I think regular cast members from almost every current sci-fi show has either appeared on Stargate or have had a Stargate regular cast member guest star on their show. It's like the freaking nexus of sci-fi tv (though it's perhaps best explained by the fact that it's in its 9th season, a worthy accomplishment for North American sci-fi television, and more then enough time for sci-fi friendly actors to get passed around)
After the jpg incident, wouldn't you tend to look at the code handling other image formats for similar problems? Guess not.
Would you apply the same logic/I'm cool because I bash Microsoft stupidity to Mozilla/Firefox?
For example in 2002 an arbitrary code execution vulerability was found in Mozilla's PNG code (155222). That obviously set off people searching for other image vulnerabilities, which resulted in them finding Mozilla's GIF decoder was also a flawed, allowing for arbitrary code execution (157989). By your logic once that initial alarm goes out the code should be checked and all bugs will be found; if bugs are still present in that module (or in Microsoft's case, in a completely seperate but similar one) then it represents a huge failure by the organization. Now since open source projects have tens of thousands of eyes to check source code once a flaw has been found, I'd assume it applies equally to Mozilla. Lets test that theory.
Fast forward to 2004, and the PNG library still has arbitrary code vulnerabilities (251381). Given that people knew as earlier as 2002 that there had been PNG vulnerabilities, WHY did they not find this one until 2 years later.
Fast forward to 2005, and this time it's the GIF code. Now we already knew the GIF library had problems 3 years ago, yet somehow an arbitrary code execution flaw, which existed from the very beginning of the Mozilla project (1998), is found (mfsa2005-30). This dangerous exploit has been sitting in open source code for 7 years. 3 years ago attention was brought to that very module for the very same kind of exploit. And yet it wasn't found until just a few months ago. By the logic of Nos, the Mozilla Foundation, and everyone who has checked the code, are morons. Or perhaps Nos has some doublethink to get himself out of the Microsoft bashing to make himself cool hole he dug himself.
And you expect better from a guy who spends the first page describing 3 different reasons why his inability to execute an HTTP download is a problem of the software he hasn't even installed yet (even throwing in an evil Microsoft conspiracy one liner)?
Same old GNU/God Complex
on
Drafting GPL3
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· Score: 2, Funny
1 of the 4 listed purposes of the GPL is "The GPL is the Literary Work of Richard M. Stallman" (which explains how the glory of Stallman is the lighting beacon of freedom). Does this guys ego ever take a break?
Third, he's an idiot Intel will have x86-64pentiums out well before apple completes there switch to Intel.
The Apple transition kit states that it includes a "3.6Ghz P4" of some sort. That would most likely point to Intel's fastest 600 series processor, the 660, a 3.6Ghz "64bit" Pentium 4 (it uses the EM64T extension architecture which is compatible with AMD64 and thus can run the existing 64bit version of Windows). You can pick one up for about $620 off Newegg.
So now every single page on every single website has to have a reload script to cover for a security flaw in one browser? Isn't that like saying every road should have big bouncy rubber guard rails because one retarded guy can't drive straight? The Firefox fanboys are really scrapping the bottom of the barrel to find a reason why it's anyones fault but their favorite browser.
What you'll be getting is a pretty standard PC, only in addition to the off white case there will either be a special chip or a special BIOS extension that is required by OS X to run (sort of like way back in the DOS days, when IBM killed their IBM-DOS by making certain utilities, like the BASIC interpretter, only run properly if they detected an authentic IBM BIOS).
Since it's just a hidden extension, Windows won't have a problem running on "Mac" PC hardware; unless someone reverse engineers Tiger86 to figure out the detection routines, Windows won't even be able to tell the difference.
Right on the first one. As The Register reports, Apple is now offering a "Developer Transition Kit" for the move to Intel, which includes the x86 build of Tiger and a 3.6GHz Intel Pentium 4.
Unlikely. I'd be willing to bet what you'll see is a standard Pentium processor of some description, put onto an Apple made motherboard that uses a standard Intel chipset. The only difference between it and any other PC on the market will be a special BIOS (that has some arbitrary useless feature to justify its existence) that only allows OS X to run on a "Mac" PC (and no, just putting your existing PC into an off white case won't trick the software protection).
Obviously you have never bought anything from Apple that required labor. Example, upgrading RAM:
You decide to buy a Mac Mini (40GB), but you want them to upgrade it from 256MB (DDR333) to 1GB (DDR333) before shipping it. Now the Mini has only 1 memory slot, so it's a straight replacement job.
First we subtract the memory from the unit. Since we assume Apple uses good parts, the brand and type used likely retails for about $25 (1x 256MB DDR333).
Net Part Cost: -$25
Now we'll add the 1GB stick. Again, we'll give Apple credit and assume they are giving us the good stuff, so the stick will cost about $125 retail (1x 1024MB DDR333).
