You mean the people who are constantly looking for ways to ruin my browsing experience with a never-ending parade of Flash ads, pop-up windows and gigantic CSS floating DIVs might be getting overcharged? Excuse me for not feeling sorry for them. Now where's that World's Smallest Violin?
Well, I'm no authority on the issue, but from what I understand, English is incredibly versatile in terms of its vocabulary. For example, English is the only language that lets you splice a word into a another word and still have it make sense, like "abso-fucking-lutely". As far as I know, no other language has this capability.
Interesting that I read this story, try to log into MySpace, and the site appears to be completely hosed. I can't log in (says my profile has been deleted), and I can't get to any of my friends' profiles either.
Don't like hearing that do ya? Maybe next time you can avoid calling people stupid when they didn't anticipate everything you could possibly do to fuck up the software they've written.
Hey fuck-stick, it doesn't take some sort of special effort to support a case-sensitive volume. There are plenty of apps out there written on case-insensitive volumes that run just fine on case-sensitive ones. All it takes using the correct paths and being consistent. If you refer to the path "/This/is/a/path" with the string "/this/Is/A/Path", you're doing it wrong, period, regardless of what your target filesystem is. Know why? Because those two aren't the same fucking string. It's not a question of whether or not you're being an idiot (you are); it's a question of whether the system is going to punish you for it. This is not a difficult concept to grasp, and yes it is developer laziness.
Saying, "Install it on a case-insensitive volume" is a stupid solution because it could involve reformatting your existing volume. They couldn't even give a decent workaround: creating a disk image with a case-insensitive file system.
Case-insensitivity was a holdover from the Classic Mac OS. But HFS-X is case-sensitive and has additional metadata features. (UFS on OS X really, really blows. No one wants to use it.) I run HFS-X on my machines personally, and for the most part it works okay. But it does break some stuff. For example, Adobe Photoshop crashes when run from a case-sensitive volume. That's just lazy development. Dashboard widgets are also particularly bad. But the file system itself is pretty rock-solid. It's just stupid and/or lazy developers that fuck things up.
Yeah, like your congressman gives a shit about what you have to say. Unless that letter you send him is accompanied with a suitcase full of cash or a weekend golf outing, you might as well piss into the wind.
The halting problem has to do with a Turing machine running another Turing machine and deciding its output. What he's talking about is proving what algorithms can even run under certain conditions. That is a different problem entirely. One Turing machine most assuredly can run another one; it's just impossible to guarantee that it will return every time. This is what makes the halting problem impossible. You can run a Turing machine in another one, but there are two ways a Turing machine can reject an input. It can either decide it (return a NO) or it can enter an infinite loop. The parent machine has no way of knowing if the child machine is in such a loop or if it just happens to be a very long computation, so it just sits there and lets the child run. This is the difference between a Turing-decidable language and a Turing-recognizable one. In the parent poster's scenario, you only need to check recognizability, not decidability.
Also, computers are not Turing machines; they are linearly-bounded automata. Turing machines have infinite memory. In fact, a Turing machine can decide the output of a LBA. In any case, you can of course check to see if an algorithm will work under certain constraints. That's why there's a "System Requirements" part on software boxes.
IANAL, but here's what I read from it. Basically, they said that Apple didn't have grounds for forcing Think Secret to turn over information about their source because Apple themselves didn't do everything they could internally to ascertain the source of the leak. In other words, the court ruled very conservatively in favor of freedom of the press in saying that Apple had to exhaust all other avenues of inquiry before they could even think about asking for a court order which might be construed as infringing on press freedoms. They didn't actually say that bloggers are entitled to the same protections as newspapers, TV shows, etc... but they didn't say they weren't either. A creative lawyer could easily interpret the decision as precedent establishing bloggers as members of the press. Basically, the court ruled in the same way they would have ruled if Apple was suing the New York Times which grants weight to the idea that bloggers are in fact journalists.
As for hard precedent, this ruling says that you can't just go after bloggers for their sources as a first resort just because they're not traditional media outlets. You have to show that you've turned up dry on every other reasonable avenue of investigation. It establishes that bloggers have at least one of the same protections that other media do.
I've gotten the same response to my documents. When I was still in physics, my labs reports always looked the best because I wrote them in TeX. (They might not have always been correct, but they looked damn good.) Also, everyone who looks at my resumé wants to borrow the format I used. I created it in Pages from scratch, and it's a very aesthetic, professional-looking layout because Pages is more of a layout program than word processor. True, it would've been possible to duplicate what I did in Word, but for some reason, I always get the feeling that I'm working against the program when using Word. It's like I can't be creative because I detest the program so damn much.
