I can't see that they've fixed anything very much in IE7.
Our IE6 fixes used the "* html" hack, and that was fixed in IE7,
but then we found we needed to include all the same fixes anyway.
So now we end up having to serve two extra stylesheets.
Searches using traditional chinese characters and Google works just fine in this part of the world.
Actually using Google in Japanese sucks for exactly that reason. If you
try search for almost any Japanese name (in Kanji) Google thinks you're
trying to write Chinese, even though my browser is set up for Japanese,
so it's sending the right Accept-Language headers.
I've even had that sitting in Japan, working on a Japanese-bought laptop. So
it really is a problem.
Dell already sells computers without Windows on it. Why does hardly anyone choose to get it? Because very, very, very few people want it.
I think that's got a lot more to do with the fact that Dell hides
their Linux offerings on the site, and even if you do manage to
find them, you'll have to buy in large quantities before they'll
sell you them.
Wake me up when Dell has a drop down "operating system" saying
Windows
Linux (-$50)
None (-$55)
on each and every page where they sell PCs.
At the moment, the "choice" (if you can call it such) is
XP or XP Professional.
They like to use history is this essay, but backward compatability is by far the biggest factor in the history of desktop operating system software.
I've seen several people now switching to Macs, two of them in a work environment where I would
presume you'd find the most serious problems with backwards compatibility. They're doing
fine. Most of what people are doing nowadays is web-oriented.
Anyway, you may be right, but I suspect by far the biggest things which keeps the
Windows monopoly going are the anticompetitive threats and threatened loss of marketing
money kickbacks made by Microsoft
against any company that dares to ship a computer without Windows on it.
The parent (Darkforge) is absolutely right.
Authenticated chains of SMTP servers are no match
for spam zombies using grandma's email address
to send out their spam.
The basic problem is unsolvable. I want anyone
in the world to be able to send me email (because
I run several FOSS projects, and I want people to
contact me about business matters). At the same
time I don't want anyone in the world to contact me
(spammers). This is not a circle that can be
squared.
Should you be using 32,000 rows? No way.
Any spreadsheet that won't fit on a few sheets of paper should be a database.
Well, databases are useful, and we use them a lot,
but there are also plenty of places
where databases make no sense. eg. How do I email a database
of 100,000 rows of search terms to my client so they can do further analysis
on it? CSV files have limitations, but at least they are
easy to read, write and email.
Now that it's 64 bit, does it support more than 32,000 rows in the spreadsheet?
That is the stupidest limitation in this program, and one which I run up
against constantly.
How about also being able to select some rows in a multi-thousand line spreadsheet
without having to hold the mouse in a certain position for 20 seconds?
Lets face it, record labels themselves are an obsolete business model. There are many ways to do self promotion now and you don't need to include a 3rd party publisher. A simple website, some iTunes tracks and a live tour are you really need to promote yourself. All labels really do is publish little plastic discs.
Labels also lend bands money so that they can rehearse and eventually go into a studio and cut
tracks. Unfortunately they do this lending on incredibly unfavourable terms, and without
making it clear that the repayable advance is what it is - ie. a loan. I met an artist from
a reasonably well-known but not very financially successful band who was still repaying
his advance years later.
I think there's a business here in loaning money to artists, in exchange for
some eventual rights - eg. a proportion of ticket sales at concerts or
merchandising sales. The banks/lenders would evaluate each band as a
business, based
on the band's ability to repay the loan (ie. how good/popular they are!).
None of this requires the abnormality of copyright either - in fact most
banks would want the music released as far and wide as possible in order
to gain the maximum possible audience, so they get the quickest possible
payback from ticket sales.
But what is really missing from your rant is an alternative. It would be the most beautiful rant in the world if it ended with "And it doesn't have to be this way, CSuperDuperDoublePlus does everything C++ does without the problems!".
OCaml gets within a few percentage points of the performance of C/C++,
without any of the associated problems.
I will second this. Photorec is excellent - it saved my bacon when my brother-in-law stuck his camera memory card into my computer and the card was accidentally formatted.