Net Part Cost: $100
Now since we want to determine the labor cost, we're going to subtract the net cost of the parts from the total cost of the upgrade as quoted by Apple, which is $225.
Labor Cost: $125
Now these calculations are obviously a bit biased toward Apple - we've assumed that even the budget Mac Mini isn't getting budget parts, and we haven't taken into account that Apple is going to be getting these parts for cheaper then retail, meaning that our estimated net parts cost is almost certainly higher then it really is (meaning the labor cost we've determined is lower then it really is). Despite this however we still end up with the rather amazing figure of $125 for a guy at the Apple factory to put in a single stick of DDR ram before the unit gets shipped out. Now we'll assume he does it in the least efficient way possible: taking an already packaged Mini, carefully taking it out of the box, opening it up, taking out the old stick, placing the new stick in, and finally repacking it. Such a procedure might take as long as 30 minutes to complete. Combined with our labor cost figure, we can determine that Apple pays their low level assembly workers approximately $250/hour, or roughly $500,000 per year (plus benefits).
Please mod parent up. This is the heart of the issue. As will likely be presented and proven in this case:
Apple knew its substandard battery would not hold up to its claims for long after purchase in many cases, yet still chose to push the misleading battery life specification.
Made the battery impossible to legitamately replace, and from dissections they might have even intentionally tried to prevent user replacements (why are so many iPod models pumped full of a sticky paste around the battery area, when other similar electronics need no such adhesive to hold the battery in place)
As documented by at least one person (the iPod battery secret guy), it seems Apple had a corperate policy in effect from their tech support lines down to their retail stores to tell consumers the only way to service their dead battery was to buy a new iPod from Apple. (as pointed out by parent, this is the real gotcha)
The Cinema line only has a 400:1 contrast ratio (and 16 ms response, which is acceptable but not great). 400:1 contrast on a LCD produces lackluster color at best. I've actually found a good test for LCD contrast (or rather, for the LCD owner who wants to fool himself into thinking his image is "just as good") - go to hotmail's inbox, and make sure you have at least one unread item and one read item (the unread item is highlighted). On a CRT, the difference between the yellow highlighted item and the white regular item is perfectly clear (they are two totally different colors). On a 500:1 or worse display you have to be looking straight at it to even perceive a difference, and even then it's very hard to make out that the unread item is supposed to be yellow.
Well according to what Nintendo announced long before the DS came out, it's a whole new product (like the VirtualBoy) - if successful (which it appears to be) they would hold off the release of a "GBA2" until 2007. If it flopped the "GBA2" would come out in 2006. The DS is really just another experiment by Nintendo to create new types of games. Shigeru Miyamoto and co don't seem to like the same game, incrementally better graphics that have taken over the industry (admit it, with few exceptions every single PS2 game is really just one of about 10 games, but with different graphics and sounds).
IE was only ahead because of the way it locked people into writing for the funny way it displays pages
Funny, that sounds like another browser I know. Long before Microsoft entered the browser arena to make Windows a viable internet machine out of the box, a company called Netscape was destroying competition in the browser world with it's "embrace and extend" philosophy. Rather then follow the standards of the day, Netscape proceeded to liberally "enhance" their browser with quirks only they supported (most infamous being the blink tag). With their vision of turning the web into a form of TV (where the webpage controlled your computer with crap like popups, window resizing and statusbar changing) they managed to create a browser that had lots of interesting (or stupid, depending on your view) things for web developers to do, but was completely incompatible with every other browser. Their monopoly got so bad webservers where being coded to look for the "Mozilla" string at the beginning of the agent field, rejecting people who didn't use the one browser because pages designed for it wouldn't render correctly on standard browsers. This forced the competition to modify their user agent just to get a page (even Internet Explorer had to identify itself as "Mozilla"), at which point they still had to try and emulate Netscapes propritary extensions.
