Microsoft will be announcing further products in their "Reloaded" range which will include Office Reloaded, Visual Studio Reloaded, Outlook Reloaded and The Browser, Reloaded.
Yeah, but when a Linux/UNIX admin patches their system for Sendmail, they know it's going to patch and fix Sendmail for that vulnerability and not break anything else. End of story.
When a Microsoft admin patches their system for the latest Outlook exploit, that occurs because the Internet Explorer component has a bug which is exploitable because the Microsoft Messenger system is broken due to a change in API on the.net model that was meant to work in such and such as way with DRM but couldn't contact the Microsoft WindowsUpdate site to automatically download a component needed to launch Microsoft Windows Media Player. Seriously, you patch something on Microsoft Windows and break something else. At least with other systems you patch a problem, and it's patched. If another problem comes along, fair enough, but why don't you place the blame with shitty development and testing processes that focus on marketing and revenues and allowing "patches" to be released (along with even more additions to draconian licensing agreements, which you must accept to recieve a CRITICAL UPDATE) despite not being fully compatible with other components of the operating system nevermind just other applications! And that isn't the end of the story with Microsoft; there's always something else...
Slightly offtopic, but if you look at the groups here you can see the start of some very interesting technologies being discussed through newsgroups.
It's a shame they seem to tail off around 1995, it would be nice to see some serious newsgroup discussions that occurred during the past seven years... although this lack of serious discussion may coincide with AOL'ers getting newsgroups access.
This is incredibly good news! For anyone having the slightest worry about whether SCO really might have had something with their licensing thing, today it is clear.
These people are talking directly from their arses, and clearly don't take the whole idea of "law" particularly seriously. It's great to see an argument like this come from them, it just confirms they are simply praying on people being baffled by the sheer magnitude of their outrageous claims that people think that they must certainly be true, because no one could seriously lie about it and keep such a straight face!
I just hope, once this is all over, that these clowns get together with the former Iraqi Information Minister and create the most awesome comedy ever. Let's pray though that the case against SCO is more successful than the war against Iraq, else it may not be us who are left laughing.
SCO today announced they own the intellectual property and distribution rights on the Big Mac, large fries and Coke. Apparently they are seeking legal advice on their next move, McDonalds has declined to comment. Burger King admit they had a deal with SCO to produce "large fries" but deny that their Pepsi infringed in any way with SCO's "Coke" licensing, and that they had a contract to serve Pepsi from a third party.
Why only a move from 32bit to 128bit addresses? I mean, I know there are a hell of a lot of assignable addresses through IPv6, but wouldn't it have made more sense (and be more futureproof) to just have an address that can be dynamic in length?
It is probably not regarded as a pressing issue to increase the range of addresses above 128bits, but then 32bits (and 640K RAM cough) seemed a lot at the time. As has been stated in previous comments, this addresses will eventually be consumed by even the most trivial of objects like light switches or microwave oven bells.
A similar point could be made for dates, where fixes for the year 2000 suddenly allowed dates up to 9999, but what about when we hit the year 10000? Sounds silly, yes, and no doubt we will have moved on to much bigger and better things by then... but what if, for example, we suddenly (within years) moved to a new style calendar system where we started counting from 18209 years ago? Yeah, the point for dates is probably stupid, but why not just let the date/address be any length it needs to be?
Just start with the lowest bit and then work towards the most significant bit that will uniquely identify an object? Perhaps this is unworkable, but it seems to make more sense than just relying on no one filling out the address space (again... will we never learn?) It also seems to follow logically from how the domain name system works where there is a hierarchy involved from some top level towards the actual machine address. I imagine I am missing some vital concept of addresses needing to be a fixed number of bits or something though, I haven't delved into it enough to understand exactly the issues involved.
There are definitely a number of games that stick out in my mind as taking up a significant amount of my time and thinking, and one in particular as taking up a significant portion of the LIFE.
