...because RC2 for MacOS X had massive problems whereby ALL keystrokes (typing in text fields on a page OR the browser search/URL bar) would simply stop working. This was most irritating when filling out forms and a MAJOR bug for a "release candidate", in my book.
About the only way to get keys to work again was to select+copy some text and paste it into a field. That would give you a 1 in 3 chance of reactivating the ability to type...
Did I mention the problem pops up with almost every new release on OS X? 1.0 did it, 1.5 previews did it...
The new hybrid hard drive will be released around the same time as the upcoming Windows Vista operating system and will be one of the first hardware designed specifically to benefit from it."
Given Apple's strong relationship with Samsung (iPod shuffle+nano memory both come from Samsung, I believe- and I'm almost positive Samsung has supplied RAM to apple on+off since the golden olden days), what do others think about the possibility of this ending up in a Powerbook, er, Macbook Pro- and 10.5 being designed to take advantage of it?
Apple can be hit or miss with the latest and greatest- they took forever with USB2 (yeah yeah, firewire blah blah) and lagged behind a lot of the smaller laptop mafacturers with Expresscard (given there's next to nothing for expresscard, who can blame them?)...it'll be interesting to see if Apple thinks this is a win or lose technology...
The fact is the first dot com bubble burst wasn't that big of a deal. It's not like we had soup lines.
Wow, talk about revisionism. The first bubble burst was HUGE deal; dozens of major banks grossly violated their 'chinese wall' policies while underwriting the IPOs of clients and looked the other way when internet companies were engaging the shadiest accounting practices known to man. Companies swapped "shares" and both counted it as revenue based on projected stock prices, for example. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs in "layoffs", and it had a massive ripple effect in places like SF. The crash and delisting of hundreds of "internet" companies destroyed "investor confidence" on the stock market, and affected all manner of investors, from individuals to massive retirement accounts.
Christ, man! It was enough to destroy Arthur Anderson Consulting. Why do you think they're known as Accenture now? Having your top officers lambasted by Congressional investigators for conspiracy, fraud, etc on national TV doesn't exactly bolster confidence in a business where clients are trusting you...
What's needed is for someone like NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer to charge Microsoft with reckless endangerment for knowingly, willfully, and negligently distributing and continuing to distribute systems vulnerable to such attacks.
Sue the IRC networks first; that's what makes it dumb shit easy for these guys to set up their botnets.
I had a machine hacked by a german movie filesharing group, and they incldued a bot which logged into their channel on Rizon. Like a good little admin, I logged into rizon, checked out the channel. It had several thousand users, a whole slew of fserves...and ZERO conversation. None.
I went to #help and reported the botnet attack and the response was: "hey, you want us to shut down one of the most popular channels here because of a evidenceless accusation that you were hacked by them and used as one of their fserves? LOL ZOMG GET SECURITY AHAHAHAHAHA LUSER P0WNZORED" etc. etc.
It is patently obvious that the Rizon admins are FULLY aware that they have dozens, if not hundreds, of illegal filesharing groups that are using botnets to set up fserves, attack other systems for more bots, etc. They're doing jack shit about it (and in fact, they're making it easier- they now support SSL connections) and I think it's time someone sued them to hell and back. It's time IRC operators were taught that you can't knowingly support criminal activity, and that if users report hackings- they need to look into said reports and act on them. I also think it's time IRC traffic was considered "highly suspicous" and monitored by ISPs for fserve commands and such; fserves have no real legitimate purpose today, except illegal filesharing.
PS: Next time you download a movie or program, bittorrent or IRC DCC....realize that it was distributed, most likely, by a group that hacked unix systems. Those systems were owned and administered by people just like you, and that person is going to have to deal with the damage and headaches. Just like you will, some day.
And how long does your battery last between recharges now?
The question is whether the fans will be run past their expected/rated lifetime before the computer has.
As we all know- small fans (CPU fans, chipset fans anyone?) don't last very long. That's precisely why they're only run when necessary. Given the MB/MBP's thermal output, Bad Things will happen if those fans fail- probably no worse than it shutting itself down or crashing. Still won't be good for it.
That said, keeping the fans on a very low speed to maintain a cooler temperature will improve general component life.
North Korea seems to have failed at the very essence of the Nuclear test.
And you've failed at the very essence of the Nuclear Threat. It doesn't matter how big the boom is- what matters is that you can make the boom land anywhere. A half to one kiloton explosion in almost any Japanese or South Korean city would kill/injure thousands.
I realize we throw Arabic speakers out of the military because they're gay and all, but maybe we could make an exception because their skills are necessary at present.
Do you really think there are enough a)Arabic-speaking b)openly c)gay soldiers in the military, to make a difference? I bet you could count them all on two hands.