Now by Netscape 3 the rest of the original browser market had been crushed by anti-competitive practices. However a new browser was appearing at this time, the first viable version of Internet Explorer, IE 3. Unlike smaller companies that Netscape could push around, IE was being made by a company with enough money to play (and eventually beat) Netscape at it's own game. IE 3 matched a great deal of Netscapes extended standard, then proceeded to do some extending of their own. By the next major incarnation, Netscape/IE 4, Explorer was not only playing Netscape's game, it was playing it just as well if not better then the master. What really helped though was that at this point there was an actual standards body appearing, creating CSS as a web standard. IE, in addition to creating it's own extensions, proceeded to try and support it (creating the first viable implimentation). Now while the IE CSS implimentation is today seen as quirky and incomplete, back then it looked quite good compared to Netscape, who apparently believing they where still living in the one browser world where Netscape could simply define a new standard whenever they wanted to kill competition, had proceeded to try making their own new standard, implimenting CSS as less then an after thought (where as IE has problems rendering CSS exactly to spec, Netscape just plain crashed on all but the simplest code). This created a market where the choice was between a browser that came on your computer, rendered its webpages and the webpages of the competition correctly, and was generally quite stable, vs a browser you had to download, didn't render half of new webpages correctly, and had a habbit of randomly crashing (CSS was sometimes the cause, but especially during the 4.5 period you could expect at least 1 crash for no reason each session). Netscape sealed the deal when they waited forever to release Netscape 6 (they skipped the 5 generation, allowing Microsoft to get a further leg up), which when finally released turned out to be the least stable browser ever concieved by man (for reasons unknown Netscape dropped their code base and wrote 6 from scratch - the successor to Netscape, Mozilla, was based on the actually usable 4.x codebase)
Very interesting. I was right, Google seems to have have multiple formats for what visually looks like the same result page. The underlying format determines if and how Google tracks your clicks. One factor that may play a part is the date - the unique ID in the cookie includes a checksummed date of when the ID was created. Some Google features (like the book excerpts) have already been shown to check this date and give different results based on whether your cookie appears to be an existing cookie, or if it appears that you just created it a short time ago. It would take some time to verify, but I would hypothize Google only starts including link tracking code once the cookie is old enough to mark you as a legitimate or otherwise worthwhile user.
Tracking on the normal search page is done a little differently (though perhaps they just have some server side code that returns different methods based on browser). As you know, account or no account, all Google pages attempt to implant a "never expires" cookie that has a unique ID if a unique ID is not already found on your system. The ID is used to allow Google to associate all requests with you (and if you have an account, multiple computers can be tied to a single person/ID).
For the regular search, rather then using a redirect script, it seems to use onmousedown javascript (in this way the link you click is a "direct" link to the URL). The mousedown script causes your webbrowser to load a hidden image (which is really a tracking image, the kind used by spammers in their email to report back to them). If you examine the javascript it sends the link you clicked, your unique ID, the position on the page the link was ("1" for the first link and so on) and two type parameters (ct="res" and sa="T") encoded as the URL for the fake image.
OS/2 was ahead of it's time, containing many of the features that would later help Windows 95 (and no, it didn't come out too soon to take advantage of them), however it was hobbled by IBM's lack of internet in the home market.
First, while IBM had a full licence deal to use Windows 3.1 (a bit remaining from the whole OS2/NT partnership), they made no real effort to make it work well inside their fancy 32bit OS (starting Windows programs resulted in a copy of Windows 3.1 actually being booted up just for that program). The care taken for supporting old DOS programs (which they didn't need Microsoft's help for) was even worse - while Windows 95 needed tweaking options too, OS/2 presented users with a huge checklist that had to have been literally copied straight from the constant names in the C header file (the option names even included the underscore). The options where so badly labeled that even an expert had a hard time figuring out what each option did, let alone what option should be used to get a program to run. It would have taken less then a day for someone at IBM to actually enter user readable options to run DOS applications - but IBM didn't give a shit.
Now poor DOS and Windows 3.1 support wouldn't completely doom OS/2. Even Windows 95 only included the (not always working) support so that users and companies could migrate to native 32bit apps. What really helped kill OS/2 Warp was that IBM was still sitting on it's high horse, demanding developers pay them just for the privilege of writing native OS/2 [Warp] applications. In the end OS/2 Warp suffered the self inflicted fate of many of Microsoft's competitors - fantastic platform, pity I can't actually run anything on it (Apple, despite having a strong niche market, fell into much the same trap in the late 80s when it got full of itself and bullied it's own third party developers, reducing them from a 10% market share to just 3% in a matter of years)
It sure didn't help IBM. Remember, even by the early Windows days IBM was still the bigger company with far more weight to pull around, yet their dislike of the personal computing market (vs Microsoft's strategy of making the market even bigger - "I want my next computer preinstalled", which opened the market up to non-hobbyists; "Internet out of the box Windows 95" [bundled TCP/IP stack, dialup networking and browser, all of which used to be seperately purchased accessories], which let the PC directly compete in the new internet user market, much to the displease of Oracle and their vision of an internet dumb terminal, and various other visions like WebTV) doomed them to failure no matter how much money and "you can't go wrong with IBM" they had to throw around.
While capital and existing marketability help (Apple shows us the second can be leveraged quite a bit), the perhaps more correct factors are accessability and "it does it now, not later"
Microsoft isn't the one relying on it, they just are supporting it to a degree because they understand the marketing importance of having backwards compatiblity for all the stuff people use (from a Joe user/Bob Company perspective, what's the point of "upgrading" to the latest version if suddenly your software/hardware stops working). Microsoft actually has got a lot of flak for making things tighter; a big one being the 9X->NT path that made a lot of API calls do a better job of checking parameters, resulting in sloppy programs being broken. More recently the SP2 update broke programs that mess with memory like a virus/exploit. So make up your mind - are they bad for maintaining backward compatiblity that is less secure/less stable, or are they bad for tightening things up and thus breaking a few badly written 3rd party programs people rely on.
