So it doesn't support standards that aren't finished? Wow, how criminal.
Browsers have always supported standards that aren't finished, at least since I started using them in the early 90s; heck, many of the standards themselves co-opted features that browsers had implemented themselves.
And every other major browser I'm aware of already supports those things, which puts IE well into the second rank in terms of features as well as security.
Color TV had an obvious and significant benefit and didn't require you to wear silly glasses all the time. 3D is a gimmick that only works well in a limited amount of footage that I've seen, and does require you to wear silly glasses all the time.
Until you can make 3D TVs which don't require glasses and do allow you to show objects which go outside the screen, it will always be a gimmick.
I used it last week on a friend's computer, and was amazed to discover that this product of a multi-billion dollar software company doesn't even support multicolumn rendering or HTML5 video tags. It felt like I'd fallen through a time warp into the 1990s.
I called them out for it and it fell on deaf ears. They are using Pando Media Booster...
Except, as mentioned above, they seem to be fairly open about using a P2P download system and it's easy to uninstall afterwards.
It's some time since I installed DDO and LOTRO but from what I remember it told you to uninstall Pando after downloading the game if you didn't want it to continue using bandwidth, and it's just a matter of using the standard uninstall from the control panel.
Seconded. An Ion system with xbmc is what I use and so far we haven't found anything it can't play... case isn't much bigger than a DVD player and even with the optional CPU fan installed it doesn't make much noise.
Can someone point me to the source for all this "I'll have to pay more if I want to see the whole Internet" argument?
Past experience with telcos? Give them the opportunity to charge for something and they will. Where's your source for your argument that they won't?
As for competition, if there were 500 choices of ISP everywhere it would work, but when the average user is lucky to have two or three choices of ISP and many people have only one, it hardly applies.
You're almost a century out of touch with reality. What you say was true in 1930s.
Today, when an airplane crashes, the human has failed. Pretty much always.
In a few cases in recent years (probably including the AF447 crash) the plane has been flying along on autopilot until the autopilot runs into something that it can't manage to fly through, and then it shuts down and dumps the problem on the pilots. In some cases they can handle weather that's too turbulent for a computer, in others they crash. Is that a 'human problem' or a programming problem or a 'flying into weather that we wouldn't try to fly through manually but we have an autopilot so that's OK' problem?
Without government testing of fuel efficiency, there would be no reliable information to go by at all.
Eh? I've never found government testing of fuel efficiency to bear more than a vague resemblance to the real world. Which isn't surprising, because once there's a single 'gold benchmark' then any engineering company will work to get the best score at that benchmark rather than in the real world.
I'd sooner trust somewhere like Consumer Reports than any kind of government MPG testing.
I don't want to sound like an argle-fargling old timer with an onion on my belt, but for christ's sake, since when is "new to a montreal mother" new for/. ? Ad retargetting has been around for YEARS.
Well, I wasn't aware of it so it's news to me.
Oh, hang on, I use NoScript, block ad site cookies and block ad servers in my/etc/hosts file.
Wrong, GRUB belongs in the MBR, not in some unpartioned space that is not supposed to be of use, if they have a problem with that, just keep that thing (GRUB) small or create a partition.
How do you plan to boot from an arbitrary Linux partition using a 512-byte boot loader?
Could it be something to do with the fact that people aren't booting from FAT filesystems?
You might find that ext3, ext4, btrfs, XFS, ZFS and other Unix filesystems might perhaps be a little more complex to read than FAT, particularly if you have to support all of them.
Anyone smart enough to run Grub probably knows better than to run Adobe software of any kind. Except, perhaps, for Flash with appropriate Apparmor or SELinux protections for the inevitable security exploits as it's so hard to avoid.
It makes sense for a bootloader to place data and code outside of partitioned space. It makes more sense to place the code inside a partition, even if it's a one-track partition dedicated to the bootloader.
It would, if you could actually get more than four partitions on a hard drive with the 90+% of BIOSes which can't boot properly from a GPT drive.
My new laptop came with _THREE_ recovery partitions and a Windows partition, so I had to delete one of the recovery partitions to be able to install Linux at all... where would I get another partition for Grub to run from without deleting all the recovery data?
So the big problem is that we're still stuck with shitty MS-DOS disk formats from the 1980s.
Am I the only one who never realised that we'd stopped having hardware acceleration of web browsers like we did in the 1990s? Are they really rendering everything with software? No wonder they make a 3GHz quad-core feel like a 486.