But with Pages, I've got a simple, clean layout without 500 toolbar buttons scattered all over the place and an inspector window that lets me do just about everything I want.
Many state jobs will require thorough background checks. One of my former co-workers went to work for my town's city hall, and he went through a background check, polygraph, the whole nine yards. Hell, if I remember correctly, the FBI requires you to turn in your home computer for examination before they'll accept you.
Actually, Dashboard widgets are repeat offenders in terms of lazy developers not respecting case. I don't know what it is about widgets, but the people who write them just don't like respecting case for some reason. Also, Adobe's products get fucked when run from a case-sensitive volume. And a lot of games do as well.
My solution is to have a case-insensitive partition laying around and put the crap written by careless developers on there. In the case of widgets, I have to go in and manually fix them. The other option is to create a disk image as case-insensitive and put your crap-tastic apps on there.
Yes. But the resource fork generally isn't used for hiding data because it's easy enough to get information about the file's resource fork size. But it's actually a pretty good way to hide malicious code. (One thing I'd like to see from Apple is denying code execution from the resource fork. There's no legitimate reason to have code from there executing at this point.) I'm pretty sure that all the POSIX command line utilities in OS X respect resource fork information as of Tiger. I don't know much about how NT's streams work, but it sounds like they could be arbitrarily many from what you're saying. On the Mac, there are two: data and resource. They are at the file system level. Apple is trying very hard to phase out the resource fork completely because it screws with interoperability. Now the resource fork is mainly used for storing custom icons on files.
Windows file names can be up to 255 characters, but that includes the full path.
Holy shit is this true? That seems like a brain-dead limitation to have in the year 2006.
Oh and Mac users didn't really have support for long file names until OS X. HFS has always supported 255-character file names, but in OS 9 and earlier, the Finder would only recognize up to 31 characters for a file name, so it was basically impossible to have a file name greater than 31 characters even though the file system allowed it.
First of all, offering to repurchase iTMS songs from Microsoft's music store is a brilliant idea. The problem is that Microsoft has the money to pull it off, meaning that such a practice could very easily be viewed as Microsoft flexing its monopolistic muscle to force their way into a new market.
But that's only part of the equation. The other part is the player. If the player doesn't stack up (like every single other so-called "iPod killer" that has come and gone), then people will get on Microsoft's store and ask, "Okay, do these songs work on my iPod"? When the answer is "NO", they'll simply go back to iTMS. They won't care if the songs work on the Creative Zen 0xDEADBEEF or whatever the fuck the latest model is called because that player is not an iPod. Microsoft's got a lot of cultural hurdles to overcome to dissociate "iPod" from "portable music player" in people's minds. But if they can get past the legal part and actually make a decent player, Apple would have a competitor.
Really? Let me go out and ask the masses then. Hey you, hot girl! Have you switched to Ubuntu yet? What is Ubuntu? No it's not a small African nation in the middle of a civil war! DUH!! Hey where are you going?! You forgot your Knoppix LiveCD!!!!
On April 3, 2000, Judge Jackson issued his findings of fact that Microsoft had abused its monopoly position by attempting to "dissuade Netscape from developing Navigator as a platform", that it "withheld crucial technical information", and attempted to reduce Navigator's usage share by "giving Internet Explorer away and rewarding firms that helped build its usage share" and "excluding Navigator from important distribution channels" [4].
No, it got established because several years ago, it sucked less than Netscape and innovated faster.
Yes, and tying it into the operating system had absolutely nothing to do with its perceived quality among users. Sure.
It's very trendy around here to slam Microsoft for being convicted monopolists, yada yada yada, but it's not like you wake up one morning and suddenly find your business has a monopoly without doing anything better than the competition. How they've maintained that position is dubious, to be sure, but then again until the much more recent past no-one was seriously trying to compete with them anyway.
It's not just me slamming them. The Department of Justice did too, and it was specifically for utilizing their dominance in the OS market to extend their presence in the browser market. This is a subtlety you're overlooking. I'm not commenting on Microsoft's OS dominance. The DoJ found that they illegally used this influence to strengthen their position in another, distinct area. It has absolutely nothing to do with how they maintained their OS dominance. But IE got where it is by virtue of dirty business tactics
As for de jure standards, you're basically making an appeal to the W3C's authority, which brings us back to where we started. If the dev teams behind, say, IE, Firefox, and Opera sat down and wrote out a spec together that was going to be followed by three of the biggest name browsers in the market today, that would be a de jure standard worth something.