Yes, yes I do. Especially considering what Macs are "supposed" to be good at - graphics and media work. 512MB? I can use up that much memory working on just one image in Photoshop. My *3 year old* machine has had 1GB from the start to avoid paging when working with several memory hungry editing apps at once. There is no excuse for a PC/Mac costing more then $1000 not to have at least 1GB of memory in this day in age.
Maybe Apple is trying to offer some nostalgia for those pre-OS X days when it seemed like you could never start up Netscape if another app (usually Quark in my case) was running (and this is *after* doubling the memory). More likely though I'd guess Apple knows that no sane person is going to run a modern (dual processor!) machine on 512MB of RAM - they're just doing it so that people end up paying for Apple's insanely expensive memory upgrades (go do the math for yourself, the guy who spends all of 2 minutes putting in that extra stick of memory must be paid more then some CEOs)
Don't joke about that. I've seen a review of Office for Mac where the guy used most of the time to go on and on about how the cardboard box the product came in wasn't as good as the previous versions packaging.
I = Isolation Basically it means that when multiple users are performing operations on the database they should not be able to screw each other up (for example if two users execute an UPDATE on a table, they should not overlap and produce crazy results).
To be technical MySQL does perform the basics of isolation - individual operations are properly isolated from one another by way of ugly full table locking (this is why MySQL [the default MyISAM tables] does so poorly at concurrent inserts and other write operations). However to properly fufill the requirements of isolation you need to actually be able to do entire human operations in isolation. For example executing a series of SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations (that together do an actual job) knowing that the data won't change right in the middle. These are called transactions, and you'll need to switch to InnoDB tables to get them (InnoDB also has row level locking).
As for other databases that pass that ACID test, well basically all of them do. MySQL is the exception to the rule, owing mainly to the fact that it's more of a fast selecting engine with database like features, instead of a stripped down database built for speed. Off the top of my head SapDB is GPL (and ACID of course), though all of the other big open source databases I can think of are under some other more free licence (Firebird [ACID], Postgre [ACID], SQLite [ACID!])
Basic concept? Steve Jobs gave Xerox some Apple stock to let his engineers hang around for a few days in their research department. The result was that the 1984 Macintosh had an operating system that looked almost 100% identical to the 1981 Xerox Star (though the Star cost almost 7 times as much and was directed at businesses). Not only did it have the exact same SDI interface design with things like a desktop holding space for icons and a shared menu bar at the top, it even had Star's "Wastebasket" (same name on both systems) in the same place, at the lower right corner of the screen.
Of course that didn't stop Apple from sueing a bunch of companies for patent infringement (they patented the "look" of their OS) back in the 80s, including Microsoft's own 16bit version of Windows which wasn't even close (unless you count the mere existence of icons in a GUI, in which case a lot of other companies had Apple beat). Today a lot of Apple's "look" patents have expired, though they have filed new ones which ironically include a patent for the wastebasket.
Your perception of "data integrity" seems very limited, either that or you don't a thing and you're just bullshitting based on your knowledge of "data integrity" in other fields.
In the professional world of databases data integrity is ensured by the ACID compliance of the database. In your post though you only seem to understand the C in ACID, "Consistency". The problem is that out of the box MySQL will often fail the Atomicity and Durability requirements of ACID (and doesn't even attempt I). That means the database or a table can be left in a corrupt, unrecoverable state if interrupted by any number of things (you don't just lose the latest additions, you lose everything, forcing you to restore from a hard backup as grandparent did).
To properly understand this, look at another area where ACID is used. If you are using a disk formatted with FAT32 or ext2 and your computer crashes, you'll end up being forced to run scandisk/e2fsck, which has to go over the entire disk structure looking for errors. In many cases the errors it finds (due to an operation being interrupted leaving the disk in a corrupt state) are not recoverable and if left unchanged will mess things up even more. So you get little chunks of the disk (CHK files when using scandisk) that the system has no idea what to do with (databases are far more interconnected, making one unrecognizable element break the whole thing). On the other hand more modern disk systems (NTFS and ext3) borrow methods from the database world, resulting in a disk system that is ACID compliant. When the system crashes or is rebooted by a power failure, it doesn't spend 20 minutes checking the disk for errors it won't even be able properly fix, it just uses it's Durability feature to "instantly" restore the disk to the last good state (on a standard ext3 formatted 7200rpm drive "instantly" is less then 2 seconds).
The only way to make MySQL ACID compliant (and thus durable enough to store information that's actually important) is to use InnoDB tables instead of MySQL's fast default MyISAM tables. Even then, by InnoDB's own documentation, its particular form of ACID compliance is heavily dependent on how and when the OS writes to disk - you can still end up with unrecoverable InnoDB tables if the system crashes, making InnoDB more a device for its transactional programming capabilities and row level locking then it's long term data integrity features (A, C and I). With real world databases a crash simply means you lose the latest changes, not the whole table (to be redundent, the D in ACID, Durability).