I think the military's policy is pretty stupid. However, I think if soldiers truly cared about "serving their country"(in quotes because I'm tired of "fighting in Iraq" = "defending freedom" in public discourse) above all else, they simply wouldn't tell the military they were gay. I'd also suspect that those that DO care about fighting for their country simply DO clam up and get the job done.
Politics aside, this is a bad idea because it fragments the user base, divides the focus, and opens the path for Microsoft and Internet Explorer 7 to regain marketshare."
Methinks someone overestimates Debian's relevance in the browser marketplace. And yes, I know about Ubuntu.
Products with a real current functionality, like GMail and Google Maps, succeed despite pushing the technological envelope.
"Pushing the technological envelope"? Wake up and stop drinking the kool-aide.
Google search? Search results 90% of the time are astroturf sites and spam blogs. I've completely given up trying to find product reviews via google, for example.
Froogle? Search for some computer component part number. Let's say the same # is used by sewing machines. Click on "Computers" without clicking the subcategory "motherboards"- the parts you wanted are GONE. What the hell? Go back, click motherboards- the parts are there. Froogle is also completely incompetent when it comes to matching/grouping/consolidating products, or even matches like "1GB PC133"...half the time, that'll yield 512MB dimms which happen to have a link to 1GB dimms on the same page!
Gmail can't let you do more than ONE thing at a time. Want to have a draft of an email open while reading a second for reference? Tough. GMail can't filter by custom headers- which makes it absolutely useless for subscribing to mailing lists. Gmail blatantly and heavily encourages top-posting and full quoting, much to the annoyance of mailing list managers everywhere. GMail was a GIANT step backwards in email client functionality. I never understood what the hell all the fuss was about, and I still don't after using it for a few months.
Google Maps is "the best map client around", except MS's local.live.com blows it out of the water; pushpins, saved addresses, side birds-eye views, etc...and doesn't have the serious problems Google Maps does with serving up image tiles; half the time, tile images aren't loaded at all, or are loaded in the wrong order. Why in 2006 do I have to keep entering my home/work address as starting points/destinations, when I could have Mapquest save addresses back in 1998!?
Google Analytics? What if I'd like to do something as simple as track my visitor retention rate over time, to see if it's going up/down? Pretty simple, right? Can't do it; you can't track anything over time except for a few basic parameters. Other bug-based web-trend software is far better, and Google appears to have done squat with Analytics, which they bought off another company!
Qualcomm and Mozilla will each participate in, and continue to foster development communities based around the open source Mozilla project,
Hopefully this will do wonders for Thunderbird's reliability; I had to stop recommending thunderbird to clients because of the near constant complaints. Disappearing email, crashes, disappearing contact lists. At least 6 months ago, Thunderbird had all sorts of problems with mailboxes and indexes getting corrupted, which would lead to fun bugs like my clients checking their mail, getting 5 new messages according to the new message count next to the mailbox...and not finding the 5 messages actually IN their inbox. Some bugs related to the index not getting cleaned up properly when messages were deleted, and "rebuilding" the mailbox didn't fix the index; you had to completely remove the index files by hand. WTF?
It stunned me how much 'housekeeping' the Thunderbird developers expect users to do to keep it working properly, and how thoroughly they knew of many problems...yet had done nothing to fix them.
I'd also like to see some effort to make GnuPG configuration part of the default install and get users set up with a keyset...and encourage them at every step of the way to use signing and encryption with their email.
Well, I use a lot of invasive extensions, and I only lost Session Manager, which is unsurprising since Fx now includes a similar feature and they would probably step on each others' toes.
Where is it? I've poured through all the menus, all the preference pages...and I can find no mention of it anywhere.
Oh, I see:
It will be activated automatically when installing an application update or extension, and users will be asked if they want to resume their previous session after a system crash.
What about when I want to restart firefox for the fourth time today because I can't enter text into any text fields, or it's sucking up 1GB of memory?
still has UI consistency/key command problems
on
Firefox 2.0 RC2 Review
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· Score: 4, Informative
I reported this bug years ago and was told "probably won't happen until 2.0" and the bug was promptly closed/ignored:
In most modern operating systems, lists in dialog boxes can have a range of items selected by holding down shift, and individual items flipped on/off with a modifier key that varies slightly; in OS X, it's the apple/command key. Open up the cookies box, a place where selecting lots of items would be REALLY handy (ie, deleting all the crap cookies that will expire in "2046"), and try selecting multiple cookies. Bzzzzt, no go. And guess what? In pre-1.5 versions, you COULD do this, so it really WAS a bug/feature delete with 1.5. Now, select one cookie and hit the delete key. NOTHING HAPPENS. Why the hell not?
