In Germany the law is quite reasonable in these cases. In self-defense you are only allowed to use adequate means to defend yourself, so you typically get away with shooting an unarmed intruder in the foot, or you can shoot an armed intruder without warning, but you are not allowed to shoot a burglar who is running away in the back.
However, there is an exception where the use of excessive force is not punished: When you family is around, and you act in order to protect them, you will very probably get away with killing anyone who breaks into your house at night, armed or not.
Free TV costs money, and every time you buy an advertised item, you pay. I do not watch Free TV any more because I hate the frequent program interruptions, and I don't want to expose my mind to this ad garbage, my brain after forty years still contains ad slogans I picked up in my childhood.
Because I do not watch TV, I would like to avoid paying for it, but it is practically impossible.
And because I pay for it I feel somehow entitled to view any movie or TV series ever broadcast on ad-supported TV, no matter what technology I use to watch it.
The same applies to ad-supported web content - I do not feel any guilty to use ad-blockers, I have pay for the content when I buy stuff.
Someone might argue now, what if everyone would avoid viewing ads?
Well, in that case we might enter a world where people buy only stuff they really want, but this is an utterly unrealistic utopia.
Regarding the electromagnetic spectrum, I think it is a scandal that it is still used to stuff mostly useless crap into people's brains. And looking at the numbers how many time people in the U.S. spend in front of a TV and pollute their mind, I doubt they will be well prepared to meet the global challenges we are facing - the failure of decision making based on knowledge of the world acquired through TV starts to become visible on all levels.
Fortunetely new technology can help to filter ads in all kind of media except public spaces, but it the battle for our attention is a dirty battle not being won by the people at large.
I use X11 OpenOffice on an Intel Mac from time to time, but it is not great. I tried Neooffice, but it crashed frequently so bad like no other App on the Mac I know of. It somehow managed to cause persistent rendering errors in the Finder - I would not consider it being anywhere near alpha stage.
MS Office on the Mac is not better than Office on Windows, but sometimes behaves different, depending on how advanced you Documents are.
I use MS Office on Windows XP with Parallels in Coherence Mode if I have to use MS Office, this works surprisingly well.
But for new Presentations I prefer Keynote, it is so much better to use than Powerpoint, which after ten years still has redraw bugs, is often sluggish - it just sucks.
For my private text processing "pages" is fine, but like with OpenOffice about half of the foreign.doc files you open have serious problems.
If you want a rock solid All-in-One Office solution for Macs an PCs, Ragtime is also worth looking at. Version 5 was free for private use, but the new version 6 again is quite expensive except for education. (49 EUR)
But NeoOffice for me has been *by far the worst application* I ever launched on an Intel Mac, and I heard rumors that Sun is also not happy with the status of OpenOffice on the Mac and plans to help to improve it.
Also ask yourself if Saddams regime was so evil why did the US put most of the Saddams government back into the administration of the country for some time.
Unfortunately they didn't. They went after all Baath party members and banned them from power, and moved in exile Iraqis like this guy, missing a few billions in the process.
If they hadn't removed the whole former ruling elite from power, the U.S. might have had chance for a turnaround, but if you criminalize most of the people who know how to run this country and give them no other chance than to fight you, you are fucked.
The cost have already piled up to over 300 billion, and may total up to more than 1 trillion dollars if the U.S. will stay a few more years under the same circumstances. What an incredible screw-up.
It is really stupid beyond belief to ban only those manufacturers who recalled batteries, makeing their models in fact much safer than other manufacturers, especially those no-names that actually pose a higher risk because people don't even know that their batteries are dangerous.
They should have either banned *all* Li-Ion batteries, or find other ways how to deal with it, e.g. put fire-proof cases or asbestos bags/blankets on the plane where they can drop a burning laptop into. On Lufthansa planes you were not allowed to use CD-Players, but you could use *every* other electronic device because some idiot in the management must have been convinced that CD-Players emit specific electromagnetic interference.
These freaks who try to provide security by uninformed actionism really suck, because at the same time they tend to ignore *real* risks as soon as they start to affect their bottom line.
It is too late. SGI missed the boat around 1997, when they made some fatal business decisions:
they "joined" forces with Microsoft in project Fahrenheit, resulting in giving away 3D-API know to Microsoft and making DirectX a competitive 3D API
they did not have the guts to cannibalize their business by building a low-cost 3D graphics card for the PC - we have been waiting for it after they did it for the Nintendo N64
they bought Cray, completely ruining the cost structure because their engineers had much higher wages than their own staff
they did stick too long to the MIPS architecture, loosing a competitive price/performance ratio
they managed to loose their best engineers to all kinds of successful new companies, probably because of a mixture of lack of success and lack of innovation in leadership
Maybe if they just had managed to avoid one or two of above mistakes, they might have not got where they are today.
Ya know how we caused the Soviet Union to collapse by forcing their military to spend, spend, spend?
It is a myth (created by the self-proclaimed winners of the cold war) that the U.S. had something to do with the collapse of the soviet union - the soviet union collapsed because Gorbachev pulled the plug on a corrupt and inefficient administrative system that was too rotten to defend itself againt this one-man-revolution.
The existence of a Castro Cuba is a strong indicator that the Soviet Union could still be alive and kicking maybe for another fifty or hundred years without someone like Gorbachev getting to the top. While the excessive military spending of the U.S. did force the Soviets to spend more, it probably did more harm to the people in the U.S.. e.g. by depriving them of the social security that people in Europe, even Eastern Europe have enjoyed since WW II.
I have no sympathy for communism, and my country was invaded in 1968 by Russians, but today historical facts seem to show that the U.S. has started and fought the cold war because it was afraid that communism would be more attractive to people than the american way of life; in other words, the cold war was a offensive action envisioned by paranoid, insane and unscrupulous U.S. leaders and buerocrats who kept the world at the brink of destruction for decades, killed millions of people and hampered economic and political development in many countries, leaving billions of people in poverty and tyranny.
I am convinced that the U.S. system is as unsustainable as the soviet union because it is too extreme and does not care for the majority of the people. The U.S. is no longer a role model for people in the world, and it is increasingly disliked by people in the U.S., their neighbors on the american continent, their allies in europe, the middle east and in asia. For strange reason, only people in africa seem to have still sympathy for the U.S. government.
The "war on terror" is another stupid idea to keep the majority of people from recognizing that they are beeing screwed by greedy bastards, and keep them from doing something against it. However, it will not work in the long run, and the sad thing is that we all are going to pay a high price for the stupidity that rules the world now.