What? Do you know what the whole point of a de jure standard is? It's a standard agreed upon by a party of experts to further the goals of interoperability. I'm not making a logical argument; I am stating a simple fact. The W3C is the body which passes and creates standards for the Internet. Therefore, any standards they agree upon are de jure. Further, appealing to authority is not a logical fallacy if that authority is legitimate. And I'd love to hear your reasoning about why Microsoft is the only legitimate authority regarding web standards. If they are, then why is Microsoft a member of the W3C? And why are all those other companies? Just for shits and giggles?
The W3C was founded in 1994, well before the first version of Internet Explorer came out. The first draft of the HTML 3.0 standard was around at the same time.
Moreover, if they had tried what you were suggesting, Microsoft wouldn't have been interested, or did you miss the whole point of the Browser Wars? Both Netscape and Microsoft were inventing new extensions to HTML on a weekly basis to keep one-upping each other, which led to the dreaded "This site works best in Netscape / Internet Explorer 4.0" web sites.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean the people who are constantly looking for ways to ruin my browsing experience with a never-ending parade of Flash ads, pop-up windows and gigantic CSS floating DIVs might be getting overcharged? Excuse me for not feeling sorry for them. Now where's that World's Smallest Violin?
So we've got the Captain's Log and the Captain's Wrap-Around. Is the Captain's Reach-Around next?
Well, I'm no authority on the issue, but from what I understand, English is incredibly versatile in terms of its vocabulary. For example, English is the only language that lets you splice a word into a another word and still have it make sense, like "abso-fucking-lutely". As far as I know, no other language has this capability.
Yeah, same story here. My account was deleted, but I was "signed in" and could sign out. Hope they have good backups.
Interesting that I read this story, try to log into MySpace, and the site appears to be completely hosed. I can't log in (says my profile has been deleted), and I can't get to any of my friends' profiles either.
Saying, "Install it on a case-insensitive volume" is a stupid solution because it could involve reformatting your existing volume. They couldn't even give a decent workaround: creating a disk image with a case-insensitive file system.
Case-insensitivity was a holdover from the Classic Mac OS. But HFS-X is case-sensitive and has additional metadata features. (UFS on OS X really, really blows. No one wants to use it.) I run HFS-X on my machines personally, and for the most part it works okay. But it does break some stuff. For example, Adobe Photoshop crashes when run from a case-sensitive volume. That's just lazy development. Dashboard widgets are also particularly bad. But the file system itself is pretty rock-solid. It's just stupid and/or lazy developers that fuck things up.
Since it's one processor with multiple cores, "Mormon" would be an appropriate code name. ;)
Yeah, like your congressman gives a shit about what you have to say. Unless that letter you send him is accompanied with a suitcase full of cash or a weekend golf outing, you might as well piss into the wind.
4x4 implies a matrix of 16 elements, not 4. Christ, can't marketing guys multiply?
The halting problem has to do with a Turing machine running another Turing machine and deciding its output. What he's talking about is proving what algorithms can even run under certain conditions. That is a different problem entirely. One Turing machine most assuredly can run another one; it's just impossible to guarantee that it will return every time. This is what makes the halting problem impossible. You can run a Turing machine in another one, but there are two ways a Turing machine can reject an input. It can either decide it (return a NO) or it can enter an infinite loop. The parent machine has no way of knowing if the child machine is in such a loop or if it just happens to be a very long computation, so it just sits there and lets the child run. This is the difference between a Turing-decidable language and a Turing-recognizable one. In the parent poster's scenario, you only need to check recognizability, not decidability.
Also, computers are not Turing machines; they are linearly-bounded automata. Turing machines have infinite memory. In fact, a Turing machine can decide the output of a LBA. In any case, you can of course check to see if an algorithm will work under certain constraints. That's why there's a "System Requirements" part on software boxes.
IANAL, but here's what I read from it. Basically, they said that Apple didn't have grounds for forcing Think Secret to turn over information about their source because Apple themselves didn't do everything they could internally to ascertain the source of the leak. In other words, the court ruled very conservatively in favor of freedom of the press in saying that Apple had to exhaust all other avenues of inquiry before they could even think about asking for a court order which might be construed as infringing on press freedoms. They didn't actually say that bloggers are entitled to the same protections as newspapers, TV shows, etc ... but they didn't say they weren't either. A creative lawyer could easily interpret the decision as precedent establishing bloggers as members of the press. Basically, the court ruled in the same way they would have ruled if Apple was suing the New York Times which grants weight to the idea that bloggers are in fact journalists.