For pure fun factor my favourite game would be Super Mario Kart (on the Super Nintendo, followed by the newer version on the GBA). This game was not only great to play against other people, you could also constantly challenge yourself in trials and trying to win the gold cups and get the faster speeds. It is a game that is almost timeless in its gameplay, and I still go back to it occasionally (albeit through an emulator now).
As a game to make me think I would say Civilisation 2 or Command and Conquer (or maybe Dune 2 somewhat earlier) were my thinking games. This is the type of game I would sit at and just HAVE to keep playing more until I got totally frustrated (such as the solo levels in C&C where there was no base building and an impossible mission to complete with just one guy). But with Civilisation 2 at least, this is one of the games that could actually make me stay up all night and not sleep before going into school (at the time).
Perhaps my most thoughtful game is Ultima 6, played on the Amiga. It was the only major game I played for sometime (being relatively young then) and I would spend days exploring dungeons and performing tasks, and occasionally would jump out of my skin or physically shake with excitement when roaming the depths of the dungeons some five or six levels below ground, suddenly stumbling across some magical graveyard or mystical talking statue.
Ultimately though, the game that has altered by life in ways that mere games should not has got to be an online game that has been around since 1989. Most people will have heard of MUDs and many will have their own favourites, but there is one I have played now for over eight years (arguably over ten). This game literally has affected me in numerous ways, including relationships and my education (a positive, mostly, and negative affect, mostly, respectively!) It is definitely the most emotionally submersive game I have ever been involved in, and one that I still go back to even now. This game is called Avalon (The Legend Lives), and has eaten up a not insignificant span of my life and definitely my money!
Beyond all these, more recent games I have enjoyed include Return To Castle Wolfenstein, SimCity 4 and Warcraft 3. Oh and an honourable mention must go to some recently discovered gems that I have enjoyed; KBounce and Frozen-Bubble (although they perhaps haven't exactly "affected" me in ways like the others have done).
I agree with your sentiment that Usenet is a much better place without all the spammers and particularly without all the users with an "AOL mentality" where they reply to each and every post with "me too" or "YOUR WRONG IM WRIGHT" etc.
A decade ago, it's fair to say only those who were technically minded were using the internet, perhaps it is even fair to say only those who were technically minded even KNEW of the internet back then. But that doesn't necessarily equate to intelligence.
Having Usenet as an easily accesible arena for free discussion is great, and if the ISPs are dragging the idiots away to their own forums, great. But what about all those really intelligent people who, even now in this internet age, haven't heard of usenet? Or who think the internet is the web?
Personally, I know a number of people who are incredibly clever and interesting with some great opinions and ideas. But they barely know how to fire up their web browser, nevermind even know about Usenet or how to go about accessing it. If you could bring these people into the fold without attracting the lame posts from people clearly out just to cause hassle, then Usenet would increase in value even more. At the moment it is (primarily) going to be the intelligent opinions of technically savvy users who will know how to post there, which is missing a massive portion of expression from a majority of people.
If Usenet was given a really good GUI, it would open it up more for those who didn't want to spend time setting up spam blocking email addresses, the news server, finding the right group for the dicussions and so on. Google Groups probably goes some way to doing this but will still attract spammers and the like.
If only there was a way in which newsgroup posts and authors could be moderated by their peers and based on a score they get you could set a threshold and only view posts above that threshold, to cut out the riff raff. It's an intriging idea that I cannot for the life of me believe I have see anywhere else, ever... It might just work, but is perhaps open to abuse... meta-moderation? I don't know, these ideas are just "off the top of my head". Such an improvement might go someway to increasing the awareness and popularity of Usenet though.
At work I am having to use a free mouse that came with the computer system, despite my insistance that a decent mouse would add to productivity we have ended up with this completely and utterly useless peice of crap (which is why it's only a fiver I guess).
Ignoring the fact that as a normal mouse this is already pretty bad (sticky and clicky buttons and badly formed shape in the palm), that little blue thing on top? Pointless! I don't know what muppet designed this thing but it is utterly unusable, basically it is trying to be a trendy new type of scroll wheel or something. But, major point number one, it isn't a button and doesn't count as a third middle click. All it does is goes up and down, not like a wheel but just like a thing that you can push up or down or leave to spring back to the centre.