I can not see any facts that do back up this opininion. From what I see, both give you access to all features of the latest graphics cards at full speed. Under OpenGL you can use Nvidia's Cg (which is basically the same as DirectX HLSL) or use OpenGL Shading Language.
DirectX includes more high-level stuff, but you have glut, SDL, gtk, ffmpeg and many other libraries you can use. The main difference between DirectX and OpenGL is that DirectX runs on the Win32 platform only, while OpenGL runs on Win32, Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, Sun, SGI, and as OpenGL ES on the Playstation, on mobile Phones, WinCE and many other platforms. You can use OpenGL from over a dozen different programming languages, among them Java, and using Java and OpenGL, you can have single binary that runs on may of above platforms.
And besides that, the actual graphics API calls are the smallest part of game programming, and many state-of-the-art engines (e.g. the FarCry engine) have backends for both APIs, and on some platforms OpenGL is even faster or works better.
Right now I am 80% through on a OS X port of our 3D-Engine that already runs on Windows and Linux, and I guess porting the 500.000 lines of C++ code will take in the order of 10 days. One current showstopper is NVidia's Cg distribution, which is broken on Intel Macs, but we would go to GLSL if they won't fix it soon.
So from my point of view, using DirectX just locks you into one platform and a few programming languages, and single-platform software tends to have a shorter lifespan, so for a developer, it is not wise to use it.
And having bought a MacBook Pro recently, I prefer to use OS X, and although Windows has been my main OS for for six years and I never used OS X before, I hardly ever boot into Windows any more, and use OS X 95% of the time. Windows XP simply looks and feels inferior to OS X, although both OSs have their strenghts and weaknesses, but given the 10-1000 times more resources Microsoft spends on Windows, Apple is doing a great job. And actually I would prefer to buy a game that runs well on every mac than a windows versions that has a different problem on every second windows box due to the incredibly diverse PC Hardware.
You are absolutely right, I am the proof. I just ordered a MacBook Pro to evaluate it as a standard developer laptop for our company. Our software runs on Linux and Windows equally, and we are doing an OS X port right now, but it has been slowed down because we don't want to give three computers to everybody on our team. (We have a Desktop and a Laptop as standard.) Windows is an absolute must for us, and we need fast and full featured 3D-support on every machine.
Some people on our team a private Powerbooks because they prefer OS X for their personal use, and they like the Apple design.
I dropped the Mac in 1999 after using it since 1984 because Windows and the Wintel-Platform was way beyond what Apple had to offer at that time, especially in terms of performance.
Since OS X I was tempted a couple of times to switch, but I don't want to carry around two laptops. Again, Windows with it's 90% market share is a platform we can not ignore. However, I regard OS X as a much more sophisticated OS than WindowsXP in terms of usability, integration, interface design and system architecture. Microsoft may catch up a bit with Vista, but I refuse to compare an existing product with vaporware.
I am really happy now that I can give OS X a try and can still run a full featured windows at full speed on a Mac. We buy about 20 Laptops every year, and from now on they might be all Macs.
However, there is something where Apple could really improve: The service. If one of our Dell Notebooks has a problem, the next day someone comes and fixes it. To send in a laptop for servicing is a major nightmare: You have to remove or clean the disk, supply the user with a new machine, put his dat on it, package the defective machine, keep track of it, and put the data back after repir, which all can easily costs hundreds of bucks if you add up the time of all people involved. Therefore we buy an on-site repair service for our Macs from a third party, but many of our people travel a lot to foreign countries, and Dell's service comes to you in many places all over the world.
So Apple, please think about offering an world-wide on-site repair service, there is a lot of money and market share to be earned here.
IMO another big problem is the missing fun factor. If you have ever looked at the windows source code, most of the 50 Mio lines of code is extremely ugly and boring.
Most of the code looks like this:
1) Setup & Initialize
Get an interface here, claim some memory, find another interface over there, register own functionality here and there, try something else in case something has failed until you succeed or run out of options
2) Delegation and Fallback
If some particular module is not available, fall back to other implementations, reformat the data, manage lifetime and ownership, synchronize with some other activities, and then
delegate the call to some other interface
3) Error Handling and Recovery
After each call, perform error checking, pass back the result to the caller, potentially reformatting it again, or raise some exceptions or create new higher level error codes from lower level error code you got
4) Cleanup
When it is time, either because some reference count went zero, some termination function was called or a garbage collector comes by, free all resources claimed so far, deregister references downstream and upstream
The whole code is full of hungarian notation type casts, macros and microsoft specific language extensions, and the flow control statements are mostly branches. You are already lucky if you may write a loop that does some actual work, even if it is just collecting stuff from multiple calls.
And then, if you look at APIs, there are much more parameters and much more options than e.g. in UNIX counterparts, and many options are not orthogonal, so you are entangled in a web of obscure semantics almost everywhere. And you do not have one API for the same stuff, you got a shitload of them: Win32, WinMM, GDI, ATL, OCX, MFC, COM, DCOM, ODBC, ActiveX, DirectX, XNA and tons of product specific APIs. It is already a nightmare to decide which API to use, but to support them all in a bug-by-bug compatible way is programmer's hell. It is like travelling with a hospital ship full of corpses that are not completely dead and need to be kept alive by a team of doctors, high doses of painkillers and cardiopulmonary and dialysis machinery, just in case someone needs them because he speaks this ancient lanuguage noone else but these living dead understands.
With.NET, Microsoft did a good job at API design, but it is of no immediate help, it is just another API that has to be supported with all the other legacy APIs, so.NET does not reduce, but increases overall complexity and does not perform as well as the other APIs. Another problem with.NET is the lack of maturity, still requiring major changes on all levels, resulting in huge compatibility nightmares between different versions of.NET.
But even if Microsoft would throw away everything but the kernel and.NET, I still would not jump on it because I do not like to be locked in on a particular platform; I want to be able to run my Software in MacOS and Linux and have a chance to port it to some hardware or OS that does not exist yet.
If I were in charge at Microsoft, I would try some of the Google philosophy: Do not be evil, and give the people something they can like:
1) A solid, simple well documumented and rock solid foundation that manages device I/O using a small set of calls with clear semantics: open, close, read, write, ioctl seem to sufficient to do a lot
2)Choose the right atomic elements: Bytes, Characters, Numbers, Strings, Pixels, Images, Audio Samples, 3D-Polygons and video streams and make them first class citizens throughout the whole operating system.
3) Implement all APIs people seem to like in a rock solid, feature complete and efficient manner: OpenGL, gtk, POSIX etc.