See the article here a week back about what the GNU folks in charge of the GPL are writing into the next version. Combined with the new interpretation of GPL fonts they're coming up with, it's going to make even normal OSS proponents start to get really scared of the damage GNU can do to the community.
Slashdot Mirror
I think regular cast members from almost every current sci-fi show has either appeared on Stargate or have had a Stargate regular cast member guest star on their show. It's like the freaking nexus of sci-fi tv (though it's perhaps best explained by the fact that it's in its 9th season, a worthy accomplishment for North American sci-fi television, and more then enough time for sci-fi friendly actors to get passed around)
After the jpg incident, wouldn't you tend to look at the code handling other image formats for similar problems? Guess not. Would you apply the same logic/I'm cool because I bash Microsoft stupidity to Mozilla/Firefox?
For example in 2002 an arbitrary code execution vulerability was found in Mozilla's PNG code (155222). That obviously set off people searching for other image vulnerabilities, which resulted in them finding Mozilla's GIF decoder was also a flawed, allowing for arbitrary code execution (157989). By your logic once that initial alarm goes out the code should be checked and all bugs will be found; if bugs are still present in that module (or in Microsoft's case, in a completely seperate but similar one) then it represents a huge failure by the organization. Now since open source projects have tens of thousands of eyes to check source code once a flaw has been found, I'd assume it applies equally to Mozilla. Lets test that theory.
Fast forward to 2004, and the PNG library still has arbitrary code vulnerabilities (251381). Given that people knew as earlier as 2002 that there had been PNG vulnerabilities, WHY did they not find this one until 2 years later.
Fast forward to 2005, and this time it's the GIF code. Now we already knew the GIF library had problems 3 years ago, yet somehow an arbitrary code execution flaw, which existed from the very beginning of the Mozilla project (1998), is found (mfsa2005-30). This dangerous exploit has been sitting in open source code for 7 years. 3 years ago attention was brought to that very module for the very same kind of exploit. And yet it wasn't found until just a few months ago. By the logic of Nos, the Mozilla Foundation, and everyone who has checked the code, are morons. Or perhaps Nos has some doublethink to get himself out of the Microsoft bashing to make himself cool hole he dug himself.
And you expect better from a guy who spends the first page describing 3 different reasons why his inability to execute an HTTP download is a problem of the software he hasn't even installed yet (even throwing in an evil Microsoft conspiracy one liner)?
1 of the 4 listed purposes of the GPL is "The GPL is the Literary Work of Richard M. Stallman" (which explains how the glory of Stallman is the lighting beacon of freedom). Does this guys ego ever take a break?
Third, he's an idiot Intel will have x86-64pentiums out well before apple completes there switch to Intel.
The Apple transition kit states that it includes a "3.6Ghz P4" of some sort. That would most likely point to Intel's fastest 600 series processor, the 660, a 3.6Ghz "64bit" Pentium 4 (it uses the EM64T extension architecture which is compatible with AMD64 and thus can run the existing 64bit version of Windows). You can pick one up for about $620 off Newegg.
So now every single page on every single website has to have a reload script to cover for a security flaw in one browser? Isn't that like saying every road should have big bouncy rubber guard rails because one retarded guy can't drive straight? The Firefox fanboys are really scrapping the bottom of the barrel to find a reason why it's anyones fault but their favorite browser.
What you'll be getting is a pretty standard PC, only in addition to the off white case there will either be a special chip or a special BIOS extension that is required by OS X to run (sort of like way back in the DOS days, when IBM killed their IBM-DOS by making certain utilities, like the BASIC interpretter, only run properly if they detected an authentic IBM BIOS).
Since it's just a hidden extension, Windows won't have a problem running on "Mac" PC hardware; unless someone reverse engineers Tiger86 to figure out the detection routines, Windows won't even be able to tell the difference.
Right on the first one. As The Register reports, Apple is now offering a "Developer Transition Kit" for the move to Intel, which includes the x86 build of Tiger and a 3.6GHz Intel Pentium 4.
Unlikely. I'd be willing to bet what you'll see is a standard Pentium processor of some description, put onto an Apple made motherboard that uses a standard Intel chipset. The only difference between it and any other PC on the market will be a special BIOS (that has some arbitrary useless feature to justify its existence) that only allows OS X to run on a "Mac" PC (and no, just putting your existing PC into an off white case won't trick the software protection).
Obviously you have never bought anything from Apple that required labor. Example, upgrading RAM:
You decide to buy a Mac Mini (40GB), but you want them to upgrade it from 256MB (DDR333) to 1GB (DDR333) before shipping it. Now the Mini has only 1 memory slot, so it's a straight replacement job.
First we subtract the memory from the unit. Since we assume Apple uses good parts, the brand and type used likely retails for about $25 (1x 256MB DDR333).
