I draw the line at having a go at the families of the world leaders. By all means, show Obama, Bush and Mugabe as animals all you like, but leave their wives and children alone.
However, this does set a bad precedent that Google can and will filter search results. Surely this helps organisations like the Church of Scientology when they next want to hide some "objectionable" facts on the Internet. Google can hardly fall back on the argument that they just show what is out there on the net and that they are not responsible for search results.
Can there be moderation for editors please? I love how comments can be modded to oblivion, but useless editors and stories can't.
If you log in then you can hide stories from particular editors (like that newbie CmdrTaco). Also, you have the chance to mod a story down using the Firehose before it gets approved.
Finally, there is also the option of just not clicking on the link if you are not interested in the story. Woah, I've gone too far there!
Another reason to avoid Internet Explorer until it gets a no script equivalent (which it never will)
Way back in the IE4 days, I used a mixture of the zone system (Trusted Sites for those few where I wanted Javascript) and the hosts file. These days, if you use multiple browsers then privoxy is the better solution because the one configuration will work in all the browsers (yes, including Internet Explorer).
Remember: the exploit always comes before the fix.
That is not true. One easy way of finding security holes to exploit is to examine what gets fixed by patches. It shines a spotlight on the security hole and puts up a sign saying "hack me!".
There are numerous examples of worms appearing after the official patch. There was the Sasser worm:
The specific hole Sasser exploits is documented by Microsoft in its MS04-011 bulletin, for which a patch had been released seventeen days earlier.
The worm spread by exploiting a buffer overflow discovered by the Polish cracking group [4] Last Stage of Delirium in the DCOM RPC service on the affected operating systems, for which a patch had been released one month earlier in MS03-026 and later in MS03-039.
I am willing to bet good money that Microsoft formed a team responsible for finding bugs in Google frame just to discredit them.
In that case, why didn't Microsoft loudly announce it to the world and shame Google?
Instead, they quietly reported it to Google so that they could fix the problem. Once the bug was fixed, Google acknowledged the security researcher who discovered the bug. This is exactly how the system is supposed to work so that everybody wins - we get safer software, Google doesn't have to "hurry out a patch" (without proper testing) and Microsoft gets the credit for the discovery. The bug gets fixed without tipping off the malware writers.
And why does everybody act so responsibly? Because next time it might be a Google employee that finds a bug in Microsoft's products. Microsoft would like to be afforded the same courtesy. Similarly, if Google didn't acknowledge Microsoft, then the next security researcher who finds a bug in Chrome may decide to get their credit by going public rather than following protocol. Remember that this public recognition is the same as an academic being published in a journal. It is how they build their reputation, and ultimately how they will get future employment.
Bing has to offer more and better search results then Google does before it gains any more then 20% of the market
In my view, it has to offer fewer, not more search results. You just want the interesting matches without the deadwood.
When Google first came out it was like a breath of fresh air. Instead of cluttered screens and tons of useless search results, it just came back with extremely targetted results. Usually the one you wanted was the first match. In those days the "I feel lucky" button could be used and 99% of the time it got you to what you wanted.
It's not like that anymore. Google results are as useless as the lycos and AltaVista ones were back in the day. There was an opportunity for Bing to be as great as Google was and get massive market share, but it missed the chance.
I have kept in on my list of search providers, but I never use it. It is good enough that if I am forced to do work on the computers of friends and family, I feel confident in the search engine just to stick with the lazy defaults.
I snagged Windows 7 early and used IE8. I could change the search providers from day one. I even added my own search engines with the "Create your own search provider" option. The only download was the XML configuration. That's just like IE7, isn't it?
This is going to shock you but written English is quite common in Russia and most Russians are multilingual.
That sounds like a poor answer for a government mandated, national standard for software. "Sorry, but we couldn't come up with a system in our own language." A great loss for national pride! As an Australian, I know that there would be an uproar if our government tried to foist a software standard for schools which used American English, let alone another language.
Some of these teachers built their own schools from raw logs... After that experience figuring out Linux should be a cinch.
Someone from a thousand years ago could build a school from logs, but that doesn't mean to say that they could understand Linux either.
I believe Russian interface is supported in every Linux variant I've ever used.
That is why I mentioned the part about the education software. It is not just the base operating system that needs to be localised. From the original, original article:
Via Google Translate: By the end of 2009, all school computers will be installed package of free software (PSPO).