4) Invent some new own cool High-Level APIs and frameworks and make sure they are available on Linux and MacO
You are wrong, the Geneva convention protects everybody, it was specifically amendended to include every soldier and civilian in every kind of armed conflict, except mercenaries. In a conflict, you are either soldier or civilian, there is no such thing as an "unlawful combattant". A terrorist is a civilian committing crimes if he does not wear a uniform and hides his weapons. However, if you wear a uniform and carry your gun over the shoulder, you are a soldier and may not be punished for killing enemies. And if you happen to live in some place that is invaded by foreign soldiers, you do not even need a uniform to be granted soldier statuts: if you form a spontanous militia and fight the invaders, you are also protected by the convention as a soldier, even without a uniform.
I also don't know where you got your impression that a military tribunal is better than a civil court. Why not then substitute all courts in the U.S. by military tribunals? What would you prefer: A court where you can choose your own defender, where you can appeal in case some mistake is made by the court, where the judges are independent from the government, and where the trial is public vs. an "enemy" officer as defendent, very limited and obscure ways to appeal if any, enemy officers as judges whose comrades you might have killed, and a secret trial in some military camp where nobody you know is allowed to attend? Do you really want to rely for justice on some TV-like bold gentlemen officers with balls of steel who have to act against the will of your warmongering commander-in-chief and compromise the former decisions of your comrades to displace and detain you for years? Good Luck.
I agree that the treatment by the U.S. military in general is not as bad how the terrorits treat U.S. soldiers or civilians, but that can not be used as an excuse to lower own standards. If you do lower the standards, you are not better than the terrorists.
You probably are not aware how Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have discredited the U.S. in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. You are no longer seen as The Good Guys (TM). For many Muslims you are now the bad guys, but for your friends you are now the Guys Who Don't Stick To Own Rules and give a fscking shit about the rules of the rest of the world.
You had the compassion and support of the world after 9/11, but you screwed up big time. Now the world looks at the U.S. troops in Iraq with a mixture of uneasiness and malicous joy, and even your best friends are investigating crimes the CIA committed in their countries or against some their citizen.
What a stupid waste of money and lifetime. The U.S. has the most talented people in politcial and social sciences, the greatest spin doctors, economical talent, the largest secret agencies, the greatest movie makers and military power that matches the power of the combined power of military in the rest of the world, but all this seems to be worthless and even counterproductive with an administration like the current one: The reputation in world ruined, terrorism in the world flourishing, the national deficit spiralling out of control, boosting national debt to historic dimensions, and an economy based on plundering and wasting irreplaceable natural resources of the world.
I hope the U.S. will manage to turn around 180 as soon as possible, but the whole world already will have to cope for decades with all the political, economical, environmental and social damage the U.S. have caused since the end of the cold war. The tragedy is that much of the damage done will turn out to be unrecoverable, but the sooner it starts, the better. Close Guantanamo today, and send the people there home. You will not be able to try them anyway, because all the evidence gained there will not be accepted in any court that respects the human rights.
According to http://www.wise-uranium.org/umaps.html, the world Uranium resources are between 1.7 Mio. tons and and 4.5 Mio. tons, depending on how much money you are willing to spend for mining it. Until 2004, a total of 2.1 Mio. tons have been already mined. The 2004 world production is about 40000 tons.
All this basically means: we have already used up a significant amount of the world resources, and we will run out of uranium as nuclear fuel in 20-100 years, depending on how many reactors we are going to have.
I think it is a short sighted and stupid idea to use uranium for power generation for a couple of decades, and have a waste problem for thousands of years, when our nearby star provides us with almost free energy for the next billion years.
And if you want to go for breeder reactors: in Germany they have been abandonded years ago because they are too dangerous, too expensive and you have really bad plutonium waste problem.
The wikipedia article has been introduced as evidence into the case, so the parents had to proceed against wikipedia if they did not want to loose. Other way round, if they would have tolerated the naming in the wikipedia, they would have to tolerate the naming in the book, too. The fact that the name can be found anywhere else is not relevant as long as the source is not introduced into the case as an evidence.
The background here is extremely complex. I knew TRON personally, and I know many people from the german wikipedia community and the Chaos Computer Club, where TRON was active until his death. From what I see, the community has been divided in about two halves for some time regarding the issue of TRON's real name in wikipedia, even if no one appreciates the escalation. But the story is not a story of censorship or some bad guys against wikipedia, it is the story of parents of a dead hacker against ignorance and harping on about principles. The parents did not want to have the article removed, they just wanted TRONs real name to be abbreviated as Boris F., instead of the full name as it is in the wikipedia right now. Seven letters.
But for everyone who has not been involved: here is a short version of a complex story how I have experienced it:
Boris F. was a german hacker under the pseudonym TRON, doing a lot of advanced chipcard hacking and crypto gear development
TRON died in 1998, he probably committed suicide, but there is a slight chance he was murdered
All german newspapers and TV covered the case, and two books were written about it, among them a novel ("Offenbarung 23") that contains a lot of bullshit that no parent wants to read about a son, especially if it is fiction; however, for marketing purposes, the author of the novel printed the full real name in the book, stating that his novel was "based" on this real case
the parents sued the publisher/author of the book to remove the real name
the author/publisher used as a defence that the real name can be found in the wikipedia
the parents removed the real name from the article
a wikipedia edit war broke out, which resulted in several locks by wikipedia admins
the parents tried for months to convince wikipedia admins to remove the real name; of course they are aware that the name can be found in the internet at many places, but the fact it is on wikipedia was used against them in a court case, so they had to act
in the wikipedia community, there were advocates for both sides, probably about half of the people arguing to respect the wish of the parents, the other half to keep the full real name there, for the sake of information freedom; if you speak german you can read the discussion page at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskussion:Tron_(Hack er)
the wikipedia community finally decided to leave the name there, but the process is not a very democratic or transparent one, and even if it was, minority rights are above democratic decisions
at the german wikimedia foundation, no one was able to really deal with the situation; instead, they basically argued "we are not responsible for the content"
some individuals at wikipedia who had no mandate to do so dragged this thing into the press, escalating the issue out of control of the community
the parents, their supporters and the german court machinery did their work, and now a court ordered that the domain wikipedia.de must no longer forward to the de.wikipedia any more
The question is: How could this get so far? I think, because of the ignorance and stubbornness some of the wikipedia people in Germany who decided to ignore the asking and adjuring of the parents of a dead guy on one side, and the determination of friends of TRON and supporters of the parents, who are also part of the hacker community and at some point gave up in convincing *all* of the involved wikipedians and finally helped the parents to legally proceed against wikipedia.
Maybe Wikipedia underestimtated the determination of the parents because they are just, well, some parents of some dead hacker. They even ignored all ample warnings, publicly accusing the people who warned them that they are making up the legal threats, and that they do not speak for the parents. All in the name of freedom of information.