This might (might!) have been a decent design, although I'm still doubtful even then, but basically when you go to "scroll" down or up, no matter how careful you are just to tap it up or down, it almost always scrolls right to the very end of the document. They claim this is better than the mouse wheel somehow!
Anyway, slightly back on topic, if the Apple mouse is basically this but with horizontal scrolling too, then it's gonna be crappy. The Apple idea did conjur up in my mind the idea of a mouse with a track ball where the wheel is at the moment. Although perhaps complicating matters somewhat, it's also logical (in my mind, ha) so that there are two degrees of movement through the mouse (somewhat like moving your head whilst moving your eyes at the same time). This could (amongst other more pratical things) be pretty cool for doing the walking through Doom3 (for example) whilst at the very same time "looking" around freely using the track ball.
If everyone stops doing SETI@home and moves to battling the SARS problem then we may miss a vital signal from outer space from an alien race that has a cure to SARS and all the other nasties roaming this planet!
Although it is unlikely to happen, if Microsoft did manage to buy SCO and more importantly their intellectual property, it might, might just be enough to push people AWAY from Windows and cause Microsoft bigger problems than they already have from the Open Source community. At the moment many people casually dislike Microsoft for it's business practices and products, but perhaps don't feel it is quite a big enough threat of totally dominating the market and completely wiping out the competition. If they suddenly had the tools to disrupt things in a bad way, it would perhaps push just that critical few (thousands) beyond the threshold where Linux et al really start to take off and gain acceptance even on the desktop.
It's all just speculation on my part of course, but like someone posted before, it's unlikely I suppose that Microsoft would get past the problems with holding a bigger monopoly on operating systems. If that was overlooked though I know I for one would begin pushing Linux, Mozilla, OpenOffice(.org) etc... to everyone I knew. That is, literally pay them to take these things up, as I already encourage them to utilize them where possible (even your average non techy computer user).
That would be just be sad, but I do have an uh, friend, who tried it within thirty seconds of reading the page. He desperately seeked one of the dozens of floppy disks that didn't work and promptly set about freeing the disk from its prison.
And for anyone else attempting to make this, a little warning. You only really have one chance at bending the metal parts, if you need to bend them back again they will generally fall off. As such, I am missing the little wing tips from the model.
Sad, sad, sad. I immediately disowned my friend after seeing this.
Launching a lawsuit against such a gigantic company like IBM who have orders of magnitude greater resources than yourselves was of course laughable. Do you regret accidentally releasing the statement to issue the lawsuit when in fact it wasn't April 1st (All Fool's Day) as you had first thought?
...have smashed all previous records on the size of small gaps between prime numbers
The size of small gaps? For a start they couldn't really "smash" the size of small gaps because then by definition they would no longer be small ones. But secondly how exactly can you smash all previous records on the size of the small gaps between the prime numbers when it is set to (and the whole theory based around) the gap being "2".
I'm not an expert by any means, but surely if what the story means is they have found more of these pairs (1000928397 and 1000928399 or something -- and no, I just made them up)... then, so what? Sure it's an achievement of sorts, but it doesn't really help? To really help then a proof that this does or doesn't go on to infinity is what is needed.
Anyone else notice a similarity of that guy on the advert with a certain (younger) William Gates? I think he might have had words with the advertising department, which is the real reason the advert was pulled (let's face it, an advert with misleading information isn't particularly unusual is it?) Wonder what the world would be like if he WAS obsolete though... (collapses into bliss).
Which is great news for the survival of your company. But tragic news for hackers.
Even if it were true that Microsoft platforms were secure and immune to outside vulnerbilities, their advertisement implies that hackers would become extinct using their platforms.
This should lead us to believe that anyone who cares to code or develop applications on a computer, or any company that wants to have or just use any applications post-Microsoft platform era, should no longer use their platforms as they make hackers extinct?