If you have partially typed anything in the URL bar and hit tab, half the time you aren't taken to the next text box in the browser window. Similar behavior happens elsewhere, only on a page.
It gets worse: just like older versions of 1.0/1.5, the current release candidate suffers from "keyboard-go-dead-itis." I've had to close Firefox FOUR times today because I could no longer enter text ANYWHERE. Not in forms, not in the URL bar, not in the search bar. Command keys (ie, apple-T for new tab) stopped working as well (1.5 still does this, though now usually only when Flash is on the page. Why Firefox allows flash to intercept command keystrokes is beyond me.)
Oh, and I still haven't figured out how to do the resume-where-you-left-off bit, despite having poured through the prefs pages several times.
he notes the connections between the recent scandals involving Mark Foley, George Allen, and Bill Clinton were representative of the new, web-driven age of American politics."
What scandal? Oh, you mean this? "Former president Bill Clinton had a televised temper fit when an interviewer challenged his terrorism record."
"Temper fit" is a "scandal"? The interviewer provoked it by repeating the Bush administration rhetoric that he was "weak" on terrorism. Given that Bush brushed aside reports with titles like "Al-Qaeda to attack US targets in the coming months" and Rice was REPEATEDLY warned about the threat Al-Qaeda represented and yet did nothing...yeah, I think Clinton has a right to be pretty pissed at mindless rhetoric.
He raised his voice, came out of his chair a bit, and controlled the conversation long enough to cover the facts: a)yeah, he missed Bin Laden and he regrets it but b)he did more than Bush ever did.
Bush and his staff ignored patently obvious and repetitive evidence of an impending terrorist attack, declared Bin Laden his number one target and then a year later, suddenly told everyone it really wasn't actually all THAT important to get Bin Laden. Who, I might remind everyone, is still alive five years after "that fateful day".
Bush has had a trillion dollars, two military campaigns, a dozen or more grossly unconsitutional laws/acts and five years to fix things, and the only thing he's done is paint a giant target on the US by acting like a treaty-ripping baffoon on the stage of world politics and invading sovereign nations where there is a substantial number of people who belong to a religion which spawns aggressive, violent groups at the drop of a hat. Just you watch- he's about to do it again in a few months when North Korea goes "nuclear", and we'll be lucky if it doesn't destabilize the whole region by dragging China, Japan, and of course South Korea...then Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia...and all their corresponding allies (Britain, France, Australia, etc)- into World War 3.
...it will hopefully free lots of people who have been falsely accused of crimes they didn't commit.
Two problems: 1)The system/process will be made mostly available to "solving" crimes, not freeing criminals; it's bad prioritization politically, existing criminals could swamp the system, and if a guilty criminal were released after a false negative and was a repeat offender, there'd be hell to pay. 2)While a "maybe a match" will certainly be grounds for the police getting warrants and such, a "maybe not a match" won't get a convicted criminal much.
I'd expect if anything for them to be very cautious about using this tool; DNA match evidence is widely perceived as completely reliable by juries, public, judges, etc...and a less-reliable matching will erode that confidence.
Are you high? China is a prime example of globalization at work. We get a whole lot more stuff for our money from China than we could produce ourselves for the same cost.
We may think we're getting "more stuff for our money", but it's simply not true. The product quality is almost always grossly inferior to domestic-made products. It used to be you had to avoid buying "American"; now it's the other way around, and American businesses and consumers are slowly figuring it out.
This subject came up on a car-related mailing list I'm on; one lister had worked for a hand tool company. They outsourced their production to a chinese firm, and the "bin" rate went from about 20% to over 70%. Yep, that's right- they were throwing away 70% of the product before it even left the warehouse. Why? Cheap Chinese steel that was so bad, stuff would practically crumble, and they lost money hand over fist. They pulled production back.
The Japanese tried using Chinese labor for electronics/IC fabs in China. Bin rates skyrocketed, and the Japanese firms pulled out, at great expense, and went back to Japan.
Quasi has a number of features in addition to his eyelids for conveying emotion, the most prominent of which are Color Kinetics LED lighting fixtures for his eyes and antennae.
Color Kinetics being the company founded by a kid from MIT, whose sole purpose was to patent the technique of using Red, green, and blue lights to produce varying colors (page three of that PDF is particularly amusing.) They've patented lots of other things, like changing color patterns. The various lighting fixtures they sell cost upwards of $1,000 or more- for a simple PIC controller and a few dozen high-brightness LEDs.
They've had their lawyers chasing down companies making LED color-changing/programmable devices for violating their "intellectual property" for several years now. If you want an example of all that is wrong with the US Patent system, look no further than Color Kinetics.