"Would it be so hard for them to include a safer rendering engine?"
Google Desktop does not embed or include any browser or rendering engine, it is a local http-server that can be accessed using any browser, and it launches your default browser.
Maybe the statistics are not exactly scientific, but he has a valid point. I had to update Firefox about five times during the last year, and this on about ten computers of friends and family, resulting in about thirty updates.
Don't take me wrong, I prefer Firefox to Internet Exlorer for surfing the web, but when I did some serious development for a kiosk system on top of the mozilla platform a few years ago, it was a real nightmare to code around hundreds of bugs we ran into, and especially memory leakage and stability were definitely several orders of magnitude worse than IE.
Any object you created in the DOM left over some memory after you deleted it. But even worse: A stress test that rotated ten different web pages from the web with a frequency of one page per second never ran longer than two hours, and the average time between two crashes was about 20 minutes.
At the time we ran into these problems we had already spent too much effort to build our application with custom XUL-Widgets, C++ XPCOM plugins and javascript. We then made stress tests on IE as well because we were afraid the customer would blame us for using Mozilla instead of IE, and hoped IE would not fare better, but IE did not leak and did not crash with the same stress test even running for a week.
Because we were definitely locked in we spent weeks to track down leaks in the mozilla source, and to find workarounds for javascript code that did leak, and while the support from the Mozilla Gurus (e.g. Brendan) was great, we finally reached a point where our application survived a relaxed stress test for 24 hours so we could make a nightly restart. We also employed a watchdog process that checked the memory condition and restarted the app in case of low memory.
To be honest: I do not know how many leaks have been fixed, but no significant progess made from Mozilla 1.1 to 1.4. regarding leakage and stability. From my first-hand knowledge of the source and the complexity of ownership issues in Mozilla and XPCOM I doubt anyone in the world will ever be able to ever fix it. The leak and stability issues may not be important for the normal web surfer, and again, I had used Mozilla for surfing without much problems, but Microsoft is light years ahead of probably any open source community project when it comes to testing.
Now, security may be another issue, but I could not see anything in the code that would indicate why the situation here should be different. I really hope that I am wrong, but I think there is simply too much complex code for the few people who are able to work on it.
p.
Fortunately, today's Germany is a civilized country with a legal system that treats kids not as adults, no matter how disgusting the crime. It is also well known that most teenagers, especially males, do commit numerous crimes during their youth, but usually cease it when they grow older, especially if they never get caught and punished.
Those who get caught and spend prison time early are much more likely to cause serious trouble later. There are also a few diehards that will cause trouble forever anyway no matter if they are punished or not. (The professional crime training they get from other inmates may even outweigh the fact that they are temporarily locked away from society)
Btw, youth trials like this one are not public, and my prediction for the outcome is that he will not go to jail this time, and even a sentence on probation is unlikely; my guess is he will get a kind of community service, but he might also have some further trouble to fight off all the civil suits that might follow.
But also fortunately for him, in Germany a company that wants to get damage compensation in court has to
1) prove the actual extent of the damage
2) show they did something reasonable to minimize the damage.
IT-Systems have malfunctions all the time, and it should be possible to recover from a virus or worm attack even easier than from hardware failures or data loss caused by software malfunction, so if your company was down because of sasser for a week, you normally won't be awarded compensation to this extent.
p.
It is worse because you can throw away the drive. You can not even format it without knowing the password when maximum security mode is used. And even replacing the controller does not help because the pw is also stored on the platters.
(On the german keyboard, y and z are reversed, there is a QWERTZ instead of a QWERTY keyboard. Therefore, since many years you can also type "zast" to start yast.)
IMO, GPL-ing yast it is a good decision, making it possibly an even better tool than it already is. The major troublespot is the integration of X-Windows configuration via SaX, which still regularly failes when using the NVIDIA drivers.
p.
Re:difficult my arse.
on
Mplayer Revisited
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· Score: 2, Informative
Even more funny, I did the same thing last night on a Out-Of-the-Box SuSE 8.2 System; I just had to remove the useless crippled mplayer that comes with SuSE.
At first I was a bit scared by all this stuff about installing additional codecs in the documentation, and I even downloaded ffmpeg because I follwed the documentation step by step, but later I found out it applies to the cvs checkout only, is already included in the release tarballs.
The fact is: for most cases, the included ffmpeg and other included codecs will already play more stuff than any other player, and installation was as painless as you describe, I just had to add a symlink/dev/dvd ->/dev/sr0 amd enable DMA access for my DVD-drive to play dvds. Ah, and I had to run it as root, and you must not forget xhost + then to allow it to open a window. And Mplayer is the most blithering piece of software I know, but I found these messages were generally helpful.
I really love mplayer because it is fast and responsive, delivers a much better quality than any windows player I used, has the freedom to jump ten seconds with arrow keys, ignories dvd no-skip zones, allows to adjust audio/video sync, to easyly correct aspect ratio, to adjust pan-scan (E/W key) and has really good deinterlacing for my kite surfing dvds.
If there is a piece of software that make me feel liberated, it is mplayer; it is the most single reason for me to boot linux as there is nothing comparable for windows. (Yesterday I found out mplayer runs under cygwin, but I didnt try yet)
In Germany it is quite dead, not only because of many RF Interference problems with TV, Wavelan, Radio, Air Traffic Control, Rescue Services and other, but also because the users had a lot of trouble really getting substantial bandwidth.
And DSL or Cable is almost always a much better, cheaper and more realiable alternative.
Power lines are a really bad environment for data transmission for many reasons:
Many people not aware of it share the same physical medium, causing hard-to-track down interference problems and raising scalabilty issues
There is a lot of noise from all kinds of devices connected to the powerline, eg. motors, phase-modulated light dimmers, old TV Sets, Microwave Ovens, Switching Power Supplies and many other things you might have never heard of, all inducing noise and possibly altering the characteristics of the medium
The topology of the network is unpredictable, you never really now how many branches there are
The cable types and their characteristics are in a wide range as well, cause a lot distortion, echoes and RF leakage
To overcome a least some of these problems, the transmission power had to be raised to a level where they started to cause RF interference, also exceeding the allowed limits of RF Power emission.
IMO Data over Powerlines will never be a commercial success and is a brainchild of the.com era where everbody and his sister wanted to be part of the internet craze. There were even plans for IP over gas and water tubes, but I think is was dropped because the new tubes are made of plastics.
I can not see a niche between Phone, DSL, Cable and Wireless that might justify this abuse of powerline and pollution of the RF spectrum.