Who knows how much of the PSPO was written from scratch or needed to be adapted. I don't know because it is so hard to search the russian pages - the original letters for PSPO actually translate as SCPI.
This isn't Windows: localization has been part of the standard GNU project template for many years.
What makes you think that Windows hasn't had localisation from the start. The Russian version of MS-DOS has been around for 19 years. How else do you think that the teachers already know Windows?
If it works out of the box it is not too much, but maybe they have to localise the software into Russian. Given the differences between the languages, that might not be a trivial task. I don't know what software they need - it might include education apps that are not part of any standard distro.
As others have said, there is also the cost of training, both of the teachers who have to use the computers and the IT departments who must administer them.
It gets too hard to go much further than this because a lot of this early stuff isn't documented anywhere. But the term spreadsheet predates computers, so even the earliest spreadsheet evolved from ideas in the real world.
Just because it wasn't around 19 years ago doesn't invalidate the OP's assertion that it has been around for years. I am sure a lot can happen in that time.
Just to fill you in, they have also made other series (Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise) and many movies. It looks like you have a lot to catch up on.
Lotus to VisiCalc, Netscape to Mosaic, Java to C++, Playstation to SNES, Apple Mac to Xerox Alto...the list goes on and on. It's what the entire industry does.
All these years later, we know so much about science and technology, but nothing about that feeling of being alive.
But what does it mean to feel alive? Is it our sense of self within our bodies, our emotions, our abilities to know how we fit into the world around us, our intelligence, our memories?
Whatever you choose, somewhere in the world there are people who do not have that attribute due to some disorder or injury. There are people who feel that their bodies (or parts of their bodies) do not belong to them. There are people who cannot feel emotions, or cannot connect with the rest of the world. Pick up any Oliver Sacks book and you will find the stories a lots of people who lack some aspect of the "feeling of being alive".
These people are valuable to scientists, because by seeing how they are different to the rest of us they can understand what makes us who we are. Over the years, these scientists have created drugs to change our emotions and alter our perceptions & desires. They have studied how memories are formed and have even artificially created memories in animal brains.
I think that it is fair to say that science has made great advances in discovering what makes up human. They don't just sit back, scratch their heads and say that it is too hard for them.
You might say that all this takes the joy and magic out of life, but I say just sit back and enjoy the chemical reactions!
It's a generally very bad idea to release software containing somebody else's code without permission.
Try to pull that off with MS code and see how well that goes.
I think that it would happen exactly as it did in this case. If the copied code was something that MS does licence to other people then the first thing they would do would be to say "you are supposed to pay X for that code - pay up now or stop using it". If that doesn't work then Microsoft would take you to court.
That is exactly what happened in the TomTom case about FAT32. TomTom was given the option of paying the usual licence fee or to stop using FAT32 on flash cards.
I think that most companies would rather settle disputes this way, because when things go legal the only winners are the lawyers.
They thank someone from Google for helping them spot the vulnerability! It's in the acknowledgements
They always do that. It is in Microsoft's interests to publicly acknowledge the people who send them security reports because they want to encourage people to do that. It is preferable to what happened in the recent story where the guy posted the bug in a blog rather than telling them directly.
The accepted practice is to privately tell the company about a bug and give them time to fix the problem before posting about it publicly.
Not sure the real level of facetiousness here, but I think that's a pretty insightful comment.
In what way? They just fixed bugs all the way back to Windows 2000. That says to me that there is still life left in the old OS yet. If they wanted to encourage people to upgrade, they wouldn't back port all of the fixes.
I'm not quite sure how you got the idea that mog007 was complaining about anything. The entire post was merely a statement of fact without any opinion whether the ADA was good or bad. Mog007 just pointed out that the ADA covered more than just government services.
The sense of entitlement is sickening...This generation grew up wanting certain things
Can you honestly not see the hypocrisy in what you say? Exactly whose sense of entitlement do you find sickening? Business wanting to be paid to produce something, this generation for wanting to have everything for free, or both?
You are not entitled to be entertained for free. At some point, somebody has to pay for it. Under an advertising model, those strange people who actually watch commercials are really patrons of the arts. They subsidise your free viewing. When there aren't enough people viewing the ads, it results in the expensive dramas disappearing and cheap, crappy reality TV shows taking their place.