The questions I need answered are: Can they work with people? Can they dress well? Do they shower? Are they capable of staying after normal work hours every now and then to see to something getting finished? Are they sensitive to other people and their surroundings?
#1 on most employer's list is, "can I trust them?" Hence why zillions of employers, especially the Big Boys, conduct criminal and credit checks and personality tests; they're not as worried about team-player-ness as they are whether you're going to try and rape Tina from accounting after the company "holiday" party.
A "black hat" hacker thinks it is not only ethical and acceptable to violate numerous laws and break in to computer systems they have no permission to do so on...but they've DONE it, which means they'll have ZERO problems going places they're not supposed to be in your company.
That sounds somewhat trivial unless, say, you work at a bank. Banks and lots of other companies employ "chinese walls" (for those that don't know: different divisions are intentionally 'firewalled' knowledge-wise to prevent conflict of interest.) A black hat that feels he/she has the right to traipse anywhere on the company file servers is a serious threat.
The real question is not "Are they mature?", but "Did they recognize and accept what they did was wrong, and will they do it again?" Another question is, "can they follow company procedures and policies, and industry regulations?" If they can't keep from violating serious federal statues, how on earth can you trust them to follow a rule that says they shouldn't poke around in the accounting files?
The Tech Report has an in-depth look at Maxtor's DiamondMax 11 hard drive that provides some interesting insight on how Seagate's recent acquisition can improve deficiencies in its own drives.
Like better SMART support on Seagate's side? I was stunned at how much more SMART capabilities Maxtor drives have compared to Seagates and others. It should almost be a crime to produce a drive that doesn't have a SMART compatible error log (which Maxtors have- you can query it and see when+what the last errors were, for starters.)
I've also been stunned at how BAD modern drives are; a client lost FOUR maxtor drives out of a 12 drive array in the space of 2-3 months, and we literally couldn't replace them fast enough (also, the idiots that he bought the system from TURNED OFF autoverify on the 3ware controller, didn't install the linux drivers, didn't bother updating the card's firmware, etc. That'd be PCs4everyone in Boston, FYI.) I had a Seagate PATA drive with barely a dozen hours on it that started clonking like crazy if you wrote data at high speed to it for too long (no, this was not the 7200.8, which had similar issues, relating to a motor driver circuit overheating. This was a 7200.9!) Seriously- the drive would completely stop writing data if you wrote to it continuously for about 40-50GB. The only thing that let me successfully complete the imaging was a borrowed fan directly cooling the drive.
I'm not too optimistic that Maxtor and Seagate will benefit each other in terms of technology the end user will care about; what is more likely is that Seagate will go enterprise, and Maxtor will go consumer, since that is what each brand is best known for.
I got to wondering what the screen pixel count was, and found "170 DPI". Curious to put that down as "numbers I know"; my 20" dell is 1680 pixels wide and ~17 inches wide; almost exactly 100dpi. This is a fair bit higher (not quite twice!) so they should be able to put down a fair amount of decent-looking print on a "page".
It's slightly disappointing that HTML support isn't standard; they support everything else, but HTML requires "conversion." Yuck.
You know what I like best, though? Battery life is rated in "page turns", not minutes...and it charges off USB. With that kind of battery life, you can cut down on the number of charge cycles and keep the liion battery living longer.
Even after the first bomb fell, and even after the Soviet Union declared war and began the invasion, they still weren't willing to surrender. Can you explain how they were on the verge of surrendering?
Did you read anything else from the article? The population was ready to revolt, and half of the military and civilian government were dead-set against continuing the war. They tried to establish diplomatic ties with Russia to save their country and avoid invasion; the US demanded unconditional surrender, the Japanese not surprisingly said "pass", but KEPT WORKING ON HOW TO END THE WAR. Christ, man! Read the article.
US history books make it out like they were rabid, crazed defenders of their almighty emperor that would have fought to the last man, and that our atomic bombs "shocked" them back to "reason" and "saved lives". It's all a blatant lie.
Case in point. Japan started the fight and they would not surrender. Very conservative estimates of an invasion of Japan's homeland put American deaths at a million and Japanese deaths as a multiple of that. As horrific the destruction caused by the 2 atomic bombs, those bombs saved American and Japanese lives.
This is the common lie/myth, as is the western belief that the Japanese would "fight to the death to protect the emperor." It's all a bunch of crap. YES, the emperor was advised that his 'house' was in danger if he continued the war...but the Japanese leadership was worried about a coup or revolt, NOT setting up plans for farmers with pitchforks to fight off GI Joe to the death.
The Japanese were on the verge of surrendering already. Go study WW2 history- it's patently obvious Japan was already losing AND that they knew it. The atomic bombs were almost completely unnecessary, except to establish US dominance in the world theater by demonstrating god-like firepower.