Thing is, to me that article shows that there's little difference between film and digital for the average user. His film images may be slightly better in extreme conditions, but I think I paid $32 for my SDHC card which holds 4,000 stills... even if I never delete them and reuse it, that's the equivalent of maybe $1,000 of film. To me that's a much bigger benefit that a slight improvement in quality when the scene is heavily backlit, and it appears that 99% of the world agrees with me.
In addition, some of his other supposed disadvantages of digital are pretty bogus. Archival storage of film only works if you can store it securely; a couple of years ago I went back to scan various old negatives only to discover that they had lots of damage from dirt, dust and sticking together in the film packet, and you can ask the Babylon 5 guys about the problems they had with 35mm film stored in a supposed archive-quality facility. Similarly, the idea that you'll have to convert digital file formats every few years is simply silly, if you care about quality you shoot in RAW format and you convert from the RAW files to whatever format is popular at the time, and could still be doing so 2,000 years from now when the film has long rotted away.
I'm actually surprised at how well the digital camera stood up in his comparisons, because I'd have expected a good modern film to be much better. Digital cameras are clearly better than I thought.
what is to stop people from using RSA 512-bit encryption with their e-mails?
I suspect the government would be quite happy to see people using 512-bit RSA because it's easy to crack... possibly even trivial with modern hardware.
4096-bit RSA, on the other hand, will still be secure for quite some time.
hahah what kind of fucking randian retard sees corporate corruption in government and goes "hmm yes the solution is to get rid of government"?
If government only had limited powers like, say, the few granted to the Federal government in the US Constitution, why would any corporation try to buy a politician? That would be as sensible as trying to become a movie star by sleeping with a screenwriter.
If you want to annoy a right winger, ask them why we don't privatize the military. They'll go on at length about all the horrible things government does, and how much better it would be if they didn't---except for the military.
How strange. When I ask American right-wingers I know why they don't privatise the miltiary they go on at length about how the founders never wanted a standing army and the whole thing should be shut down and replaced with a citizen's militia.
Perhaps you're confusing right-wingers with Republicans, who mostly seem to be just a different brand of socialist.
How many jobs would be returned to the US if we made the US a corporate tax haven and instituted some sane liability laws?
Lots, obviously, but the average voter would never support eliminating taxes on EVIL CORPORATIONS if it meant that their personal tax rates increased, even if it also meant that the price they paid for goods was reduced because corporations no longer had to offload their taxes onto the cost of their products.
So it would be sane and benefiical, but politically impossible without a catastrophic crisis to force economic change.
If this is indeed the case, then shouldn't a municipal broadband should be no threat at all to private industry, and therefore there should be nothing at all for them to worry about.
Except the govermnent-run system can run at a loss forever and drive the competition out of the market. You really don't think that free government broadband might be a slight problem if you're trying to sell broadband access to people?
The theory that an all Linux environment would be secure is false in the real world. All operating systems and applications are vulnerable to varying degrees.
But Linux won't be owned just by putting a USB stick in the slot. Sure, there might be USB driver bugs, but that's very different to autorunning software off the stick, or loading DLLs from the stick when you browse that directory.
The most likely person to be killed with a firearm is the owner.
Well, yes, if you want to commit suicide and happen to have a gun, that's probably what you'll use. Most of us don't regard sucide as a 'nefarious purpose', particularly as anyone who's willing to shoot themselves can find numerous other reliable methods of killing themselves even if they don't have a gun.
I believe this is also the source of the infamous 'a cop is more likely to be killed with his own gun than kill a criminal', as cops have a high suicide rate and rarely kill criminals.
Off the top of my head, a buffer overflow in the code that reads and displays embedded icons would be a juicy target, along with the file system parsing code.
Presumably the current Windows Explorer 'load DLLs from the current directory' exploit would be enough... put an image or video file on the disk and a DLL which will be loaded when that directory is viewed, and the user (and possibly the entire PC) is owned even without autorun.
Seriously, why are people so silly to leave this on.
Because Microsoft make it insanely difficult to turn off? From what I remember on XP, I had to change it in the control panel, edit some registry variables and then run another program from the command line to tell it that yes, I really, really did want it disabled.
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So it doesn't support standards that aren't finished? Wow, how criminal.
Browsers have always supported standards that aren't finished, at least since I started using them in the early 90s; heck, many of the standards themselves co-opted features that browsers had implemented themselves.