Net Part Cost: -$25
Now we'll add the 1GB stick. Again, we'll give Apple credit and assume they are giving us the good stuff, so the stick will cost about $125 retail (1x 1024MB DDR333).
Net Part Cost: $100
Now since we want to determine the labor cost, we're going to subtract the net cost of the parts from the total cost of the upgrade as quoted by Apple, which is $225.
Labor Cost: $125
Now these calculations are obviously a bit biased toward Apple - we've assumed that even the budget Mac Mini isn't getting budget parts, and we haven't taken into account that Apple is going to be getting these parts for cheaper then retail, meaning that our estimated net parts cost is almost certainly higher then it really is (meaning the labor cost we've determined is lower then it really is). Despite this however we still end up with the rather amazing figure of $125 for a guy at the Apple factory to put in a single stick of DDR ram before the unit gets shipped out. Now we'll assume he does it in the least efficient way possible: taking an already packaged Mini, carefully taking it out of the box, opening it up, taking out the old stick, placing the new stick in, and finally repacking it. Such a procedure might take as long as 30 minutes to complete. Combined with our labor cost figure, we can determine that Apple pays their low level assembly workers approximately $250/hour, or roughly $500,000 per year (plus benefits).
Or he's blind, or he's a blind fanatic.
The Cinema line only has a 400:1 contrast ratio (and 16 ms response, which is acceptable but not great). 400:1 contrast on a LCD produces lackluster color at best. I've actually found a good test for LCD contrast (or rather, for the LCD owner who wants to fool himself into thinking his image is "just as good") - go to hotmail's inbox, and make sure you have at least one unread item and one read item (the unread item is highlighted). On a CRT, the difference between the yellow highlighted item and the white regular item is perfectly clear (they are two totally different colors). On a 500:1 or worse display you have to be looking straight at it to even perceive a difference, and even then it's very hard to make out that the unread item is supposed to be yellow.
Well according to what Nintendo announced long before the DS came out, it's a whole new product (like the VirtualBoy) - if successful (which it appears to be) they would hold off the release of a "GBA2" until 2007. If it flopped the "GBA2" would come out in 2006. The DS is really just another experiment by Nintendo to create new types of games. Shigeru Miyamoto and co don't seem to like the same game, incrementally better graphics that have taken over the industry (admit it, with few exceptions every single PS2 game is really just one of about 10 games, but with different graphics and sounds).
IE was only ahead because of the way it locked people into writing for the funny way it displays pages
Funny, that sounds like another browser I know. Long before Microsoft entered the browser arena to make Windows a viable internet machine out of the box, a company called Netscape was destroying competition in the browser world with it's "embrace and extend" philosophy. Rather then follow the standards of the day, Netscape proceeded to liberally "enhance" their browser with quirks only they supported (most infamous being the blink tag). With their vision of turning the web into a form of TV (where the webpage controlled your computer with crap like popups, window resizing and statusbar changing) they managed to create a browser that had lots of interesting (or stupid, depending on your view) things for web developers to do, but was completely incompatible with every other browser. Their monopoly got so bad webservers where being coded to look for the "Mozilla" string at the beginning of the agent field, rejecting people who didn't use the one browser because pages designed for it wouldn't render correctly on standard browsers. This forced the competition to modify their user agent just to get a page (even Internet Explorer had to identify itself as "Mozilla"), at which point they still had to try and emulate Netscapes propritary extensions.
Now by Netscape 3 the rest of the original browser market had been crushed by anti-competitive practices. However a new browser was appearing at this time, the first viable version of Internet Explorer, IE 3. Unlike smaller companies that Netscape could push around, IE was being made by a company with enough money to play (and eventually beat) Netscape at it's own game. IE 3 matched a great deal of Netscapes extended standard, then proceeded to do some extending of their own. By the next major incarnation, Netscape/IE 4, Explorer was not only playing Netscape's game, it was playing it just as well if not better then the master. What really helped though was that at this point there was an actual standards body appearing, creating CSS as a web standard. IE, in addition to creating it's own extensions, proceeded to try and support it (creating the first viable implimentation). Now while the IE CSS implimentation is today seen as quirky and incomplete, back then it looked quite good compared to Netscape, who apparently believing they where still living in the one browser world where Netscape could simply define a new standard whenever they wanted to kill competition, had proceeded to try making their own new standard, implimenting CSS as less then an after thought (where as IE has problems rendering CSS exactly to spec, Netscape just plain crashed on all but the simplest code). This created a market where the choice was between a browser that came on your computer, rendered its webpages and the webpages of the competition correctly, and was generally quite stable, vs a browser you had to download, didn't render half of new webpages correctly, and had a habbit of randomly crashing (CSS was sometimes the cause, but especially during the 4.5 period you could expect at least 1 crash for no reason each session). Netscape sealed the deal when they waited forever to release Netscape 6 (they skipped the 5 generation, allowing Microsoft to get a further leg up), which when finally released turned out to be the least stable browser ever concieved by man (for reasons unknown Netscape dropped their code base and wrote 6 from scratch - the successor to Netscape, Mozilla, was based on the actually usable 4.x codebase)
Very interesting. I was right, Google seems to have have multiple formats for what visually looks like the same result page. The underlying format determines if and how Google tracks your clicks. One factor that may play a part is the date - the unique ID in the cookie includes a checksummed date of when the ID was created. Some Google features (like the book excerpts) have already been shown to check this date and give different results based on whether your cookie appears to be an existing cookie, or if it appears that you just created it a short time ago. It would take some time to verify, but I would hypothize Google only starts including link tracking code once the cookie is old enough to mark you as a legitimate or otherwise worthwhile user.