Incidentally, does the political division and the emperor's "stay the course" position sound familiar to you? Those who do not study history, blah blah.
Nothing will come of this. There will be no data in the database due to either "national security" or creative accounting.
I think you're half right. All the stuff Republicans care about (defense and pork barrel spending) will either please the people who see it (ie, pork barrel spending, ie "wow, Joe Congresscritter brought in the jobs for us this year! Let's re-elect him!") or won't be included (Defense and/or Homeland inSecurity.) The defense budget is where we need to be trimming the fat more than anywhere else, and under Clinton, we balanced the budget simply by telling the military to chill out. We spend more money on defense, both total and per capita, than any other nation in the world, including China and North Korea.
What will be painfully visible will be the stuff that Joe Sixpack doesn't "see" why we need to spend money on. Things like school lunch assistance programs, PBS and NPR ("liberal media") funding...anything that has a slightly abstract benefit to society as a whole. All that will come of this is a lot of armchair socio-accounting, where Joe Sixpack gets outraged that HE is paying for ____________. It doesn't matter that only one cent out of his income tax goes to that tiny little thing and hundreds of dollars go to military hardware...
One thing seems consistent about Republican policy: cater the lowest common denominator in regards to people's ability to understand the flow of government dollars and how it helps "them." Hence the massive farm subsidies and a national diet that revolves around corn no matter how unhealthy it is, tarriffs on imported farm goods, corn-to-ethanol programs, and absurd "homeland (in)security" spending.
Pretty soon we'll all be corn-bloated, our kids will be mired in at least two foreign wars and dumb as fence posts, and we'll have an explosion of crime and homelessness...but at least we'll have shiny new police cars every year.
Just 33 years old, it might seem strange for someone to write an autobiographical narrative so soon, but like a lot of youth who've grown up in the age of the home computer, O'Hara's gotten a lot of living done in that short time.
Uh...I thought the usual joke was that BBSers DIDN'T get out and live life. How about giving an example of this "lot of living done"?
The only difference is there's no professional editor jamming through the work before it gets to you. It's easy to find flaws in a lack of slickness and flow in a self-published book, but also no real filtering out of "the good stuff", either. So I think of this book as a real sweet homebrew creation, rough-hewn but full of heart, not unlike the boards it talks about. Because of this, the first few dozen pages are choppy
A few dozen pages of "choppy" (poorly written) material? Look. I know it's popular to discredit professions; these days we've got bloggers running around claiming they're journalists, for example...but editors exist for a reason. Sure, there are companies that will laugh and tell you to take a hike, or insist you 'sex up' the story. That's not an editing decision; that's a PUBISHING and MARKETING decision; get it straight. He could have worked with a professional editor (there are many who are independent; my aunt is one of them) and THEN published...or offered up an electronic edition for community review and then published a printed edition.
Memoirs are written by people who have a unique, interesting story to tell about their lives- or people who are really good storytellers/writers. Rarely are they both, which is why many memoirs are ghost-written. From the sounds of it, this is just one of a hundred thousand plus people who traded warez, writing about...how he traded warez, and how cool he is for doing it. He's too life-inexperienced to realize that the same fights and drama occur in every situation in society where a bunch of people are involved in something.
Lastly- is there ever a time where Jason Scott doesn't hawk his film? His "disclaimer" wasn't; it was a blatant ad.
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...because RC2 for MacOS X had massive problems whereby ALL keystrokes (typing in text fields on a page OR the browser search/URL bar) would simply stop working. This was most irritating when filling out forms and a MAJOR bug for a "release candidate", in my book.
About the only way to get keys to work again was to select+copy some text and paste it into a field. That would give you a 1 in 3 chance of reactivating the ability to type...
Did I mention the problem pops up with almost every new release on OS X? 1.0 did it, 1.5 previews did it...
Given Apple's strong relationship with Samsung (iPod shuffle+nano memory both come from Samsung, I believe- and I'm almost positive Samsung has supplied RAM to apple on+off since the golden olden days), what do others think about the possibility of this ending up in a Powerbook, er, Macbook Pro- and 10.5 being designed to take advantage of it?
Apple can be hit or miss with the latest and greatest- they took forever with USB2 (yeah yeah, firewire blah blah) and lagged behind a lot of the smaller laptop mafacturers with Expresscard (given there's next to nothing for expresscard, who can blame them?)...it'll be interesting to see if Apple thinks this is a win or lose technology...
The fact is the first dot com bubble burst wasn't that big of a deal. It's not like we had soup lines.
