In what upside down world does running a program to prevent something, and having no instances of what your trying to prevent happen, constitute failure??!!
In late news, the US Government's Anti-Invisible Pink Unicorn Defence Program has been a tremendous success because no invisible pink unicorns have been sighted in the United States since the program was founded.
I agree with you somewhat; clearly increased security measures have had some impact on those who might otherwise have tried to attack airliners... but given the vast holes behind the security theater, clearly there are very few terrorists wanting to attack airliners or they'd have done so by now; OK, there have been a handful, but they were mostly inept and several of them managed to get past the security theater anyway.
well, how may airliners that take off from Israel have been hijacked since the 70's?
How many terrorists have been caught by Israeli airport security since the 70s? More importantly, since I believe the answer is a handful in the 70s and 80s, how many have been caught since 2001?
they "SPOT" people too.
Which is easy when the targets are Jewish, anyone who's not Jewish is a potential threat, and they don't give a crap about whether those people ever fly in or out of Israel again. People visiting Britain and America would not put up with the kind of intrusive measures taken in Israeli airports and would find an alternative destination in future.,, nor would politically correct British or American governments put up with similar screening measures that concentrated on Muslims.
Given the processors being sold nowadays I'm really surprised that there are still people installing 32 OS on their 64 bit boxes.
One issue is that 64-bit Windows 7 won't run 16-bit apps; there aren't many that are any use these days, but I'm sure there are still businesses reliant on them and it means you can't run old DOS games without an emulator and Carmageddon, for example, won't run acceptably in any emulator I've tried... either the graphics are corrupt, it's too slow to play on a CPU that's 20x faster than recommended at release, or the game timer counts down at 10x normal speed so you can't finish the race before it runs out. Best results were in Win98 running in VirtualBox, and that's still about half speed on a 2.26GHz i5.
Windows users don't expect 64-bit versions, and I don't think you can get Windows without the 32-bit libraries.
My Windows 7 install has 64-bit IE, which is pretty much pointless for the average user without 64-bit Flash. 64-bit Linux can install 32-bit Firefox though I guess you do need to install some 32-bit libraries if the distro didn't do that by default.
Also, the web has moved so far away from HTML/JavaScript only that you are pretty much unable to browse most sites without flash, or some video player or various other plugins.
Strange: Flash is the only plugin I have installed and I have Flash and Javascript disabled on most sites... doesn't seem to be a problem.
But you do want the content, right? So how do you expect the content providers to pay for the bandwidth they use to provide you with it?
Find a business model that works.
Which they'd better do fast if people are increasingly going to be browsing the web on devices that are charged by the byte, because those people sure as hell not going to be visiting sites that are laden with ads.
The funny part is that in this case the company who transfer the bytes that make up the ad to the end user are probably being paid more for doing so than the people who provide the 'ad supported' content.
For a game to demand that people pay money into every month for the privilege of not going off and playing Red Dead Redemption instead for a one-time price (or insert other recent popular title here), that game has to be not just good but great.
I agree. I've played a number of MMOGs in the past and while I'd quite like to continue some of them on a casual basis, I'm not paying $15 a month for each of six different games that I might play for 2-3 hours a week.
There are just too many MMOGs now as everyone jumped on the monthly subscription bandwagon over the last few years, and few people are willing to pay a subscription to more than one or two. If I can play for free and buy expansions now and again then I'm far more likely to play another online game then if I'm paying the same per month as someone who plays for forty hours a week.
But most of the cost of solid rocket motors is the fuel, so making them reusable doesn't save much on launch costs.
From what I remember, NASA would probably save money if they stopped recovering the SRBs and just built new ones each time. They're basically just big metal tubes which require a lot of refurbishing before they're ready to fly again, so there's a substantial cost to reusing them.
Didn't we learn from the Space Shuttle that reusable spacecraft cost just as much to launch as rebuilding a new craft every time?