In Germany the federal court ruled than every NCA is void unless you get paid a substantial amount *during* the period, and it said that "substantial" is in the order of 50% of your previous salary. As a result in Germany all NCAs are usually signed as an option, and the company can decide to exercise it or not. Usually most companies decide *not* to exercise it if they have to pay for it extra.
p.
The trailer sucks, but the rest is really great. I love it. The tension between Archer and T'Pau, these arrogant vulkans, Achers's naive approach to aliens, the russian submarine touch of the enterprise, and all the trouble they are getting into.
IMO, TOS was not very good as science fiction. It works because it is the classic voyage plot with
with Kirk, Spock and McCoy as characters in conflict , meeting powerful and strange enemies. The main innovation was the concept of allied aliens (the Vulcans), and the multinational crew gave hope for humanity in times of cold war.
TNG successfully built upon this concept, and with Picard as benevolent, polically correct dictator there was room for a lot of good drama and SF, with a lot of great episodes in seasons 4 to 7.
DS9 was basically people hanging around in a shopping mall waiting for aliens to show up. It seemed to be a soap opera, and it started to be boring soon, but I know some people who liked it very much for this reason.
I also did't like Voyager very much; the characters did not bring anything new, the ship was too small and too far away from home to be able to survive without miracles. And if there is something forbidden in SF, it is miracles. If they were a whole fleet and had some weapons of mass destruction, it might have been credible, but probably the budget wasn't there for a whole fleet. I always had the feeling that it would not matter very much if the Voyager would be destroyed; they were MIA anyway without any hope of getting back home. It really sucked that they couldn't die or succeed in getting home. So far from home, nothing seemed to matter.
Enterprise, OTOH is on the most important mission for mankind that has ever been undertaken. They are true explorers, live in constant danger but have powerful allies who save them from time to time, giving them credibility. And there are a lot of nice details; the ship looks really cool and serious, not like a passenger cruiser asall the other Enterprises. The cartridges to reload the Phasers, the communicators, and the computer screens are all much more realistic with more details than in all previous series. And I also like the humor. Maybe many americans don't like Enterprise because the people their are no perfect american superheroes, but more like european loosers who think and talk before they shoot, and in contrast believe there are very *few* problems that can be solved by blowing things up.
...which is the reason why it gained so much acceptance in almost every community. It has hit a nerve, and it is great to express almost everything you want in a human readable, persistent cross platform data structure.
The problems with XML are in areas of the standard that are complex *and* rarely used, as with every software system. Problems start with the correct handling of entity references, and the correct implementation of xml-schema has not yet been achieved by any implementation I have tested recently. Even worse, it is almost impossible to write an xsd for a complex case that will validate correctly on a second xml processor, even if it works perfectly with a the chosen first processor.
And I think there will not be a conforming svg or smil browser in the next ten years because these specs are too complex to be understood by different programmers in the same way.
XML is great, but some guy at w3c went way too far too fast, making standards that are too complex to be properly understood by mere mortals who need to think about more than just XML.
Slashdot Mirror
In Germany the law is quite reasonable in these cases. In self-defense you are only allowed to use adequate means to defend yourself, so you typically get away with shooting an unarmed intruder in the foot, or you can shoot an armed intruder without warning, but you are not allowed to shoot a burglar who is running away in the back.
However, there is an exception where the use of excessive force is not punished: When you family is around, and you act in order to protect them, you will very probably get away with killing anyone who breaks into your house at night, armed or not.
p.
Free TV costs money, and every time you buy an advertised item, you pay.
I do not watch Free TV any more because I hate the frequent program interruptions, and I don't want to expose my mind to this ad garbage, my brain after forty years still contains ad slogans I picked up in my childhood.
Because I do not watch TV, I would like to avoid paying for it, but it is practically impossible.
And because I pay for it I feel somehow entitled to view any movie or TV series ever broadcast on ad-supported TV, no matter what technology I use to watch it.
The same applies to ad-supported web content - I do not feel any guilty to use ad-blockers, I have pay for the content when I buy stuff.
Someone might argue now, what if everyone would avoid viewing ads?
Well, in that case we might enter a world where people buy only stuff they really want, but this is an utterly unrealistic utopia.
Regarding the electromagnetic spectrum, I think it is a scandal that it is still used to stuff mostly useless crap into people's brains. And looking at the numbers how many time people in the U.S. spend in front of a TV and pollute their mind, I doubt they will be well prepared to meet the global challenges we are facing - the failure of decision making based on knowledge of the world acquired through TV starts to become visible on all levels.
Fortunetely new technology can help to filter ads in all kind of media except public spaces, but it the battle for our attention is a dirty battle not being won by the people at large.
p.
I use X11 OpenOffice on an Intel Mac from time to time, but it is not great. I tried Neooffice, but it crashed frequently so bad like no other App on the Mac I know of. It somehow managed to cause persistent rendering errors in the Finder - I would not consider it being anywhere near alpha stage.
.doc files you open have serious problems.
MS Office on the Mac is not better than Office on Windows, but sometimes behaves different, depending on how advanced you Documents are.
I use MS Office on Windows XP with Parallels in Coherence Mode if I have to use MS Office, this works surprisingly well.
But for new Presentations I prefer Keynote, it is so much better to use than Powerpoint, which after ten years still has redraw bugs, is often sluggish - it just sucks.
For my private text processing "pages" is fine, but like with OpenOffice about half of the foreign
If you want a rock solid All-in-One Office solution for Macs an PCs, Ragtime is also worth looking at. Version 5 was free for private use, but the new version 6 again is quite expensive except for education. (49 EUR)
But NeoOffice for me has been *by far the worst application* I ever launched on an Intel Mac, and I heard rumors that Sun is also not happy with the status of OpenOffice on the Mac and plans to help to improve it.
p.
Digital rights management is essentially a technology mechanism to enforce (or hinder the breaking of) contract law.
No, I would rather say that DRM is an MBA's technology mechanism to defy the laws of thermodynamics.
p.
Also ask yourself if Saddams regime was so evil why did the US put most of the Saddams government back into the administration of the country for some time.
Unfortunately they didn't. They went after all Baath party members and banned them from power, and moved in exile Iraqis like this guy, missing a few billions in the process.
If they hadn't removed the whole former ruling elite from power, the U.S. might have had chance for a turnaround, but if you criminalize most of the people who know how to run this country and give them no other chance than to fight you, you are fucked.
The cost have already piled up to over 300 billion, and may total up to more than 1 trillion dollars if the U.S. will stay a few more years under the same circumstances. What an incredible screw-up.
p.