As for hard precedent, this ruling says that you can't just go after bloggers for their sources as a first resort just because they're not traditional media outlets. You have to show that you've turned up dry on every other reasonable avenue of investigation. It establishes that bloggers have at least one of the same protections that other media do.
I've gotten the same response to my documents. When I was still in physics, my labs reports always looked the best because I wrote them in TeX. (They might not have always been correct, but they looked damn good.) Also, everyone who looks at my resumé wants to borrow the format I used. I created it in Pages from scratch, and it's a very aesthetic, professional-looking layout because Pages is more of a layout program than word processor. True, it would've been possible to duplicate what I did in Word, but for some reason, I always get the feeling that I'm working against the program when using Word. It's like I can't be creative because I detest the program so damn much.
But with Pages, I've got a simple, clean layout without 500 toolbar buttons scattered all over the place and an inspector window that lets me do just about everything I want.
Many state jobs will require thorough background checks. One of my former co-workers went to work for my town's city hall, and he went through a background check, polygraph, the whole nine yards. Hell, if I remember correctly, the FBI requires you to turn in your home computer for examination before they'll accept you.
Actually, Dashboard widgets are repeat offenders in terms of lazy developers not respecting case. I don't know what it is about widgets, but the people who write them just don't like respecting case for some reason. Also, Adobe's products get fucked when run from a case-sensitive volume. And a lot of games do as well.
My solution is to have a case-insensitive partition laying around and put the crap written by careless developers on there. In the case of widgets, I have to go in and manually fix them. The other option is to create a disk image as case-insensitive and put your crap-tastic apps on there.
Yes. But the resource fork generally isn't used for hiding data because it's easy enough to get information about the file's resource fork size. But it's actually a pretty good way to hide malicious code. (One thing I'd like to see from Apple is denying code execution from the resource fork. There's no legitimate reason to have code from there executing at this point.) I'm pretty sure that all the POSIX command line utilities in OS X respect resource fork information as of Tiger. I don't know much about how NT's streams work, but it sounds like they could be arbitrarily many from what you're saying. On the Mac, there are two: data and resource. They are at the file system level. Apple is trying very hard to phase out the resource fork completely because it screws with interoperability. Now the resource fork is mainly used for storing custom icons on files.
Oh and Mac users didn't really have support for long file names until OS X. HFS has always supported 255-character file names, but in OS 9 and earlier, the Finder would only recognize up to 31 characters for a file name, so it was basically impossible to have a file name greater than 31 characters even though the file system allowed it.
Make perfectly spherical chickens.
First of all, offering to repurchase iTMS songs from Microsoft's music store is a brilliant idea. The problem is that Microsoft has the money to pull it off, meaning that such a practice could very easily be viewed as Microsoft flexing its monopolistic muscle to force their way into a new market.
But that's only part of the equation. The other part is the player. If the player doesn't stack up (like every single other so-called "iPod killer" that has come and gone), then people will get on Microsoft's store and ask, "Okay, do these songs work on my iPod"? When the answer is "NO", they'll simply go back to iTMS. They won't care if the songs work on the Creative Zen 0xDEADBEEF or whatever the fuck the latest model is called because that player is not an iPod. Microsoft's got a lot of cultural hurdles to overcome to dissociate "iPod" from "portable music player" in people's minds. But if they can get past the legal part and actually make a decent player, Apple would have a competitor.
Really? Let me go out and ask the masses then. Hey you, hot girl! Have you switched to Ubuntu yet? What is Ubuntu? No it's not a small African nation in the middle of a civil war! DUH!! Hey where are you going?! You forgot your Knoppix LiveCD!!!!
Uh ... yeah. Why wouldn't it?
The W3C was founded in 1994, well before the first version of Internet Explorer came out. The first draft of the HTML 3.0 standard was around at the same time.
Moreover, if they had tried what you were suggesting, Microsoft wouldn't have been interested, or did you miss the whole point of the Browser Wars? Both Netscape and Microsoft were inventing new extensions to HTML on a weekly basis to keep one-upping each other, which led to the dreaded "This site works best in Netscape / Internet Explorer 4.0" web sites.