Considering that a shuttle orbiter alone costs over $2,000,000,000 while a single shuttle launch costs around $150,000,000, the answer would have to be no. Most of the cost of the shuttle program is fixed costs like maintaining KSC which have to be paid regardless of whether the shuttle flies and don't change much with increased flight rates up to a dozen or so per year.
Does it tell you how to solve the "700MB per 6 hours" speed limit win7 suffers when trying to copy files across a wireless network?
Probably because there isn't one. While the first thing I did after buying a Windows-7 laptop was to configure it to dual-boot into Linux for anything other than games, I've had no problems with wireless performance, including downloading tens of gigabytes of games from Steam.
That's not to say that you couldn't have a crappy driver or some misconfiguration, but there's no such fundamental limit in the OS.
If you want to fix this information economy, you need to get control of the economy first, so that the money doesn't overwhelm the information.
So the problem is that the government has too much control of the economy so it's now more far efficient for corporations to buy politicians that to compete in the marketplace.
And the solution is to give the government _more_ power over the economy?
If you don't want corporations buying politicians to pass laws that favor them, then the solution is to reduce the power of politicians to the point where they can't offer anything worth buying. Unless you really believe that communist states are _less_ corrupt than America.
You seem to leave them out of the picture. It's not like a democracy works with the people don't do anything.
Apathetic? Most of the Americans I know are seething with rage at the politicians on offer, so calling them 'apathetic' seems... odd.
What if we actually voted er, upright politicians into office that didn't get swayed/purchased by corporations?
And how would you do that?
First you need 'upright politicians' for the 'apathetic' voters to vote for, then you need them in a party which can actually get elected. Instead you get a choice between Obama and whatsisname, both of whom were only going to make things worse; it's like giving people a chance to vote on whether they eat cyanide or arsenic and then complaining that they're 'apathetic' when they decide they'd prefer not to eat either.
But the actual progress just isn't matching the hoped for predictions.
I remember some famous SF writer (I think it was Clarke) pointing out years ago that people tend to overestimate short-term progress and underestimate long term because our expectations tend to be linear while progress -- absent government regulation -- tends to be exponential.
Moore's law is an obvious example. Telling someone in 1990 that in twenty years you'd be able to buy the equivalent of a Cray Y-MP (which is about what my Atom-330 benchmarks as) for $50 and it would be about the slowest mass-market CPU on the market would probably have branded you insane.
I really do revel in the thought of an American BBC, just a shame we can't call it the ABC because of those bastards at Disney. The name isn't important, however, the content is!
Which is odd, because most people I know in Britain revel in the thought of the BBC tax being eliminated because they're sick of being forced to pay for a left-wing propaganda station even if they don't watch it. Fox News may be just as bad on the other side of the political spectrum (I don't know because I've never watched it) but at least the government doesn't force you to pay for it.
Configuring my security setting does not seem like a big deal. If you don't like Yahoo's new policy, walk.
I just checked my yahoo email account -- which I have paid a few bucks for over the years becasue I want the POP access -- and I can't see any sign of a way to turn this crap off. Turning it on for everyone is simply insane.
OTOH I have removed my psycho ex from the address book.
So go ahead, explain what exactly is inproper in Windows XP security model, preferably in comparison to "proper security models dating back decades".
A security model ain't worth crap when so many applications won't run if you're not an administrator. Linux security wouldn't be worth crap if you had to run as root and disable SELinux in order to run Tuxracer, but that's not required because security was built into Unix from the early days while Windows had no security worth speaking of until XP (yeah, NT did, but 99% of Windows users didn't run NT).
As for UAC, it's exactly the same as gksudo. Funny how no-one says the latter is worthless, though...
Probably because you're talking crap. People don't complain about gksudo because they hardly ever see it, and generally only do so when performing some kind of operation that absolutely requires admin priviledges; UAC comes up routinely when you run ordinary every day pre-Vista software and with some that's not even that old.