Wow, talk about revisionism. The first bubble burst was HUGE deal; dozens of major banks grossly violated their 'chinese wall' policies while underwriting the IPOs of clients and looked the other way when internet companies were engaging the shadiest accounting practices known to man. Companies swapped "shares" and both counted it as revenue based on projected stock prices, for example. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs in "layoffs", and it had a massive ripple effect in places like SF. The crash and delisting of hundreds of "internet" companies destroyed "investor confidence" on the stock market, and affected all manner of investors, from individuals to massive retirement accounts.
Christ, man! It was enough to destroy Arthur Anderson Consulting. Why do you think they're known as Accenture now? Having your top officers lambasted by Congressional investigators for conspiracy, fraud, etc on national TV doesn't exactly bolster confidence in a business where clients are trusting you...
What's needed is for someone like NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer to charge Microsoft with reckless endangerment for knowingly, willfully, and negligently distributing and continuing to distribute systems vulnerable to such attacks.
Sue the IRC networks first; that's what makes it dumb shit easy for these guys to set up their botnets.
I had a machine hacked by a german movie filesharing group, and they incldued a bot which logged into their channel on Rizon. Like a good little admin, I logged into rizon, checked out the channel. It had several thousand users, a whole slew of fserves...and ZERO conversation. None.
I went to #help and reported the botnet attack and the response was: "hey, you want us to shut down one of the most popular channels here because of a evidenceless accusation that you were hacked by them and used as one of their fserves? LOL ZOMG GET SECURITY AHAHAHAHAHA LUSER P0WNZORED" etc. etc.
It is patently obvious that the Rizon admins are FULLY aware that they have dozens, if not hundreds, of illegal filesharing groups that are using botnets to set up fserves, attack other systems for more bots, etc. They're doing jack shit about it (and in fact, they're making it easier- they now support SSL connections) and I think it's time someone sued them to hell and back. It's time IRC operators were taught that you can't knowingly support criminal activity, and that if users report hackings- they need to look into said reports and act on them. I also think it's time IRC traffic was considered "highly suspicous" and monitored by ISPs for fserve commands and such; fserves have no real legitimate purpose today, except illegal filesharing.
PS: Next time you download a movie or program, bittorrent or IRC DCC....realize that it was distributed, most likely, by a group that hacked unix systems. Those systems were owned and administered by people just like you, and that person is going to have to deal with the damage and headaches. Just like you will, some day.
An armed "drone" doesn't do anything without being commanded to. It has no independent decisionmaking capabilities. Hence the name drone.
The "laws" apply to AIs, not machines.
And how long does your battery last between recharges now?
The question is whether the fans will be run past their expected/rated lifetime before the computer has.
As we all know- small fans (CPU fans, chipset fans anyone?) don't last very long. That's precisely why they're only run when necessary. Given the MB/MBP's thermal output, Bad Things will happen if those fans fail- probably no worse than it shutting itself down or crashing. Still won't be good for it.
That said, keeping the fans on a very low speed to maintain a cooler temperature will improve general component life.
North Korea seems to have failed at the very essence of the Nuclear test.
And you've failed at the very essence of the Nuclear Threat. It doesn't matter how big the boom is- what matters is that you can make the boom land anywhere. A half to one kiloton explosion in almost any Japanese or South Korean city would kill/injure thousands.
I realize we throw Arabic speakers out of the military because they're gay and all, but maybe we could make an exception because their skills are necessary at present.
Do you really think there are enough a)Arabic-speaking b)openly c)gay soldiers in the military, to make a difference? I bet you could count them all on two hands.
I think the military's policy is pretty stupid. However, I think if soldiers truly cared about "serving their country"(in quotes because I'm tired of "fighting in Iraq" = "defending freedom" in public discourse) above all else, they simply wouldn't tell the military they were gay. I'd also suspect that those that DO care about fighting for their country simply DO clam up and get the job done.
Methinks someone overestimates Debian's relevance in the browser marketplace. And yes, I know about Ubuntu.
"Pushing the technological envelope"? Wake up and stop drinking the kool-aide.
Google search? Search results 90% of the time are astroturf sites and spam blogs. I've completely given up trying to find product reviews via google, for example.
Froogle? Search for some computer component part number. Let's say the same # is used by sewing machines. Click on "Computers" without clicking the subcategory "motherboards"- the parts you wanted are GONE. What the hell? Go back, click motherboards- the parts are there. Froogle is also completely incompetent when it comes to matching/grouping/consolidating products, or even matches like "1GB PC133"...half the time, that'll yield 512MB dimms which happen to have a link to 1GB dimms on the same page!