It is rather a catch-22 situation for Microsoft is it not, that their platform will prevent anyone from developing it further once hackers are obsolete (although with a perfectly performing system why would they need to develop it further?)
But thanks for the warning Microsoft, we should not develop for their platforms and must move to other platforms if we want to hack away at the system to create applications. How nice of them to advertise this fact.
I don't know the technical details but I would imagine that in a virtual world where everything worked in theory, you'd be right, parallel would be faster. It stands to reason that however fast you can get a serial link, you can just put it together with a few more and have a parallel one just as fast.
I think the problem(s) come when you have to take into account keeping parallel lines in synch with one another, accouting for lost bits, and breaking down/putting back together all the information at either end. This all adds up in overhead for a parallel connection, where a serial connection just lets the information go through the line with little or no pre/post processing or synching to worry about.
Adult TLDs are the answer, except for one small twist to the common idea that there should be a domain such as ".xxx" or whatever, to specify adult content. Personally I think this idea sucks, because what do you rate, and how do you rate, what is meant to be in that domain? There are just so many problems here because of the multitide of grey areas and issues with enforcement and so on, what is needed is a way to get domain holders to WANT to comply with protecting a child from "adult" content.
So, my little twist is simply to not have adult TLDs, but turn it on its head and have a TLD especially for websites that offer content suitable for children and minors to view. This is much, much easier to enforce (in my view), and those sites which wish to appeal to children will WANT to actively try and promote this domain, whereas an adult site may not wish to be "tainted" with the.xxx domain.
It also means we are not restricting the right of adults to set their own limits on what is acceptable and not acceptable, which I believe is a good thing. By offering sites a TLD which is suited to minors it would allow a parent to set up a browser to ONLY allow access to those sites.
Overall, I personally feel such a solution is viable, would be effective, and solve the problem without needing the restrictive measures against EVERYONE to appease those parents who do not monitor their child's internet usage.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft will be announcing further products in their "Reloaded" range which will include Office Reloaded, Visual Studio Reloaded, Outlook Reloaded and The Browser, Reloaded.
Yeah, but when a Linux/UNIX admin patches their system for Sendmail, they know it's going to patch and fix Sendmail for that vulnerability and not break anything else. End of story.
.net model that was meant to work in such and such as way with DRM but couldn't contact the Microsoft WindowsUpdate site to automatically download a component needed to launch Microsoft Windows Media Player. Seriously, you patch something on Microsoft Windows and break something else. At least with other systems you patch a problem, and it's patched. If another problem comes along, fair enough, but why don't you place the blame with shitty development and testing processes that focus on marketing and revenues and allowing "patches" to be released (along with even more additions to draconian licensing agreements, which you must accept to recieve a CRITICAL UPDATE) despite not being fully compatible with other components of the operating system nevermind just other applications! And that isn't the end of the story with Microsoft; there's always something else...
When a Microsoft admin patches their system for the latest Outlook exploit, that occurs because the Internet Explorer component has a bug which is exploitable because the Microsoft Messenger system is broken due to a change in API on the
Slightly offtopic, but if you look at the groups here you can see the start of some very interesting technologies being discussed through newsgroups.
It's a shame they seem to tail off around 1995, it would be nice to see some serious newsgroup discussions that occurred during the past seven years... although this lack of serious discussion may coincide with AOL'ers getting newsgroups access.
This is incredibly good news! For anyone having the slightest worry about whether SCO really might have had something with their licensing thing, today it is clear.
These people are talking directly from their arses, and clearly don't take the whole idea of "law" particularly seriously. It's great to see an argument like this come from them, it just confirms they are simply praying on people being baffled by the sheer magnitude of their outrageous claims that people think that they must certainly be true, because no one could seriously lie about it and keep such a straight face!
I just hope, once this is all over, that these clowns get together with the former Iraqi Information Minister and create the most awesome comedy ever. Let's pray though that the case against SCO is more successful than the war against Iraq, else it may not be us who are left laughing.
That's why Microsoft is worried, duh.
Although still in development and a bit buggy, it includes the basic functionality. I have been using it for a couple of months now.