So let me get this straight, UAC is both: 1) Too easy to ignore as you just have to click 'yes' every time 2) Too intrusive as it pops up whenever a program requires administrative privileges
Sure, don't bother to respond to what I post when you can just make stuff up instead.
At least as far as point 2 goes, mac os and many linux distros are "worse" as they not only prompt, but require your user name and password.
Like that.
Linux occasionally asks for my password or the root password (depending on the distribution) when I'm performing some kind of system maintenance. The only time it asks for a user name is when I log in.
Windows asks me to click yes to allow SuperFoobarScreensaver wants to access the program files directory; how the hell is anyone supposed to know whether it's trying to update a configuration file that the dumb developer stuck in the program files directory, or install spyware into IE? Worse, it happens so often running ordinary everyday software that pressing 'yes' becomes second nature.
Windows 7 has an OK kernel with a bazillion lines of crud on top in order to support old software that thinks it's running on a single-tasking DOS with no security. That is why Windows will take at least a decade to be anywhere near as secure as a real operating system, because it has to burn off the crud first.
The concept of Windows's UAC is fine, it just boils down to poor UI design.
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It's far better than racial profiling - we don't all want to live in Arizona.
Do you seriously think that Israeli security don't pay far more attention to Arab passengers than others?
In what upside down world does running a program to prevent something, and having no instances of what your trying to prevent happen, constitute failure??!!
In late news, the US Government's Anti-Invisible Pink Unicorn Defence Program has been a tremendous success because no invisible pink unicorns have been sighted in the United States since the program was founded.
I agree with you somewhat; clearly increased security measures have had some impact on those who might otherwise have tried to attack airliners... but given the vast holes behind the security theater, clearly there are very few terrorists wanting to attack airliners or they'd have done so by now; OK, there have been a handful, but they were mostly inept and several of them managed to get past the security theater anyway.
well, how may airliners that take off from Israel have been hijacked since the 70's?
How many terrorists have been caught by Israeli airport security since the 70s? More importantly, since I believe the answer is a handful in the 70s and 80s, how many have been caught since 2001?
they "SPOT" people too.
Which is easy when the targets are Jewish, anyone who's not Jewish is a potential threat, and they don't give a crap about whether those people ever fly in or out of Israel again. People visiting Britain and America would not put up with the kind of intrusive measures taken in Israeli airports and would find an alternative destination in future.,, nor would politically correct British or American governments put up with similar screening measures that concentrated on Muslims.
Given the processors being sold nowadays I'm really surprised that there are still people installing 32 OS on their 64 bit boxes.
One issue is that 64-bit Windows 7 won't run 16-bit apps; there aren't many that are any use these days, but I'm sure there are still businesses reliant on them and it means you can't run old DOS games without an emulator and Carmageddon, for example, won't run acceptably in any emulator I've tried... either the graphics are corrupt, it's too slow to play on a CPU that's 20x faster than recommended at release, or the game timer counts down at 10x normal speed so you can't finish the race before it runs out. Best results were in Win98 running in VirtualBox, and that's still about half speed on a 2.26GHz i5.
Windows users don't expect 64-bit versions, and I don't think you can get Windows without the 32-bit libraries.
My Windows 7 install has 64-bit IE, which is pretty much pointless for the average user without 64-bit Flash. 64-bit Linux can install 32-bit Firefox though I guess you do need to install some 32-bit libraries if the distro didn't do that by default.
Perhaps because it appears to be a half-assed gesture to make GNU/Linux users shut up about lack of 64-bit support.
Unlike Windows where there is _no_ 64-bit support.
In any case, I just checked adobe.com and no version seems to have been updated yet.
Also, the web has moved so far away from HTML/JavaScript only that you are pretty much unable to browse most sites without flash, or some video player or various other plugins.
Strange: Flash is the only plugin I have installed and I have Flash and Javascript disabled on most sites... doesn't seem to be a problem.