However I have seen other failure modes in memory cards where somehow the card "loses" all
the sectors. Linux reports the device as being 0 bytes long. I don't know of any
software which can recover from that sort of an error. Please let me know if there is
some because I have one card which does just that.
What would have really been good news for web developers would have been if Microsoft had gone a bit further with the standards support and not broken a number of methods developers used to trick IE6.
And even better if they hadn't broken IE7's CSS in a DIFFERENT WAY from IE6. On
our client sites we're now serving out a different set of bugfixes to IE6 and IE7
users because unbelievably IE7 is still broken. I only make cursory tests on
Safari, KHTML and Opera because I know those will just work the same way as
Firefox. WTF not IE???
Provided you don't want to drink, you can get an excellent meal for under $20 (around £11-12) in London at one of the many excellent vegetarian southern Indian restaurants on Drummond Street, near Euston.
Speaking of which, the word processor is using a picture of a floppy disc to represent saving a file. Since a)The OLPC doesnt have a floppy disc and b)The target users may never have seen a floppy disc, they may need a new icon...
What's even more scary is
that they didn't think to get rid of the out-dated "save file" metaphor. Why can't
I just type stuff in and have it persist automatically?
If I type over something, the computer should just remember what was there
before and allow me to go back.
(IMHO) From what I've seen, it looks like Novell got sucked into this Microsoft deal without knowing the real purpose of this deal: to discredit Linux.
* Novell is saying 'WTF? Where did this come from? You scammed us!!1!!'
You may well be right, but, erm, isn't it Novell management's job
to have worked out all the angles on this? It's not like this
is some newbie company that knows nothing about Microsoft. Novell
have tangleddirectly with Microsoftand indirectly with their proxies before on many many occasions. They
are veterans of the server computing industry. If they had
no idea that Microsoft would scam them, it shows an extraordinary
corporate structure in disarray.
As a practicing Zen Buddhist, you ego doesn't get reincarnated which is the "I" or "Me" that we experience.
Doing Zen meditation (maybe koan study) and following the ten precepts is the only way to realize your true Buddha nature. The ten precepts are not too different than the ten commandments intrestingly enough.
Do you ever worry that what you believe in is complete nonsense?
But that's exactly the point of this 'cracked' encryption: you *can't* clone the passport just by reading the RFID in someone's coat pocket.
Well this is so, but if you read the FA then you'll see a more
plausible attack involving someone who knows your name and address
(the postman in that case). Nevertheless it seems the fundamental
problem here is that the key on the chip can be brute-forced. A
simple change ought to fix that - either have the chip shut down
after three incorrect keys have been tried, or (better) have it
implement an exponential back-off for each failed attempt.
You fail to see the deal. They are essentially cross-licensing with Novell. Which means they are using Novell as a proxy to acquire Linux IP. This shouldn't be possible with the GPL, but they've done it.
You fail to make sense. Microsoft is going to acquire "Linux IP", is it?
By the fuzzy term "Linux IP" I assume you mean that Microsoft will acquire copyrights
on sections of the Linux kernel, gcc, libc, etc.
That's quite an achievement. Pray explain for us how they will do that.
Yes, it's particularly brilliant how MS have done this FUD without
even specifying any supposedly "infringed" patents. They've made
sweeping statements about "owning" this that and the other (eg. "owning" ".Net")
which it simply isn't possible to do, and everyone is repeating
their FUD. Well done Microsoft.
As Novell becomes THE Linux for companies with a Linux-Windows infrastructure, Red Hat will look back on this day as when they lost warp field containment and got stuck in Redmond tractor beam in search of revenue.
I think you swapped "Novell" and "Red Hat" in that sentence.
He's probably not an English speaker. Photons are spelled "foton" in
plenty of countries, including Denmark, the Netherlands, southern Europe (eg. fotone in Italy), etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Democracy is a nice app, but is there anything worth watching apart from the rather brilliant "Make" Weekend Projects?
Rich.
(Genuinely curious BTW)
I can't see that they've fixed anything very much in IE7. Our IE6 fixes used the "* html" hack, and that was fixed in IE7, but then we found we needed to include all the same fixes anyway. So now we end up having to serve two extra stylesheets.