;)
You were right about the buggy bit, it's only the 14th you know; you've been using it for two WEEKS not months...
SCO today announced they own the intellectual property and distribution rights on the Big Mac, large fries and Coke. Apparently they are seeking legal advice on their next move, McDonalds has declined to comment. Burger King admit they had a deal with SCO to produce "large fries" but deny that their Pepsi infringed in any way with SCO's "Coke" licensing, and that they had a contract to serve Pepsi from a third party.
The case begins...
Why only a move from 32bit to 128bit addresses? I mean, I know there are a hell of a lot of assignable addresses through IPv6, but wouldn't it have made more sense (and be more futureproof) to just have an address that can be dynamic in length?
It is probably not regarded as a pressing issue to increase the range of addresses above 128bits, but then 32bits (and 640K RAM cough) seemed a lot at the time. As has been stated in previous comments, this addresses will eventually be consumed by even the most trivial of objects like light switches or microwave oven bells.
A similar point could be made for dates, where fixes for the year 2000 suddenly allowed dates up to 9999, but what about when we hit the year 10000? Sounds silly, yes, and no doubt we will have moved on to much bigger and better things by then... but what if, for example, we suddenly (within years) moved to a new style calendar system where we started counting from 18209 years ago? Yeah, the point for dates is probably stupid, but why not just let the date/address be any length it needs to be?
Just start with the lowest bit and then work towards the most significant bit that will uniquely identify an object? Perhaps this is unworkable, but it seems to make more sense than just relying on no one filling out the address space (again... will we never learn?) It also seems to follow logically from how the domain name system works where there is a hierarchy involved from some top level towards the actual machine address. I imagine I am missing some vital concept of addresses needing to be a fixed number of bits or something though, I haven't delved into it enough to understand exactly the issues involved.
There are definitely a number of games that stick out in my mind as taking up a significant amount of my time and thinking, and one in particular as taking up a significant portion of the LIFE.
For pure fun factor my favourite game would be Super Mario Kart (on the Super Nintendo, followed by the newer version on the GBA). This game was not only great to play against other people, you could also constantly challenge yourself in trials and trying to win the gold cups and get the faster speeds. It is a game that is almost timeless in its gameplay, and I still go back to it occasionally (albeit through an emulator now).
As a game to make me think I would say Civilisation 2 or Command and Conquer (or maybe Dune 2 somewhat earlier) were my thinking games. This is the type of game I would sit at and just HAVE to keep playing more until I got totally frustrated (such as the solo levels in C&C where there was no base building and an impossible mission to complete with just one guy). But with Civilisation 2 at least, this is one of the games that could actually make me stay up all night and not sleep before going into school (at the time).
Perhaps my most thoughtful game is Ultima 6, played on the Amiga. It was the only major game I played for sometime (being relatively young then) and I would spend days exploring dungeons and performing tasks, and occasionally would jump out of my skin or physically shake with excitement when roaming the depths of the dungeons some five or six levels below ground, suddenly stumbling across some magical graveyard or mystical talking statue.
Ultimately though, the game that has altered by life in ways that mere games should not has got to be an online game that has been around since 1989. Most people will have heard of MUDs and many will have their own favourites, but there is one I have played now for over eight years (arguably over ten). This game literally has affected me in numerous ways, including relationships and my education (a positive, mostly, and negative affect, mostly, respectively!) It is definitely the most emotionally submersive game I have ever been involved in, and one that I still go back to even now. This game is called Avalon (The Legend Lives), and has eaten up a not insignificant span of my life and definitely my money!
Beyond all these, more recent games I have enjoyed include Return To Castle Wolfenstein, SimCity 4 and Warcraft 3. Oh and an honourable mention must go to some recently discovered gems that I have enjoyed; KBounce and Frozen-Bubble (although they perhaps haven't exactly "affected" me in ways like the others have done).
I agree with your sentiment that Usenet is a much better place without all the spammers and particularly without all the users with an "AOL mentality" where they reply to each and every post with "me too" or "YOUR WRONG IM WRIGHT" etc.