It is really stupid beyond belief to ban only those manufacturers who recalled batteries, makeing their models in fact much safer than other manufacturers, especially those no-names that actually pose a higher risk because people don't even know that their batteries are dangerous.
They should have either banned *all* Li-Ion batteries, or find other ways how to deal with it, e.g. put fire-proof cases or asbestos bags/blankets on the plane where they can drop a burning laptop into. On Lufthansa planes you were not allowed to use CD-Players, but you could use *every* other electronic device because some idiot in the management must have been convinced that CD-Players emit specific electromagnetic interference.
These freaks who try to provide security by uninformed actionism really suck, because at the same time they tend to ignore *real* risks as soon as they start to affect their bottom line.
p.
Maybe if they just had managed to avoid one or two of above mistakes, they might have not got where they are today.
p.
It is a myth (created by the self-proclaimed winners of the cold war) that the U.S. had something to do with the collapse of the soviet union - the soviet union collapsed because Gorbachev pulled the plug on a corrupt and inefficient administrative system that was too rotten to defend itself againt this one-man-revolution.
The existence of a Castro Cuba is a strong indicator that the Soviet Union could still be alive and kicking maybe for another fifty or hundred years without someone like Gorbachev getting to the top. While the excessive military spending of the U.S. did force the Soviets to spend more, it probably did more harm to the people in the U.S.. e.g. by depriving them of the social security that people in Europe, even Eastern Europe have enjoyed since WW II.
I have no sympathy for communism, and my country was invaded in 1968 by Russians, but today historical facts seem to show that the U.S. has started and fought the cold war because it was afraid that communism would be more attractive to people than the american way of life; in other words, the cold war was a offensive action envisioned by paranoid, insane and unscrupulous U.S. leaders and buerocrats who kept the world at the brink of destruction for decades, killed millions of people and hampered economic and political development in many countries, leaving billions of people in poverty and tyranny.I am convinced that the U.S. system is as unsustainable as the soviet union because it is too extreme and does not care for the majority of the people. The U.S. is no longer a role model for people in the world, and it is increasingly disliked by people in the U.S., their neighbors on the american continent, their allies in europe, the middle east and in asia. For strange reason, only people in africa seem to have still sympathy for the U.S. government.
The "war on terror" is another stupid idea to keep the majority of people from recognizing that they are beeing screwed by greedy bastards, and keep them from doing something against it. However, it will not work in the long run, and the sad thing is that we all are going to pay a high price for the stupidity that rules the world now.
p.
I can not see any facts that do back up this opininion. From what I see, both give you access to all features of the latest graphics cards at full speed. Under OpenGL you can use Nvidia's Cg (which is basically the same as DirectX HLSL) or use OpenGL Shading Language.
DirectX includes more high-level stuff, but you have glut, SDL, gtk, ffmpeg and many other libraries you can use. The main difference between DirectX and OpenGL is that DirectX runs on the Win32 platform only, while OpenGL runs on Win32, Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, Sun, SGI, and as OpenGL ES on the Playstation, on mobile Phones, WinCE and many other platforms. You can use OpenGL from over a dozen different programming languages, among them Java, and using Java and OpenGL, you can have single binary that runs on may of above platforms.
And besides that, the actual graphics API calls are the smallest part of game programming, and many state-of-the-art engines (e.g. the FarCry engine) have backends for both APIs, and on some platforms OpenGL is even faster or works better.
Right now I am 80% through on a OS X port of our 3D-Engine that already runs on Windows and Linux, and I guess porting the 500.000 lines of C++ code will take in the order of 10 days. One current showstopper is NVidia's Cg distribution, which is broken on Intel Macs, but we would go to GLSL if they won't fix it soon.
So from my point of view, using DirectX just locks you into one platform and a few programming languages, and single-platform software tends to have a shorter lifespan, so for a developer, it is not wise to use it.
And having bought a MacBook Pro recently, I prefer to use OS X, and although Windows has been my main OS for for six years and I never used OS X before, I hardly ever boot into Windows any more, and use OS X 95% of the time. Windows XP simply looks and feels inferior to OS X, although both OSs have their strenghts and weaknesses, but given the 10-1000 times more resources Microsoft spends on Windows, Apple is doing a great job. And actually I would prefer to buy a game that runs well on every mac than a windows versions that has a different problem on every second windows box due to the incredibly diverse PC Hardware.
p.
Some people on our team a private Powerbooks because they prefer OS X for their personal use, and they like the Apple design.
I dropped the Mac in 1999 after using it since 1984 because Windows and the Wintel-Platform was way beyond what Apple had to offer at that time, especially in terms of performance.
Since OS X I was tempted a couple of times to switch, but I don't want to carry around two laptops. Again, Windows with it's 90% market share is a platform we can not ignore. However, I regard OS X as a much more sophisticated OS than WindowsXP in terms of usability, integration, interface design and system architecture. Microsoft may catch up a bit with Vista, but I refuse to compare an existing product with vaporware.
I am really happy now that I can give OS X a try and can still run a full featured windows at full speed on a Mac. We buy about 20 Laptops every year, and from now on they might be all Macs.
However, there is something where Apple could really improve: The service. If one of our Dell Notebooks has a problem, the next day someone comes and fixes it. To send in a laptop for servicing is a major nightmare: You have to remove or clean the disk, supply the user with a new machine, put his dat on it, package the defective machine, keep track of it, and put the data back after repir, which all can easily costs hundreds of bucks if you add up the time of all people involved. Therefore we buy an on-site repair service for our Macs from a third party, but many of our people travel a lot to foreign countries, and Dell's service comes to you in many places all over the world.
So Apple, please think about offering an world-wide on-site repair service, there is a lot of money and market share to be earned here.
p.
Most of the code looks like this:
1) Setup & Initialize
Get an interface here, claim some memory, find another interface over there, register own functionality here and there, try something else in case something has failed until you succeed or run out of options
2) Delegation and Fallback
If some particular module is not available, fall back to other implementations, reformat the data, manage lifetime and ownership, synchronize with some other activities, and then delegate the call to some other interface
3) Error Handling and Recovery
After each call, perform error checking, pass back the result to the caller, potentially reformatting it again, or raise some exceptions or create new higher level error codes from lower level error code you got
4) Cleanup
When it is time, either because some reference count went zero, some termination function was called or a garbage collector comes by, free all resources claimed so far, deregister references downstream and upstream
The whole code is full of hungarian notation type casts, macros and microsoft specific language extensions, and the flow control statements are mostly branches. You are already lucky if you may write a loop that does some actual work, even if it is just collecting stuff from multiple calls.