Tracking on the normal search page is done a little differently (though perhaps they just have some server side code that returns different methods based on browser). As you know, account or no account, all Google pages attempt to implant a "never expires" cookie that has a unique ID if a unique ID is not already found on your system. The ID is used to allow Google to associate all requests with you (and if you have an account, multiple computers can be tied to a single person/ID).
For the regular search, rather then using a redirect script, it seems to use onmousedown javascript (in this way the link you click is a "direct" link to the URL). The mousedown script causes your webbrowser to load a hidden image (which is really a tracking image, the kind used by spammers in their email to report back to them). If you examine the javascript it sends the link you clicked, your unique ID, the position on the page the link was ("1" for the first link and so on) and two type parameters (ct="res" and sa="T") encoded as the URL for the fake image.
OS/2 was ahead of it's time, containing many of the features that would later help Windows 95 (and no, it didn't come out too soon to take advantage of them), however it was hobbled by IBM's lack of internet in the home market.
First, while IBM had a full licence deal to use Windows 3.1 (a bit remaining from the whole OS2/NT partnership), they made no real effort to make it work well inside their fancy 32bit OS (starting Windows programs resulted in a copy of Windows 3.1 actually being booted up just for that program). The care taken for supporting old DOS programs (which they didn't need Microsoft's help for) was even worse - while Windows 95 needed tweaking options too, OS/2 presented users with a huge checklist that had to have been literally copied straight from the constant names in the C header file (the option names even included the underscore). The options where so badly labeled that even an expert had a hard time figuring out what each option did, let alone what option should be used to get a program to run. It would have taken less then a day for someone at IBM to actually enter user readable options to run DOS applications - but IBM didn't give a shit.
Now poor DOS and Windows 3.1 support wouldn't completely doom OS/2. Even Windows 95 only included the (not always working) support so that users and companies could migrate to native 32bit apps. What really helped kill OS/2 Warp was that IBM was still sitting on it's high horse, demanding developers pay them just for the privilege of writing native OS/2 [Warp] applications. In the end OS/2 Warp suffered the self inflicted fate of many of Microsoft's competitors - fantastic platform, pity I can't actually run anything on it (Apple, despite having a strong niche market, fell into much the same trap in the late 80s when it got full of itself and bullied it's own third party developers, reducing them from a 10% market share to just 3% in a matter of years)
It sure didn't help IBM. Remember, even by the early Windows days IBM was still the bigger company with far more weight to pull around, yet their dislike of the personal computing market (vs Microsoft's strategy of making the market even bigger - "I want my next computer preinstalled", which opened the market up to non-hobbyists; "Internet out of the box Windows 95" [bundled TCP/IP stack, dialup networking and browser, all of which used to be seperately purchased accessories], which let the PC directly compete in the new internet user market, much to the displease of Oracle and their vision of an internet dumb terminal, and various other visions like WebTV) doomed them to failure no matter how much money and "you can't go wrong with IBM" they had to throw around.
While capital and existing marketability help (Apple shows us the second can be leveraged quite a bit), the perhaps more correct factors are accessability and "it does it now, not later"
Microsoft isn't the one relying on it, they just are supporting it to a degree because they understand the marketing importance of having backwards compatiblity for all the stuff people use (from a Joe user/Bob Company perspective, what's the point of "upgrading" to the latest version if suddenly your software/hardware stops working). Microsoft actually has got a lot of flak for making things tighter; a big one being the 9X->NT path that made a lot of API calls do a better job of checking parameters, resulting in sloppy programs being broken. More recently the SP2 update broke programs that mess with memory like a virus/exploit. So make up your mind - are they bad for maintaining backward compatiblity that is less secure/less stable, or are they bad for tightening things up and thus breaking a few badly written 3rd party programs people rely on.
Yes, yes I do. Especially considering what Macs are "supposed" to be good at - graphics and media work. 512MB? I can use up that much memory working on just one image in Photoshop. My *3 year old* machine has had 1GB from the start to avoid paging when working with several memory hungry editing apps at once. There is no excuse for a PC/Mac costing more then $1000 not to have at least 1GB of memory in this day in age.