A decade ago, it's fair to say only those who were technically minded were using the internet, perhaps it is even fair to say only those who were technically minded even KNEW of the internet back then. But that doesn't necessarily equate to intelligence.
Having Usenet as an easily accesible arena for free discussion is great, and if the ISPs are dragging the idiots away to their own forums, great. But what about all those really intelligent people who, even now in this internet age, haven't heard of usenet? Or who think the internet is the web?
Personally, I know a number of people who are incredibly clever and interesting with some great opinions and ideas. But they barely know how to fire up their web browser, nevermind even know about Usenet or how to go about accessing it. If you could bring these people into the fold without attracting the lame posts from people clearly out just to cause hassle, then Usenet would increase in value even more. At the moment it is (primarily) going to be the intelligent opinions of technically savvy users who will know how to post there, which is missing a massive portion of expression from a majority of people.
If Usenet was given a really good GUI, it would open it up more for those who didn't want to spend time setting up spam blocking email addresses, the news server, finding the right group for the dicussions and so on. Google Groups probably goes some way to doing this but will still attract spammers and the like.
If only there was a way in which newsgroup posts and authors could be moderated by their peers and based on a score they get you could set a threshold and only view posts above that threshold, to cut out the riff raff. It's an intriging idea that I cannot for the life of me believe I have see anywhere else, ever... It might just work, but is perhaps open to abuse... meta-moderation? I don't know, these ideas are just "off the top of my head". Such an improvement might go someway to increasing the awareness and popularity of Usenet though.
At work I am having to use a free mouse that came with the computer system, despite my insistance that a decent mouse would add to productivity we have ended up with this completely and utterly useless peice of crap (which is why it's only a fiver I guess).
Ignoring the fact that as a normal mouse this is already pretty bad (sticky and clicky buttons and badly formed shape in the palm), that little blue thing on top? Pointless! I don't know what muppet designed this thing but it is utterly unusable, basically it is trying to be a trendy new type of scroll wheel or something. But, major point number one, it isn't a button and doesn't count as a third middle click. All it does is goes up and down, not like a wheel but just like a thing that you can push up or down or leave to spring back to the centre.
This might (might!) have been a decent design, although I'm still doubtful even then, but basically when you go to "scroll" down or up, no matter how careful you are just to tap it up or down, it almost always scrolls right to the very end of the document. They claim this is better than the mouse wheel somehow!
Anyway, slightly back on topic, if the Apple mouse is basically this but with horizontal scrolling too, then it's gonna be crappy. The Apple idea did conjur up in my mind the idea of a mouse with a track ball where the wheel is at the moment. Although perhaps complicating matters somewhat, it's also logical (in my mind, ha) so that there are two degrees of movement through the mouse (somewhat like moving your head whilst moving your eyes at the same time). This could (amongst other more pratical things) be pretty cool for doing the walking through Doom3 (for example) whilst at the very same time "looking" around freely using the track ball.
If everyone stops doing SETI@home and moves to battling the SARS problem then we may miss a vital signal from outer space from an alien race that has a cure to SARS and all the other nasties roaming this planet!
Although it is unlikely to happen, if Microsoft did manage to buy SCO and more importantly their intellectual property, it might, might just be enough to push people AWAY from Windows and cause Microsoft bigger problems than they already have from the Open Source community. At the moment many people casually dislike Microsoft for it's business practices and products, but perhaps don't feel it is quite a big enough threat of totally dominating the market and completely wiping out the competition. If they suddenly had the tools to disrupt things in a bad way, it would perhaps push just that critical few (thousands) beyond the threshold where Linux et al really start to take off and gain acceptance even on the desktop.
It's all just speculation on my part of course, but like someone posted before, it's unlikely I suppose that Microsoft would get past the problems with holding a bigger monopoly on operating systems. If that was overlooked though I know I for one would begin pushing Linux, Mozilla, OpenOffice(.org) etc... to everyone I knew. That is, literally pay them to take these things up, as I already encourage them to utilize them where possible (even your average non techy computer user).