And then, if you look at APIs, there are much more parameters and much more options than e.g. in UNIX counterparts, and many options are not orthogonal, so you are entangled in a web of obscure semantics almost everywhere. And you do not have one API for the same stuff, you got a shitload of them: Win32, WinMM, GDI, ATL, OCX, MFC, COM, DCOM, ODBC, ActiveX, DirectX, XNA and tons of product specific APIs. It is already a nightmare to decide which API to use, but to support them all in a bug-by-bug compatible way is programmer's hell. It is like travelling with a hospital ship full of corpses that are not completely dead and need to be kept alive by a team of doctors, high doses of painkillers and cardiopulmonary and dialysis machinery, just in case someone needs them because he speaks this ancient lanuguage noone else but these living dead understands.
With .NET, Microsoft did a good job at API design, but it is of no immediate help, it is just another API that has to be supported with all the other legacy APIs, so .NET does not reduce, but increases overall complexity and does not perform as well as the other APIs. Another problem with .NET is the lack of maturity, still requiring major changes on all levels, resulting in huge compatibility nightmares between different versions of .NET.
But even if Microsoft would throw away everything but the kernel and .NET, I still would not jump on it because I do not like to be locked in on a particular platform; I want to be able to run my Software in MacOS and Linux and have a chance to port it to some hardware or OS that does not exist yet.
If I were in charge at Microsoft, I would try some of the Google philosophy: Do not be evil, and give the people something they can like:
1) A solid, simple well documumented and rock solid foundation that manages device I/O using a small set of calls with clear semantics: open, close, read, write, ioctl seem to sufficient to do a lot
2)Choose the right atomic elements: Bytes, Characters, Numbers, Strings, Pixels, Images, Audio Samples, 3D-Polygons and video streams and make them first class citizens throughout the whole operating system.
3) Implement all APIs people seem to like in a rock solid, feature complete and efficient manner: OpenGL, gtk, POSIX etc.
4) Invent some new own cool High-Level APIs and frameworks and make sure they are available on Linux and MacO
I also don't know where you got your impression that a military tribunal is better than a civil court. Why not then substitute all courts in the U.S. by military tribunals? What would you prefer: A court where you can choose your own defender, where you can appeal in case some mistake is made by the court, where the judges are independent from the government, and where the trial is public vs. an "enemy" officer as defendent, very limited and obscure ways to appeal if any, enemy officers as judges whose comrades you might have killed, and a secret trial in some military camp where nobody you know is allowed to attend? Do you really want to rely for justice on some TV-like bold gentlemen officers with balls of steel who have to act against the will of your warmongering commander-in-chief and compromise the former decisions of your comrades to displace and detain you for years? Good Luck.
I agree that the treatment by the U.S. military in general is not as bad how the terrorits treat U.S. soldiers or civilians, but that can not be used as an excuse to lower own standards. If you do lower the standards, you are not better than the terrorists.
You probably are not aware how Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have discredited the U.S. in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. You are no longer seen as The Good Guys (TM). For many Muslims you are now the bad guys, but for your friends you are now the Guys Who Don't Stick To Own Rules and give a fscking shit about the rules of the rest of the world.
You had the compassion and support of the world after 9/11, but you screwed up big time. Now the world looks at the U.S. troops in Iraq with a mixture of uneasiness and malicous joy, and even your best friends are investigating crimes the CIA committed in their countries or against some their citizen.
What a stupid waste of money and lifetime. The U.S. has the most talented people in politcial and social sciences, the greatest spin doctors, economical talent, the largest secret agencies, the greatest movie makers and military power that matches the power of the combined power of military in the rest of the world, but all this seems to be worthless and even counterproductive with an administration like the current one: The reputation in world ruined, terrorism in the world flourishing, the national deficit spiralling out of control, boosting national debt to historic dimensions, and an economy based on plundering and wasting irreplaceable natural resources of the world.
I hope the U.S. will manage to turn around 180 as soon as possible, but the whole world already will have to cope for decades with all the political, economical, environmental and social damage the U.S. have caused since the end of the cold war. The tragedy is that much of the damage done will turn out to be unrecoverable, but the sooner it starts, the better. Close Guantanamo today, and send the people there home. You will not be able to try them anyway, because all the evidence gained there will not be accepted in any court that respects the human rights.
All this basically means: we have already used up a significant amount of the world resources, and we will run out of uranium as nuclear fuel in 20-100 years, depending on how many reactors we are going to have.
I think it is a short sighted and stupid idea to use uranium for power generation for a couple of decades, and have a waste problem for thousands of years, when our nearby star provides us with almost free energy for the next billion years.
And if you want to go for breeder reactors: in Germany they have been abandonded years ago because they are too dangerous, too expensive and you have really bad plutonium waste problem.
p.
But for everyone who has not been involved: here is a short version of a complex story how I have experienced it:
The question is: How could this get so far? I think, because of the ignorance and stubbornness some of the wikipedia people in Germany who decided to ignore the asking and adjuring of the parents of a dead guy on one side, and the determination of friends of TRON and supporters of the parents, who are also part of the hacker community and at some point gave up in convincing *all* of the involved wikipedians and finally helped the parents to legally proceed against wikipedia. Maybe Wikipedia underestimtated the determination of the parents because they are just, well, some parents of some dead hacker. They even ignored all ample warnings, publicly accusing the people who warned them that they are making up the legal threats, and that they do not speak for the parents. All in the name of freedom of information.
In Germany ther
Google Desktop does not embed or include any browser or rendering engine, it is a local http-server that can be accessed using any browser, and it launches your default browser.
p.
Don't take me wrong, I prefer Firefox to Internet Exlorer for surfing the web, but when I did some serious development for a kiosk system on top of the mozilla platform a few years ago, it was a real nightmare to code around hundreds of bugs we ran into, and especially memory leakage and stability were definitely several orders of magnitude worse than IE.
Any object you created in the DOM left over some memory after you deleted it. But even worse: A stress test that rotated ten different web pages from the web with a frequency of one page per second never ran longer than two hours, and the average time between two crashes was about 20 minutes.
At the time we ran into these problems we had already spent too much effort to build our application with custom XUL-Widgets, C++ XPCOM plugins and javascript. We then made stress tests on IE as well because we were afraid the customer would blame us for using Mozilla instead of IE, and hoped IE would not fare better, but IE did not leak and did not crash with the same stress test even running for a week.
Because we were definitely locked in we spent weeks to track down leaks in the mozilla source, and to find workarounds for javascript code that did leak, and while the support from the Mozilla Gurus (e.g. Brendan) was great, we finally reached a point where our application survived a relaxed stress test for 24 hours so we could make a nightly restart. We also employed a watchdog process that checked the memory condition and restarted the app in case of low memory.