And every other major browser I'm aware of already supports those things, which puts IE well into the second rank in terms of features as well as security.
Color TV had an obvious and significant benefit and didn't require you to wear silly glasses all the time. 3D is a gimmick that only works well in a limited amount of footage that I've seen, and does require you to wear silly glasses all the time.
Until you can make 3D TVs which don't require glasses and do allow you to show objects which go outside the screen, it will always be a gimmick.
People still use MSIE?
I used it last week on a friend's computer, and was amazed to discover that this product of a multi-billion dollar software company doesn't even support multicolumn rendering or HTML5 video tags. It felt like I'd fallen through a time warp into the 1990s.
I called them out for it and it fell on deaf ears.
They are using Pando Media Booster...
Except, as mentioned above, they seem to be fairly open about using a P2P download system and it's easy to uninstall afterwards.
It's some time since I installed DDO and LOTRO but from what I remember it told you to uninstall Pando after downloading the game if you didn't want it to continue using bandwidth, and it's just a matter of using the standard uninstall from the control panel.
Seconded. An Ion system with xbmc is what I use and so far we haven't found anything it can't play... case isn't much bigger than a DVD player and even with the optional CPU fan installed it doesn't make much noise.
Can someone point me to the source for all this "I'll have to pay more if I want to see the whole Internet" argument?
Past experience with telcos? Give them the opportunity to charge for something and they will. Where's your source for your argument that they won't?
As for competition, if there were 500 choices of ISP everywhere it would work, but when the average user is lucky to have two or three choices of ISP and many people have only one, it hardly applies.
You're almost a century out of touch with reality. What you say was true in 1930s.
Today, when an airplane crashes, the human has failed. Pretty much always.
In a few cases in recent years (probably including the AF447 crash) the plane has been flying along on autopilot until the autopilot runs into something that it can't manage to fly through, and then it shuts down and dumps the problem on the pilots. In some cases they can handle weather that's too turbulent for a computer, in others they crash. Is that a 'human problem' or a programming problem or a 'flying into weather that we wouldn't try to fly through manually but we have an autopilot so that's OK' problem?
Without government testing of fuel efficiency, there would be no reliable information to go by at all.
Eh? I've never found government testing of fuel efficiency to bear more than a vague resemblance to the real world. Which isn't surprising, because once there's a single 'gold benchmark' then any engineering company will work to get the best score at that benchmark rather than in the real world.
I'd sooner trust somewhere like Consumer Reports than any kind of government MPG testing.
I don't want to sound like an argle-fargling old timer with an onion on my belt, but for christ's sake, since when is "new to a montreal mother" new for /. ? Ad retargetting has been around for YEARS.
Well, I wasn't aware of it so it's news to me.
Oh, hang on, I use NoScript, block ad site cookies and block ad servers in my /etc/hosts file.
Wrong, GRUB belongs in the MBR, not in some unpartioned space that is not supposed to be of use, if they have a problem with that, just keep that thing (GRUB) small or create a partition.
How do you plan to boot from an arbitrary Linux partition using a 512-byte boot loader?
What is the Grub project finding so difficult?
Could it be something to do with the fact that people aren't booting from FAT filesystems?
You might find that ext3, ext4, btrfs, XFS, ZFS and other Unix filesystems might perhaps be a little more complex to read than FAT, particularly if you have to support all of them.
Adobe Flexnet DRM is another issue entirely.
Anyone smart enough to run Grub probably knows better than to run Adobe software of any kind. Except, perhaps, for Flash with appropriate Apparmor or SELinux protections for the inevitable security exploits as it's so hard to avoid.
It makes sense for a bootloader to place data and code outside of partitioned space. It makes more sense to place the code inside a partition, even if it's a one-track partition dedicated to the bootloader.
It would, if you could actually get more than four partitions on a hard drive with the 90+% of BIOSes which can't boot properly from a GPT drive.
My new laptop came with _THREE_ recovery partitions and a Windows partition, so I had to delete one of the recovery partitions to be able to install Linux at all... where would I get another partition for Grub to run from without deleting all the recovery data?
So the big problem is that we're still stuck with shitty MS-DOS disk formats from the 1980s.
Am I the only one who never realised that we'd stopped having hardware acceleration of web browsers like we did in the 1990s? Are they really rendering everything with software? No wonder they make a 3GHz quad-core feel like a 486.