When I was a pennyless student, I pirated software because collecting titles was the goal. We all did it. When I started earning money of my own, I would buy anything that lasted on my computer for more than a week. (And back in those days, it wasn't as easy to finish a game as it is now)
The theory was that if I got more than a week's value out of something then it was worth keeping. See - try before you buy.
After a while, I got more money, but had less time. I started to buy games (in big spending sprees) only to find later that I had never even installed the game once. I am currently going through my backlog of titles - 107 in total, some of which I have to run in DOSBox! If a pirate is someone who plays a game without buying it, what is the name for someone who buys a game without playing it?
On second thoughts, maybe I don't want to know the answer.
I must be getting old. The parent has been modded as informative, but to me it just looks like the poster had a stroke as they were typing in the message.
They should also review and classify all websites on the internet as they can be downloaded to mobile phones as well
I'm not sure if you are aware, but that is the direction that they are heading with their mandatory internet filtering scheme at the ISP level. It's a completely dumb and unworkable idea, so therefore the government loves it!
For me, the more Slashdot bashes Microsoft unfairly, the less I despise Microsoft.
I agree. I got quite angry with the Net community in general about all the complaints people had about Vista. When I purchased a laptop that was preloaded with Vista for my wife, I booted it up with my XP disc in hand ready to wipe off the "abomination" only to find that so most of what I had read about the OS was a complete lie.
It was not slow, buggy or so infested with DRM that you couldn't do anything. Even after that I still got caught up in what people said and at one stage I had an argument with the missus about whether she could rip a CD in MP3 format. XP couldn't do it, and with all the supposed extra DRM in Vista I felt sure that it wouldn't work with anything other than WMA format. I was wrong.
You are absolutely correct. If you need to lie about about non-existent bad things in Vista, then any the legitimate complaints (eg. network stacks that slow down when any sound is playing) will look suspect too.
Slashdot Mirror
I draw the line at having a go at the families of the world leaders. By all means, show Obama, Bush and Mugabe as animals all you like, but leave their wives and children alone.
However, this does set a bad precedent that Google can and will filter search results. Surely this helps organisations like the Church of Scientology when they next want to hide some "objectionable" facts on the Internet. Google can hardly fall back on the argument that they just show what is out there on the net and that they are not responsible for search results.
Can there be moderation for editors please? I love how comments can be modded to oblivion, but useless editors and stories can't.
If you log in then you can hide stories from particular editors (like that newbie CmdrTaco). Also, you have the chance to mod a story down using the Firehose before it gets approved.
Finally, there is also the option of just not clicking on the link if you are not interested in the story. Woah, I've gone too far there!
Another reason to avoid Internet Explorer until it gets a no script equivalent (which it never will)
Way back in the IE4 days, I used a mixture of the zone system (Trusted Sites for those few where I wanted Javascript) and the hosts file. These days, if you use multiple browsers then privoxy is the better solution because the one configuration will work in all the browsers (yes, including Internet Explorer).
Remember: the exploit always comes before the fix.
That is not true. One easy way of finding security holes to exploit is to examine what gets fixed by patches. It shines a spotlight on the security hole and puts up a sign saying "hack me!".
There are numerous examples of worms appearing after the official patch. There was the Sasser worm:
The specific hole Sasser exploits is documented by Microsoft in its MS04-011 bulletin, for which a patch had been released seventeen days earlier.
And the Blaster worm
The worm spread by exploiting a buffer overflow discovered by the Polish cracking group [4] Last Stage of Delirium in the DCOM RPC service on the affected operating systems, for which a patch had been released one month earlier in MS03-026 and later in MS03-039.
And not wait another week until it's patch-Tuesday.
How do you know exactly when the bug was first reported to Google? For all you know, they may have sat on the problem for a month.
It seems that they did batch the updates together, because this update to version 4.0.245.1 fixes 9 different issues.
I am willing to bet good money that Microsoft formed a team responsible for finding bugs in Google frame just to discredit them.
In that case, why didn't Microsoft loudly announce it to the world and shame Google?
Instead, they quietly reported it to Google so that they could fix the problem. Once the bug was fixed, Google acknowledged the security researcher who discovered the bug. This is exactly how the system is supposed to work so that everybody wins - we get safer software, Google doesn't have to "hurry out a patch" (without proper testing) and Microsoft gets the credit for the discovery. The bug gets fixed without tipping off the malware writers.