Gmail can't let you do more than ONE thing at a time. Want to have a draft of an email open while reading a second for reference? Tough. GMail can't filter by custom headers- which makes it absolutely useless for subscribing to mailing lists. Gmail blatantly and heavily encourages top-posting and full quoting, much to the annoyance of mailing list managers everywhere. GMail was a GIANT step backwards in email client functionality. I never understood what the hell all the fuss was about, and I still don't after using it for a few months.
Google Maps is "the best map client around", except MS's local.live.com blows it out of the water; pushpins, saved addresses, side birds-eye views, etc...and doesn't have the serious problems Google Maps does with serving up image tiles; half the time, tile images aren't loaded at all, or are loaded in the wrong order. Why in 2006 do I have to keep entering my home/work address as starting points/destinations, when I could have Mapquest save addresses back in 1998!?
Google Analytics? What if I'd like to do something as simple as track my visitor retention rate over time, to see if it's going up/down? Pretty simple, right? Can't do it; you can't track anything over time except for a few basic parameters. Other bug-based web-trend software is far better, and Google appears to have done squat with Analytics, which they bought off another company!
Qualcomm and Mozilla will each participate in, and continue to foster development communities based around the open source Mozilla project,
Hopefully this will do wonders for Thunderbird's reliability; I had to stop recommending thunderbird to clients because of the near constant complaints. Disappearing email, crashes, disappearing contact lists. At least 6 months ago, Thunderbird had all sorts of problems with mailboxes and indexes getting corrupted, which would lead to fun bugs like my clients checking their mail, getting 5 new messages according to the new message count next to the mailbox...and not finding the 5 messages actually IN their inbox. Some bugs related to the index not getting cleaned up properly when messages were deleted, and "rebuilding" the mailbox didn't fix the index; you had to completely remove the index files by hand. WTF?
It stunned me how much 'housekeeping' the Thunderbird developers expect users to do to keep it working properly, and how thoroughly they knew of many problems...yet had done nothing to fix them.
I'd also like to see some effort to make GnuPG configuration part of the default install and get users set up with a keyset...and encourage them at every step of the way to use signing and encryption with their email.
Where is it? I've poured through all the menus, all the preference pages...and I can find no mention of it anywhere.
Oh, I see:
It will be activated automatically when installing an application update or extension, and users will be asked if they want to resume their previous session after a system crash.
What about when I want to restart firefox for the fourth time today because I can't enter text into any text fields, or it's sucking up 1GB of memory?
I reported this bug years ago and was told "probably won't happen until 2.0" and the bug was promptly closed/ignored:
In most modern operating systems, lists in dialog boxes can have a range of items selected by holding down shift, and individual items flipped on/off with a modifier key that varies slightly; in OS X, it's the apple/command key. Open up the cookies box, a place where selecting lots of items would be REALLY handy (ie, deleting all the crap cookies that will expire in "2046"), and try selecting multiple cookies. Bzzzzt, no go. And guess what? In pre-1.5 versions, you COULD do this, so it really WAS a bug/feature delete with 1.5. Now, select one cookie and hit the delete key. NOTHING HAPPENS. Why the hell not?
If you have partially typed anything in the URL bar and hit tab, half the time you aren't taken to the next text box in the browser window. Similar behavior happens elsewhere, only on a page.
It gets worse: just like older versions of 1.0/1.5, the current release candidate suffers from "keyboard-go-dead-itis." I've had to close Firefox FOUR times today because I could no longer enter text ANYWHERE. Not in forms, not in the URL bar, not in the search bar. Command keys (ie, apple-T for new tab) stopped working as well (1.5 still does this, though now usually only when Flash is on the page. Why Firefox allows flash to intercept command keystrokes is beyond me.)
Oh, and I still haven't figured out how to do the resume-where-you-left-off bit, despite having poured through the prefs pages several times.
he notes the connections between the recent scandals involving Mark Foley, George Allen, and Bill Clinton were representative of the new, web-driven age of American politics."
What scandal? Oh, you mean this? "Former president Bill Clinton had a televised temper fit when an interviewer challenged his terrorism record."
"Temper fit" is a "scandal"? The interviewer provoked it by repeating the Bush administration rhetoric that he was "weak" on terrorism. Given that Bush brushed aside reports with titles like "Al-Qaeda to attack US targets in the coming months" and Rice was REPEATEDLY warned about the threat Al-Qaeda represented and yet did nothing...yeah, I think Clinton has a right to be pretty pissed at mindless rhetoric.
He raised his voice, came out of his chair a bit, and controlled the conversation long enough to cover the facts: a)yeah, he missed Bin Laden and he regrets it but b)he did more than Bush ever did.
Bush and his staff ignored patently obvious and repetitive evidence of an impending terrorist attack, declared Bin Laden his number one target and then a year later, suddenly told everyone it really wasn't actually all THAT important to get Bin Laden. Who, I might remind everyone, is still alive five years after "that fateful day".