This article looks more at the non-resolution aspects of film:
http://www.twinlenslife.com/2009/05/digital-vs-film-real-deal-nikon-d300-vs.html
Thing is, to me that article shows that there's little difference between film and digital for the average user. His film images may be slightly better in extreme conditions, but I think I paid $32 for my SDHC card which holds 4,000 stills... even if I never delete them and reuse it, that's the equivalent of maybe $1,000 of film. To me that's a much bigger benefit that a slight improvement in quality when the scene is heavily backlit, and it appears that 99% of the world agrees with me.
In addition, some of his other supposed disadvantages of digital are pretty bogus. Archival storage of film only works if you can store it securely; a couple of years ago I went back to scan various old negatives only to discover that they had lots of damage from dirt, dust and sticking together in the film packet, and you can ask the Babylon 5 guys about the problems they had with 35mm film stored in a supposed archive-quality facility. Similarly, the idea that you'll have to convert digital file formats every few years is simply silly, if you care about quality you shoot in RAW format and you convert from the RAW files to whatever format is popular at the time, and could still be doing so 2,000 years from now when the film has long rotted away.
I'm actually surprised at how well the digital camera stood up in his comparisons, because I'd have expected a good modern film to be much better. Digital cameras are clearly better than I thought.
what is to stop people from using RSA 512-bit encryption with their e-mails?
I suspect the government would be quite happy to see people using 512-bit RSA because it's easy to crack... possibly even trivial with modern hardware.
4096-bit RSA, on the other hand, will still be secure for quite some time.
Businesses are ONLY interested in one thing, profits. They will *always* go to cheaper labor.
So why does anyone in America have a job when you could find a Chinese person willing to do it for $0.50 an hour?
hahah what kind of fucking randian retard sees corporate corruption in government and goes "hmm yes the solution is to get rid of government"?
If government only had limited powers like, say, the few granted to the Federal government in the US Constitution, why would any corporation try to buy a politician? That would be as sensible as trying to become a movie star by sleeping with a screenwriter.
If you want to annoy a right winger, ask them why we don't privatize the military. They'll go on at length about all the horrible things government does, and how much better it would be if they didn't---except for the military.
How strange. When I ask American right-wingers I know why they don't privatise the miltiary they go on at length about how the founders never wanted a standing army and the whole thing should be shut down and replaced with a citizen's militia.
Perhaps you're confusing right-wingers with Republicans, who mostly seem to be just a different brand of socialist.
How many jobs would be returned to the US if we made the US a corporate tax haven and instituted some sane liability laws?
Lots, obviously, but the average voter would never support eliminating taxes on EVIL CORPORATIONS if it meant that their personal tax rates increased, even if it also meant that the price they paid for goods was reduced because corporations no longer had to offload their taxes onto the cost of their products.
So it would be sane and benefiical, but politically impossible without a catastrophic crisis to force economic change.
If this is indeed the case, then shouldn't a municipal broadband should be no threat at all to private industry, and therefore there should be nothing at all for them to worry about.
Except the govermnent-run system can run at a loss forever and drive the competition out of the market. You really don't think that free government broadband might be a slight problem if you're trying to sell broadband access to people?
The theory that an all Linux environment would be secure is false in the real world. All operating systems and applications are vulnerable to varying degrees.
But Linux won't be owned just by putting a USB stick in the slot. Sure, there might be USB driver bugs, but that's very different to autorunning software off the stick, or loading DLLs from the stick when you browse that directory.
The most likely person to be killed with a firearm is the owner.
Well, yes, if you want to commit suicide and happen to have a gun, that's probably what you'll use. Most of us don't regard sucide as a 'nefarious purpose', particularly as anyone who's willing to shoot themselves can find numerous other reliable methods of killing themselves even if they don't have a gun.
I believe this is also the source of the infamous 'a cop is more likely to be killed with his own gun than kill a criminal', as cops have a high suicide rate and rarely kill criminals.
Off the top of my head, a buffer overflow in the code that reads and displays embedded icons would be a juicy target, along with the file system parsing code.
Presumably the current Windows Explorer 'load DLLs from the current directory' exploit would be enough... put an image or video file on the disk and a DLL which will be loaded when that directory is viewed, and the user (and possibly the entire PC) is owned even without autorun.
Seriously, why are people so silly to leave this on.
Because Microsoft make it insanely difficult to turn off? From what I remember on XP, I had to change it in the control panel, edit some registry variables and then run another program from the command line to tell it that yes, I really, really did want it disabled.