I ranted about that on our company blog.
Rich.
Searches using traditional chinese characters and Google works just fine in this part of the world.
Actually using Google in Japanese sucks for exactly that reason. If you try search for almost any Japanese name (in Kanji) Google thinks you're trying to write Chinese, even though my browser is set up for Japanese, so it's sending the right Accept-Language headers. I've even had that sitting in Japan, working on a Japanese-bought laptop. So it really is a problem.
Rich.
Rich.
Dell already sells computers without Windows on it. Why does hardly anyone choose to get it? Because very, very, very few people want it.
I think that's got a lot more to do with the fact that Dell hides their Linux offerings on the site, and even if you do manage to find them, you'll have to buy in large quantities before they'll sell you them.
Wake me up when Dell has a drop down "operating system" saying
on each and every page where they sell PCs. At the moment, the "choice" (if you can call it such) is XP or XP Professional.
Rich.
They like to use history is this essay, but backward compatability is by far the biggest factor in the history of desktop operating system software.
I've seen several people now switching to Macs, two of them in a work environment where I would presume you'd find the most serious problems with backwards compatibility. They're doing fine. Most of what people are doing nowadays is web-oriented.
Anyway, you may be right, but I suspect by far the biggest things which keeps the Windows monopoly going are the anticompetitive threats and threatened loss of marketing money kickbacks made by Microsoft against any company that dares to ship a computer without Windows on it.
Rich
The parent (Darkforge) is absolutely right. Authenticated chains of SMTP servers are no match for spam zombies using grandma's email address to send out their spam.
The basic problem is unsolvable. I want anyone in the world to be able to send me email (because I run several FOSS projects, and I want people to contact me about business matters). At the same time I don't want anyone in the world to contact me (spammers). This is not a circle that can be squared.
Rich.
Should you be using 32,000 rows? No way. Any spreadsheet that won't fit on a few sheets of paper should be a database.
Well, databases are useful, and we use them a lot, but there are also plenty of places where databases make no sense. eg. How do I email a database of 100,000 rows of search terms to my client so they can do further analysis on it? CSV files have limitations, but at least they are easy to read, write and email.
But not apparently for OOCalc to load.
Rich.
It's supported 65536 rows since version 2.0.
Why? 16 bit ints are so 1980.
Rich.
Now that it's 64 bit, does it support more than 32,000 rows in the spreadsheet?
That is the stupidest limitation in this program, and one which I run up against constantly.
How about also being able to select some rows in a multi-thousand line spreadsheet without having to hold the mouse in a certain position for 20 seconds?
Rich.
Lets face it, record labels themselves are an obsolete business model. There are many ways to do self promotion now and you don't need to include a 3rd party publisher. A simple website, some iTunes tracks and a live tour are you really need to promote yourself. All labels really do is publish little plastic discs.
Labels also lend bands money so that they can rehearse and eventually go into a studio and cut tracks. Unfortunately they do this lending on incredibly unfavourable terms, and without making it clear that the repayable advance is what it is - ie. a loan. I met an artist from a reasonably well-known but not very financially successful band who was still repaying his advance years later.
I think there's a business here in loaning money to artists, in exchange for some eventual rights - eg. a proportion of ticket sales at concerts or merchandising sales. The banks/lenders would evaluate each band as a business, based on the band's ability to repay the loan (ie. how good/popular they are!). None of this requires the abnormality of copyright either - in fact most banks would want the music released as far and wide as possible in order to gain the maximum possible audience, so they get the quickest possible payback from ticket sales.
Rich.
But what is really missing from your rant is an alternative. It would be the most beautiful rant in the world if it ended with "And it doesn't have to be this way, CSuperDuperDoublePlus does everything C++ does without the problems!".
OCaml gets within a few percentage points of the performance of C/C++, without any of the associated problems.
In some cases it's faster and the code is smaller.
Rich.
I will second this. Photorec is excellent - it saved my bacon when my brother-in-law stuck his camera memory card into my computer and the card was accidentally formatted.