To be honest: I do not know how many leaks have been fixed, but no significant progess made from Mozilla 1.1 to 1.4. regarding leakage and stability. From my first-hand knowledge of the source and the complexity of ownership issues in Mozilla and XPCOM I doubt anyone in the world will ever be able to ever fix it. The leak and stability issues may not be important for the normal web surfer, and again, I had used Mozilla for surfing without much problems, but Microsoft is light years ahead of probably any open source community project when it comes to testing.
Now, security may be another issue, but I could not see anything in the code that would indicate why the situation here should be different. I really hope that I am wrong, but I think there is simply too much complex code for the few people who are able to work on it. p.
Those who get caught and spend prison time early are much more likely to cause serious trouble later. There are also a few diehards that will cause trouble forever anyway no matter if they are punished or not. (The professional crime training they get from other inmates may even outweigh the fact that they are temporarily locked away from society)
Btw, youth trials like this one are not public, and my prediction for the outcome is that he will not go to jail this time, and even a sentence on probation is unlikely; my guess is he will get a kind of community service, but he might also have some further trouble to fight off all the civil suits that might follow.
But also fortunately for him, in Germany a company that wants to get damage compensation in court has to
1) prove the actual extent of the damage
2) show they did something reasonable to minimize the damage.
IT-Systems have malfunctions all the time, and it should be possible to recover from a virus or worm attack even easier than from hardware failures or data loss caused by software malfunction, so if your company was down because of sasser for a week, you normally won't be awarded compensation to this extent. p.
It is worse because you can throw away the drive. You can not even format it without knowing the password when maximum security mode is used. And even replacing the controller does not help because the pw is also stored on the platters.
(On the german keyboard, y and z are reversed, there is a QWERTZ instead of a QWERTY keyboard. Therefore, since many years you can also type "zast" to start yast.) IMO, GPL-ing yast it is a good decision, making it possibly an even better tool than it already is. The major troublespot is the integration of X-Windows configuration via SaX, which still regularly failes when using the NVIDIA drivers. p.
Even more funny, I did the same thing last night on a Out-Of-the-Box SuSE 8.2 System; I just had to remove the useless crippled mplayer that comes with SuSE.
/dev/dvd -> /dev/sr0 amd enable DMA access for my DVD-drive to play dvds. Ah, and I had to run it as root, and you must not forget xhost + then to allow it to open a window. And Mplayer is the most blithering piece of software I know, but I found these messages were generally helpful.
At first I was a bit scared by all this stuff about installing additional codecs in the documentation, and I even downloaded ffmpeg because I follwed the documentation step by step, but later I found out it applies to the cvs checkout only, is already included in the release tarballs.
The fact is: for most cases, the included ffmpeg and other included codecs will already play more stuff than any other player, and installation was as painless as you describe, I just had to add a symlink
I really love mplayer because it is fast and responsive, delivers a much better quality than any windows player I used, has the freedom to jump ten seconds with arrow keys, ignories dvd no-skip zones, allows to adjust audio/video sync, to easyly correct aspect ratio, to adjust pan-scan (E/W key) and has really good deinterlacing for my kite surfing dvds.
If there is a piece of software that make me feel liberated, it is mplayer; it is the most single reason for me to boot linux as there is nothing comparable for windows. (Yesterday I found out mplayer runs under cygwin, but I didnt try yet)
p.
And DSL or Cable is almost always a much better, cheaper and more realiable alternative.
Power lines are a really bad environment for data transmission for many reasons:
To overcome a least some of these problems, the transmission power had to be raised to a level where they started to cause RF interference, also exceeding the allowed limits of RF Power emission.
IMO Data over Powerlines will never be a commercial success and is a brainchild of the .com era where everbody and his sister wanted to be part of the internet craze. There were even plans for IP over gas and water tubes, but I think is was dropped because the new tubes are made of plastics.
I can not see a niche between Phone, DSL, Cable and Wireless that might justify this abuse of powerline and pollution of the RF spectrum.
p.
In Germany the federal court ruled than every NCA is void unless you get paid a substantial amount *during* the period, and it said that "substantial" is in the order of 50% of your previous salary. As a result in Germany all NCAs are usually signed as an option, and the company can decide to exercise it or not. Usually most companies decide *not* to exercise it if they have to pay for it extra. p.
IMO, TOS was not very good as science fiction. It works because it is the classic voyage plot with with Kirk, Spock and McCoy as characters in conflict , meeting powerful and strange enemies. The main innovation was the concept of allied aliens (the Vulcans), and the multinational crew gave hope for humanity in times of cold war.
TNG successfully built upon this concept, and with Picard as benevolent, polically correct dictator there was room for a lot of good drama and SF, with a lot of great episodes in seasons 4 to 7.
DS9 was basically people hanging around in a shopping mall waiting for aliens to show up. It seemed to be a soap opera, and it started to be boring soon, but I know some people who liked it very much for this reason.
I also did't like Voyager very much; the characters did not bring anything new, the ship was too small and too far away from home to be able to survive without miracles. And if there is something forbidden in SF, it is miracles. If they were a whole fleet and had some weapons of mass destruction, it might have been credible, but probably the budget wasn't there for a whole fleet. I always had the feeling that it would not matter very much if the Voyager would be destroyed; they were MIA anyway without any hope of getting back home. It really sucked that they couldn't die or succeed in getting home. So far from home, nothing seemed to matter.
Enterprise, OTOH is on the most important mission for mankind that has ever been undertaken. They are true explorers, live in constant danger but have powerful allies who save them from time to time, giving them credibility. And there are a lot of nice details; the ship looks really cool and serious, not like a passenger cruiser asall the other Enterprises. The cartridges to reload the Phasers, the communicators, and the computer screens are all much more realistic with more details than in all previous series. And I also like the humor. Maybe many americans don't like Enterprise because the people their are no perfect american superheroes, but more like european loosers who think and talk before they shoot, and in contrast believe there are very *few* problems that can be solved by blowing things up.
p.
The problems with XML are in areas of the standard that are complex *and* rarely used, as with every software system. Problems start with the correct handling of entity references, and the correct implementation of xml-schema has not yet been achieved by any implementation I have tested recently. Even worse, it is almost impossible to write an xsd for a complex case that will validate correctly on a second xml processor, even if it works perfectly with a the chosen first processor.
And I think there will not be a conforming svg or smil browser in the next ten years because these specs are too complex to be understood by different programmers in the same way.
XML is great, but some guy at w3c went way too far too fast, making standards that are too complex to be properly understood by mere mortals who need to think about more than just XML.
p.