the Third World.
Schwab