We are all ears!!!
The current model works. Simply suggesting it doesn't is not good enough. The evidence is all around you.
You've quoted my post, yet your response appears to have nothing to do with what I wrote.
But you do want the content, right? So how do you expect the content providers to pay for the bandwidth they use to provide you with it?
Find a business model that works.
Which they'd better do fast if people are increasingly going to be browsing the web on devices that are charged by the byte, because those people sure as hell not going to be visiting sites that are laden with ads.
The funny part is that in this case the company who transfer the bytes that make up the ad to the end user are probably being paid more for doing so than the people who provide the 'ad supported' content.
For a game to demand that people pay money into every month for the privilege of not going off and playing Red Dead Redemption instead for a one-time price (or insert other recent popular title here), that game has to be not just good but great.
I agree. I've played a number of MMOGs in the past and while I'd quite like to continue some of them on a casual basis, I'm not paying $15 a month for each of six different games that I might play for 2-3 hours a week.
There are just too many MMOGs now as everyone jumped on the monthly subscription bandwagon over the last few years, and few people are willing to pay a subscription to more than one or two. If I can play for free and buy expansions now and again then I'm far more likely to play another online game then if I'm paying the same per month as someone who plays for forty hours a week.
But most of the cost of solid rocket motors is the fuel, so making them reusable doesn't save much on launch costs.
From what I remember, NASA would probably save money if they stopped recovering the SRBs and just built new ones each time. They're basically just big metal tubes which require a lot of refurbishing before they're ready to fly again, so there's a substantial cost to reusing them.
Didn't we learn from the Space Shuttle that reusable spacecraft cost just as much to launch as rebuilding a new craft every time?
Considering that a shuttle orbiter alone costs over $2,000,000,000 while a single shuttle launch costs around $150,000,000, the answer would have to be no. Most of the cost of the shuttle program is fixed costs like maintaining KSC which have to be paid regardless of whether the shuttle flies and don't change much with increased flight rates up to a dozen or so per year.
Only the engine cluster is designed to be 'reusable' -it separates from the first stage fuel tank after booster separation.
Considering that the engines are probably 90% of the cost of the first stage, that makes sense; empty fuel tanks are cheap compared to rocket engines.
Does it tell you how to solve the "700MB per 6 hours" speed limit win7 suffers when trying to copy files across a wireless network?
Probably because there isn't one. While the first thing I did after buying a Windows-7 laptop was to configure it to dual-boot into Linux for anything other than games, I've had no problems with wireless performance, including downloading tens of gigabytes of games from Steam.
That's not to say that you couldn't have a crappy driver or some misconfiguration, but there's no such fundamental limit in the OS.
If you want to fix this information economy, you need to get control of the economy first, so that the money doesn't overwhelm the information.
So the problem is that the government has too much control of the economy so it's now more far efficient for corporations to buy politicians that to compete in the marketplace.
And the solution is to give the government _more_ power over the economy?
If you don't want corporations buying politicians to pass laws that favor them, then the solution is to reduce the power of politicians to the point where they can't offer anything worth buying. Unless you really believe that communist states are _less_ corrupt than America.
What about apathetic voters?
You seem to leave them out of the picture. It's not like a democracy works with the people don't do anything.
Apathetic? Most of the Americans I know are seething with rage at the politicians on offer, so calling them 'apathetic' seems... odd.
What if we actually voted er, upright politicians into office that didn't get swayed/purchased by corporations?
And how would you do that?
First you need 'upright politicians' for the 'apathetic' voters to vote for, then you need them in a party which can actually get elected. Instead you get a choice between Obama and whatsisname, both of whom were only going to make things worse; it's like giving people a chance to vote on whether they eat cyanide or arsenic and then complaining that they're 'apathetic' when they decide they'd prefer not to eat either.
Nixon would've gotten off scotch-free and we'd have never gone to war with the Nazis?