And why does everybody act so responsibly? Because next time it might be a Google employee that finds a bug in Microsoft's products. Microsoft would like to be afforded the same courtesy. Similarly, if Google didn't acknowledge Microsoft, then the next security researcher who finds a bug in Chrome may decide to get their credit by going public rather than following protocol. Remember that this public recognition is the same as an academic being published in a journal. It is how they build their reputation, and ultimately how they will get future employment.
Bing has to offer more and better search results then Google does before it gains any more then 20% of the market
In my view, it has to offer fewer, not more search results. You just want the interesting matches without the deadwood.
When Google first came out it was like a breath of fresh air. Instead of cluttered screens and tons of useless search results, it just came back with extremely targetted results. Usually the one you wanted was the first match. In those days the "I feel lucky" button could be used and 99% of the time it got you to what you wanted.
It's not like that anymore. Google results are as useless as the lycos and AltaVista ones were back in the day. There was an opportunity for Bing to be as great as Google was and get massive market share, but it missed the chance.
I have kept in on my list of search providers, but I never use it. It is good enough that if I am forced to do work on the computers of friends and family, I feel confident in the search engine just to stick with the lazy defaults.
I snagged Windows 7 early and used IE8. I could change the search providers from day one. I even added my own search engines with the "Create your own search provider" option. The only download was the XML configuration. That's just like IE7, isn't it?
This is going to shock you but written English is quite common in Russia and most Russians are multilingual.
That sounds like a poor answer for a government mandated, national standard for software. "Sorry, but we couldn't come up with a system in our own language." A great loss for national pride! As an Australian, I know that there would be an uproar if our government tried to foist a software standard for schools which used American English, let alone another language.
Some of these teachers built their own schools from raw logs ... After that experience figuring out Linux should be a cinch.
Someone from a thousand years ago could build a school from logs, but that doesn't mean to say that they could understand Linux either.
I believe Russian interface is supported in every Linux variant I've ever used.
That is why I mentioned the part about the education software. It is not just the base operating system that needs to be localised. From the original, original article:
Via Google Translate: By the end of 2009, all school computers will be installed package of free software (PSPO).
Who knows how much of the PSPO was written from scratch or needed to be adapted. I don't know because it is so hard to search the russian pages - the original letters for PSPO actually translate as SCPI.
This isn't Windows: localization has been part of the standard GNU project template for many years.
What makes you think that Windows hasn't had localisation from the start. The Russian version of MS-DOS has been around for 19 years. How else do you think that the teachers already know Windows?
Free software costs too much? Really?
If it works out of the box it is not too much, but maybe they have to localise the software into Russian. Given the differences between the languages, that might not be a trivial task. I don't know what software they need - it might include education apps that are not part of any standard distro.
As others have said, there is also the cost of training, both of the teachers who have to use the computers and the IT departments who must administer them.
No, Shatner (Captain Kirk) was the one who replaced Jeffrey Hunter (Captain Pike).
The main thing that I remember about the original pilot was that Spock yelled a lot. I guess this was filmed before they had electronic microphones.
Xerox Alto to oN-Line System
Visicalc to LANPAR (Warning PDF link)
It gets too hard to go much further than this because a lot of this early stuff isn't documented anywhere. But the term spreadsheet predates computers, so even the earliest spreadsheet evolved from ideas in the real world.
Just because it wasn't around 19 years ago doesn't invalidate the OP's assertion that it has been around for years. I am sure a lot can happen in that time.
Just to fill you in, they have also made other series (Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise) and many movies. It looks like you have a lot to catch up on.
Lotus to VisiCalc, Netscape to Mosaic, Java to C++, Playstation to SNES, Apple Mac to Xerox Alto...the list goes on and on. It's what the entire industry does.
All these years later, we know so much about science and technology, but nothing about that feeling of being alive.
But what does it mean to feel alive? Is it our sense of self within our bodies, our emotions, our abilities to know how we fit into the world around us, our intelligence, our memories?
Whatever you choose, somewhere in the world there are people who do not have that attribute due to some disorder or injury. There are people who feel that their bodies (or parts of their bodies) do not belong to them. There are people who cannot feel emotions, or cannot connect with the rest of the world. Pick up any Oliver Sacks book and you will find the stories a lots of people who lack some aspect of the "feeling of being alive".
These people are valuable to scientists, because by seeing how they are different to the rest of us they can understand what makes us who we are. Over the years, these scientists have created drugs to change our emotions and alter our perceptions & desires. They have studied how memories are formed and have even artificially created memories in animal brains.