Inoffensive and unbreakable
That would be just be sad, but I do have an uh, friend, who tried it within thirty seconds of reading the page. He desperately seeked one of the dozens of floppy disks that didn't work and promptly set about freeing the disk from its prison.
And for anyone else attempting to make this, a little warning. You only really have one chance at bending the metal parts, if you need to bend them back again they will generally fall off. As such, I am missing the little wing tips from the model.
Sad, sad, sad. I immediately disowned my friend after seeing this.
My question is:
Launching a lawsuit against such a gigantic company like IBM who have orders of magnitude greater resources than yourselves was of course laughable. Do you regret accidentally releasing the statement to issue the lawsuit when in fact it wasn't April 1st (All Fool's Day) as you had first thought?
...have smashed all previous records on the size of small gaps between prime numbers
The size of small gaps? For a start they couldn't really "smash" the size of small gaps because then by definition they would no longer be small ones. But secondly how exactly can you smash all previous records on the size of the small gaps between the prime numbers when it is set to (and the whole theory based around) the gap being "2".
I'm not an expert by any means, but surely if what the story means is they have found more of these pairs (1000928397 and 1000928399 or something -- and no, I just made them up)... then, so what? Sure it's an achievement of sorts, but it doesn't really help? To really help then a proof that this does or doesn't go on to infinity is what is needed.
Anyone else notice a similarity of that guy on the advert with a certain (younger) William Gates? I think he might have had words with the advertising department, which is the real reason the advert was pulled (let's face it, an advert with misleading information isn't particularly unusual is it?) Wonder what the world would be like if he WAS obsolete though... (collapses into bliss).
Is it really surprising that Microsoft don't know what the term "hacker" really means? Just take a look at one or two of their products.
Which is great news for the survival of your company. But tragic news for hackers.
Even if it were true that Microsoft platforms were secure and immune to outside vulnerbilities, their advertisement implies that hackers would become extinct using their platforms.
This should lead us to believe that anyone who cares to code or develop applications on a computer, or any company that wants to have or just use any applications post-Microsoft platform era, should no longer use their platforms as they make hackers extinct? It is rather a catch-22 situation for Microsoft is it not, that their platform will prevent anyone from developing it further once hackers are obsolete (although with a perfectly performing system why would they need to develop it further?)
But thanks for the warning Microsoft, we should not develop for their platforms and must move to other platforms if we want to hack away at the system to create applications. How nice of them to advertise this fact.
I don't know the technical details but I would imagine that in a virtual world where everything worked in theory, you'd be right, parallel would be faster. It stands to reason that however fast you can get a serial link, you can just put it together with a few more and have a parallel one just as fast.
I think the problem(s) come when you have to take into account keeping parallel lines in synch with one another, accouting for lost bits, and breaking down/putting back together all the information at either end. This all adds up in overhead for a parallel connection, where a serial connection just lets the information go through the line with little or no pre/post processing or synching to worry about.
Adult TLDs are the answer, except for one small twist to the common idea that there should be a domain such as ".xxx" or whatever, to specify adult content. Personally I think this idea sucks, because what do you rate, and how do you rate, what is meant to be in that domain? There are just so many problems here because of the multitide of grey areas and issues with enforcement and so on, what is needed is a way to get domain holders to WANT to comply with protecting a child from "adult" content.
.xxx domain.
So, my little twist is simply to not have adult TLDs, but turn it on its head and have a TLD especially for websites that offer content suitable for children and minors to view. This is much, much easier to enforce (in my view), and those sites which wish to appeal to children will WANT to actively try and promote this domain, whereas an adult site may not wish to be "tainted" with the
It also means we are not restricting the right of adults to set their own limits on what is acceptable and not acceptable, which I believe is a good thing. By offering sites a TLD which is suited to minors it would allow a parent to set up a browser to ONLY allow access to those sites.
Overall, I personally feel such a solution is viable, would be effective, and solve the problem without needing the restrictive measures against EVERYONE to appease those parents who do not monitor their child's internet usage.