Considering that the Nazis declared war on America, I don't think you'd have had much choice.
And when I read about Nixon his crimes always seem so quaint compared to what politicians routinely get away with today.
But the actual progress just isn't matching the hoped for predictions.
I remember some famous SF writer (I think it was Clarke) pointing out years ago that people tend to overestimate short-term progress and underestimate long term because our expectations tend to be linear while progress -- absent government regulation -- tends to be exponential.
Moore's law is an obvious example. Telling someone in 1990 that in twenty years you'd be able to buy the equivalent of a Cray Y-MP (which is about what my Atom-330 benchmarks as) for $50 and it would be about the slowest mass-market CPU on the market would probably have branded you insane.
I really do revel in the thought of an American BBC, just a shame we can't call it the ABC because of those bastards at Disney. The name isn't important, however, the content is!
Which is odd, because most people I know in Britain revel in the thought of the BBC tax being eliminated because they're sick of being forced to pay for a left-wing propaganda station even if they don't watch it. Fox News may be just as bad on the other side of the political spectrum (I don't know because I've never watched it) but at least the government doesn't force you to pay for it.
Right, because journalism doesn't cost a dime to the journalists.
Modern 'journalism' mostly seems to involve reprinting press releases and rewriting information from Wikipedia, so surely it can't cost that much?
There is good reason to worry about the loss of an independent source of information to an otherwise uninformed electorate.
True, but I thought we were talking about newspapers?
Configuring my security setting does not seem like a big deal. If you don't like Yahoo's new policy, walk.
I just checked my yahoo email account -- which I have paid a few bucks for over the years becasue I want the POP access -- and I can't see any sign of a way to turn this crap off. Turning it on for everyone is simply insane.
OTOH I have removed my psycho ex from the address book.
Indeed: I still have my psycho ex-girlfriend in my address book, and letting her know when I'm online is hardly high in my priority list.
Address books are for addresses, not for people I want to have access to all kinds of information about my life.
So go ahead, explain what exactly is inproper in Windows XP security model, preferably in comparison to "proper security models dating back decades".
A security model ain't worth crap when so many applications won't run if you're not an administrator. Linux security wouldn't be worth crap if you had to run as root and disable SELinux in order to run Tuxracer, but that's not required because security was built into Unix from the early days while Windows had no security worth speaking of until XP (yeah, NT did, but 99% of Windows users didn't run NT).
As for UAC, it's exactly the same as gksudo. Funny how no-one says the latter is worthless, though...
Probably because you're talking crap. People don't complain about gksudo because they hardly ever see it, and generally only do so when performing some kind of operation that absolutely requires admin priviledges; UAC comes up routinely when you run ordinary every day pre-Vista software and with some that's not even that old.
So let me get this straight, UAC is both:
1) Too easy to ignore as you just have to click 'yes' every time
2) Too intrusive as it pops up whenever a program requires administrative privileges
Sure, don't bother to respond to what I post when you can just make stuff up instead.
At least as far as point 2 goes, mac os and many linux distros are "worse" as they not only prompt, but require your user name and password.
Like that.
Linux occasionally asks for my password or the root password (depending on the distribution) when I'm performing some kind of system maintenance. The only time it asks for a user name is when I log in.
Windows asks me to click yes to allow SuperFoobarScreensaver wants to access the program files directory; how the hell is anyone supposed to know whether it's trying to update a configuration file that the dumb developer stuck in the program files directory, or install spyware into IE? Worse, it happens so often running ordinary everyday software that pressing 'yes' becomes second nature.
Windows 7 has an OK kernel with a bazillion lines of crud on top in order to support old software that thinks it's running on a single-tasking DOS with no security. That is why Windows will take at least a decade to be anywhere near as secure as a real operating system, because it has to burn off the crud first.
The concept of Windows's UAC is fine, it just boils down to poor UI design.
Which is what I said.