I think that it is fair to say that science has made great advances in discovering what makes up human. They don't just sit back, scratch their heads and say that it is too hard for them.
You might say that all this takes the joy and magic out of life, but I say just sit back and enjoy the chemical reactions!
And what difference does that make to this conversation? The basic fundementals are the same.
It's a generally very bad idea to release software containing somebody else's code without permission.
Try to pull that off with MS code and see how well that goes.
I think that it would happen exactly as it did in this case. If the copied code was something that MS does licence to other people then the first thing they would do would be to say "you are supposed to pay X for that code - pay up now or stop using it". If that doesn't work then Microsoft would take you to court.
That is exactly what happened in the TomTom case about FAT32. TomTom was given the option of paying the usual licence fee or to stop using FAT32 on flash cards.
I think that most companies would rather settle disputes this way, because when things go legal the only winners are the lawyers.
They thank someone from Google for helping them spot the vulnerability! It's in the acknowledgements
They always do that. It is in Microsoft's interests to publicly acknowledge the people who send them security reports because they want to encourage people to do that. It is preferable to what happened in the recent story where the guy posted the bug in a blog rather than telling them directly.
The accepted practice is to privately tell the company about a bug and give them time to fix the problem before posting about it publicly.
Not sure the real level of facetiousness here, but I think that's a pretty insightful comment.
In what way? They just fixed bugs all the way back to Windows 2000. That says to me that there is still life left in the old OS yet. If they wanted to encourage people to upgrade, they wouldn't back port all of the fixes.
You're going to complain about THOSE?!
I'm not quite sure how you got the idea that mog007 was complaining about anything. The entire post was merely a statement of fact without any opinion whether the ADA was good or bad. Mog007 just pointed out that the ADA covered more than just government services.
The sense of entitlement is sickening...This generation grew up wanting certain things
Can you honestly not see the hypocrisy in what you say? Exactly whose sense of entitlement do you find sickening? Business wanting to be paid to produce something, this generation for wanting to have everything for free, or both?
You are not entitled to be entertained for free. At some point, somebody has to pay for it. Under an advertising model, those strange people who actually watch commercials are really patrons of the arts. They subsidise your free viewing. When there aren't enough people viewing the ads, it results in the expensive dramas disappearing and cheap, crappy reality TV shows taking their place.
When I was a pennyless student, I pirated software because collecting titles was the goal. We all did it. When I started earning money of my own, I would buy anything that lasted on my computer for more than a week. (And back in those days, it wasn't as easy to finish a game as it is now)
The theory was that if I got more than a week's value out of something then it was worth keeping. See - try before you buy.
After a while, I got more money, but had less time. I started to buy games (in big spending sprees) only to find later that I had never even installed the game once. I am currently going through my backlog of titles - 107 in total, some of which I have to run in DOSBox! If a pirate is someone who plays a game without buying it, what is the name for someone who buys a game without playing it?
On second thoughts, maybe I don't want to know the answer.
I must be getting old. The parent has been modded as informative, but to me it just looks like the poster had a stroke as they were typing in the message.
I hope the recovery goes well, either way!
They should also review and classify all websites on the internet as they can be downloaded to mobile phones as well
I'm not sure if you are aware, but that is the direction that they are heading with their mandatory internet filtering scheme at the ISP level. It's a completely dumb and unworkable idea, so therefore the government loves it!
For me, the more Slashdot bashes Microsoft unfairly, the less I despise Microsoft.
I agree. I got quite angry with the Net community in general about all the complaints people had about Vista. When I purchased a laptop that was preloaded with Vista for my wife, I booted it up with my XP disc in hand ready to wipe off the "abomination" only to find that so most of what I had read about the OS was a complete lie.
It was not slow, buggy or so infested with DRM that you couldn't do anything. Even after that I still got caught up in what people said and at one stage I had an argument with the missus about whether she could rip a CD in MP3 format. XP couldn't do it, and with all the supposed extra DRM in Vista I felt sure that it wouldn't work with anything other than WMA format. I was wrong.
Even just today I came across someone who made the claim that Windows 7 is NOT as or Faster than XP. PERIOD despite TFA clearly showing that this was untrue.
You are absolutely correct. If you need to lie about about non-existent bad things in Vista, then any the legitimate complaints (eg. network stacks that slow down when any sound is playing) will look suspect too.