Maybe Apple is trying to offer some nostalgia for those pre-OS X days when it seemed like you could never start up Netscape if another app (usually Quark in my case) was running (and this is *after* doubling the memory). More likely though I'd guess Apple knows that no sane person is going to run a modern (dual processor!) machine on 512MB of RAM - they're just doing it so that people end up paying for Apple's insanely expensive memory upgrades (go do the math for yourself, the guy who spends all of 2 minutes putting in that extra stick of memory must be paid more then some CEOs)
Don't joke about that. I've seen a review of Office for Mac where the guy used most of the time to go on and on about how the cardboard box the product came in wasn't as good as the previous versions packaging.
I = Isolation
Basically it means that when multiple users are performing operations on the database they should not be able to screw each other up (for example if two users execute an UPDATE on a table, they should not overlap and produce crazy results).
To be technical MySQL does perform the basics of isolation - individual operations are properly isolated from one another by way of ugly full table locking (this is why MySQL [the default MyISAM tables] does so poorly at concurrent inserts and other write operations). However to properly fufill the requirements of isolation you need to actually be able to do entire human operations in isolation. For example executing a series of SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations (that together do an actual job) knowing that the data won't change right in the middle. These are called transactions, and you'll need to switch to InnoDB tables to get them (InnoDB also has row level locking).
As for other databases that pass that ACID test, well basically all of them do. MySQL is the exception to the rule, owing mainly to the fact that it's more of a fast selecting engine with database like features, instead of a stripped down database built for speed. Off the top of my head SapDB is GPL (and ACID of course), though all of the other big open source databases I can think of are under some other more free licence (Firebird [ACID], Postgre [ACID], SQLite [ACID!])
Basic concept? Steve Jobs gave Xerox some Apple stock to let his engineers hang around for a few days in their research department. The result was that the 1984 Macintosh had an operating system that looked almost 100% identical to the 1981 Xerox Star (though the Star cost almost 7 times as much and was directed at businesses). Not only did it have the exact same SDI interface design with things like a desktop holding space for icons and a shared menu bar at the top, it even had Star's "Wastebasket" (same name on both systems) in the same place, at the lower right corner of the screen.
Of course that didn't stop Apple from sueing a bunch of companies for patent infringement (they patented the "look" of their OS) back in the 80s, including Microsoft's own 16bit version of Windows which wasn't even close (unless you count the mere existence of icons in a GUI, in which case a lot of other companies had Apple beat). Today a lot of Apple's "look" patents have expired, though they have filed new ones which ironically include a patent for the wastebasket.
Your perception of "data integrity" seems very limited, either that or you don't a thing and you're just bullshitting based on your knowledge of "data integrity" in other fields.
In the professional world of databases data integrity is ensured by the ACID compliance of the database. In your post though you only seem to understand the C in ACID, "Consistency". The problem is that out of the box MySQL will often fail the Atomicity and Durability requirements of ACID (and doesn't even attempt I). That means the database or a table can be left in a corrupt, unrecoverable state if interrupted by any number of things (you don't just lose the latest additions, you lose everything, forcing you to restore from a hard backup as grandparent did).
To properly understand this, look at another area where ACID is used. If you are using a disk formatted with FAT32 or ext2 and your computer crashes, you'll end up being forced to run scandisk/e2fsck, which has to go over the entire disk structure looking for errors. In many cases the errors it finds (due to an operation being interrupted leaving the disk in a corrupt state) are not recoverable and if left unchanged will mess things up even more. So you get little chunks of the disk (CHK files when using scandisk) that the system has no idea what to do with (databases are far more interconnected, making one unrecognizable element break the whole thing). On the other hand more modern disk systems (NTFS and ext3) borrow methods from the database world, resulting in a disk system that is ACID compliant. When the system crashes or is rebooted by a power failure, it doesn't spend 20 minutes checking the disk for errors it won't even be able properly fix, it just uses it's Durability feature to "instantly" restore the disk to the last good state (on a standard ext3 formatted 7200rpm drive "instantly" is less then 2 seconds).
The only way to make MySQL ACID compliant (and thus durable enough to store information that's actually important) is to use InnoDB tables instead of MySQL's fast default MyISAM tables. Even then, by InnoDB's own documentation, its particular form of ACID compliance is heavily dependent on how and when the OS writes to disk - you can still end up with unrecoverable InnoDB tables if the system crashes, making InnoDB more a device for its transactional programming capabilities and row level locking then it's long term data integrity features (A, C and I). With real world databases a crash simply means you lose the latest changes, not the whole table (to be redundent, the D in ACID, Durability).
See the article here a week back about what the GNU folks in charge of the GPL are writing into the next version. Combined with the new interpretation of GPL fonts they're coming up with, it's going to make even normal OSS proponents start to get really scared of the damage GNU can do to the community.