However I have seen other failure modes in memory cards where somehow the card "loses" all the sectors. Linux reports the device as being 0 bytes long. I don't know of any software which can recover from that sort of an error. Please let me know if there is some because I have one card which does just that.
Rich.
What would have really been good news for web developers would have been if Microsoft had gone a bit further with the standards support and not broken a number of methods developers used to trick IE6.
And even better if they hadn't broken IE7's CSS in a DIFFERENT WAY from IE6. On our client sites we're now serving out a different set of bugfixes to IE6 and IE7 users because unbelievably IE7 is still broken. I only make cursory tests on Safari, KHTML and Opera because I know those will just work the same way as Firefox. WTF not IE???
Rich.
Rich.
Provided you don't want to drink, you can get an excellent meal for under $20 (around £11-12) in London at one of the many excellent vegetarian southern Indian restaurants on Drummond Street, near Euston.
Rich.
Speaking of which, the word processor is using a picture of a floppy disc to represent saving a file. Since a)The OLPC doesnt have a floppy disc and b)The target users may never have seen a floppy disc, they may need a new icon...
What's even more scary is that they didn't think to get rid of the out-dated "save file" metaphor. Why can't I just type stuff in and have it persist automatically? If I type over something, the computer should just remember what was there before and allow me to go back.
Rich.
(IMHO) From what I've seen, it looks like Novell got sucked into this Microsoft deal without knowing the real purpose of this deal: to discredit Linux.
* Novell is saying 'WTF? Where did this come from? You scammed us!!1!!'
You may well be right, but, erm, isn't it Novell management's job to have worked out all the angles on this? It's not like this is some newbie company that knows nothing about Microsoft. Novell have tangled directly with Microsoft and indirectly with their proxies before on many many occasions. They are veterans of the server computing industry. If they had no idea that Microsoft would scam them, it shows an extraordinary corporate structure in disarray.
Rich.
As a practicing Zen Buddhist, you ego doesn't get reincarnated which is the "I" or "Me" that we experience.
Doing Zen meditation (maybe koan study) and following the ten precepts is the only way to realize your true Buddha nature. The ten precepts are not too different than the ten commandments intrestingly enough.
Do you ever worry that what you believe in is complete nonsense?
Rich.
Back-off is reasonable except then someone just wanders through Heathrow spamming passports with their 10m-range RFID reader and then nobody flies.
That would be funny though :-)
Rich.
Ah, I think there's a knock at the door. Police?
But that's exactly the point of this 'cracked' encryption: you *can't* clone the passport just by reading the RFID in someone's coat pocket.
Well this is so, but if you read the FA then you'll see a more plausible attack involving someone who knows your name and address (the postman in that case). Nevertheless it seems the fundamental problem here is that the key on the chip can be brute-forced. A simple change ought to fix that - either have the chip shut down after three incorrect keys have been tried, or (better) have it implement an exponential back-off for each failed attempt.
Rich.
You fail to see the deal. They are essentially cross-licensing with Novell. Which means they are using Novell as a proxy to acquire Linux IP. This shouldn't be possible with the GPL, but they've done it.
You fail to make sense. Microsoft is going to acquire "Linux IP", is it? By the fuzzy term "Linux IP" I assume you mean that Microsoft will acquire copyrights on sections of the Linux kernel, gcc, libc, etc. That's quite an achievement. Pray explain for us how they will do that.
Rich.
Yes, it's particularly brilliant how MS have done this FUD without even specifying any supposedly "infringed" patents. They've made sweeping statements about "owning" this that and the other (eg. "owning" ".Net") which it simply isn't possible to do, and everyone is repeating their FUD. Well done Microsoft.
Rich.
As Novell becomes THE Linux for companies with a Linux-Windows infrastructure, Red Hat will look back on this day as when they lost warp field containment and got stuck in Redmond tractor beam in search of revenue.
I think you swapped "Novell" and "Red Hat" in that sentence.
Rich.
He's probably not an English speaker. Photons are spelled "foton" in plenty of countries, including Denmark, the Netherlands, southern Europe (eg. fotone in Italy), etc.
Rich.