Bush has had a trillion dollars, two military campaigns, a dozen or more grossly unconsitutional laws/acts and five years to fix things, and the only thing he's done is paint a giant target on the US by acting like a treaty-ripping baffoon on the stage of world politics and invading sovereign nations where there is a substantial number of people who belong to a religion which spawns aggressive, violent groups at the drop of a hat. Just you watch- he's about to do it again in a few months when North Korea goes "nuclear", and we'll be lucky if it doesn't destabilize the whole region by dragging China, Japan, and of course South Korea...then Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia...and all their corresponding allies (Britain, France, Australia, etc)- into World War 3.
Two problems: 1)The system/process will be made mostly available to "solving" crimes, not freeing criminals; it's bad prioritization politically, existing criminals could swamp the system, and if a guilty criminal were released after a false negative and was a repeat offender, there'd be hell to pay. 2)While a "maybe a match" will certainly be grounds for the police getting warrants and such, a "maybe not a match" won't get a convicted criminal much.
I'd expect if anything for them to be very cautious about using this tool; DNA match evidence is widely perceived as completely reliable by juries, public, judges, etc...and a less-reliable matching will erode that confidence.
We may think we're getting "more stuff for our money", but it's simply not true. The product quality is almost always grossly inferior to domestic-made products. It used to be you had to avoid buying "American"; now it's the other way around, and American businesses and consumers are slowly figuring it out.
This subject came up on a car-related mailing list I'm on; one lister had worked for a hand tool company. They outsourced their production to a chinese firm, and the "bin" rate went from about 20% to over 70%. Yep, that's right- they were throwing away 70% of the product before it even left the warehouse. Why? Cheap Chinese steel that was so bad, stuff would practically crumble, and they lost money hand over fist. They pulled production back.
The Japanese tried using Chinese labor for electronics/IC fabs in China. Bin rates skyrocketed, and the Japanese firms pulled out, at great expense, and went back to Japan.
It's not "false advertising", it's slander.
Quasi has a number of features in addition to his eyelids for conveying emotion, the most prominent of which are Color Kinetics LED lighting fixtures for his eyes and antennae.
Color Kinetics being the company founded by a kid from MIT, whose sole purpose was to patent the technique of using Red, green, and blue lights to produce varying colors (page three of that PDF is particularly amusing.) They've patented lots of other things, like changing color patterns. The various lighting fixtures they sell cost upwards of $1,000 or more- for a simple PIC controller and a few dozen high-brightness LEDs.
They've had their lawyers chasing down companies making LED color-changing/programmable devices for violating their "intellectual property" for several years now. If you want an example of all that is wrong with the US Patent system, look no further than Color Kinetics.
The questions I need answered are: Can they work with people? Can they dress well? Do they shower? Are they capable of staying after normal work hours every now and then to see to something getting finished? Are they sensitive to other people and their surroundings?
#1 on most employer's list is, "can I trust them?" Hence why zillions of employers, especially the Big Boys, conduct criminal and credit checks and personality tests; they're not as worried about team-player-ness as they are whether you're going to try and rape Tina from accounting after the company "holiday" party.
A "black hat" hacker thinks it is not only ethical and acceptable to violate numerous laws and break in to computer systems they have no permission to do so on...but they've DONE it, which means they'll have ZERO problems going places they're not supposed to be in your company.
That sounds somewhat trivial unless, say, you work at a bank. Banks and lots of other companies employ "chinese walls" (for those that don't know: different divisions are intentionally 'firewalled' knowledge-wise to prevent conflict of interest.) A black hat that feels he/she has the right to traipse anywhere on the company file servers is a serious threat.
The real question is not "Are they mature?", but "Did they recognize and accept what they did was wrong, and will they do it again?" Another question is, "can they follow company procedures and policies, and industry regulations?" If they can't keep from violating serious federal statues, how on earth can you trust them to follow a rule that says they shouldn't poke around in the accounting files?
The Tech Report has an in-depth look at Maxtor's DiamondMax 11 hard drive that provides some interesting insight on how Seagate's recent acquisition can improve deficiencies in its own drives.
Like better SMART support on Seagate's side? I was stunned at how much more SMART capabilities Maxtor drives have compared to Seagates and others. It should almost be a crime to produce a drive that doesn't have a SMART compatible error log (which Maxtors have- you can query it and see when+what the last errors were, for starters.)
I've also been stunned at how BAD modern drives are; a client lost FOUR maxtor drives out of a 12 drive array in the space of 2-3 months, and we literally couldn't replace them fast enough (also, the idiots that he bought the system from TURNED OFF autoverify on the 3ware controller, didn't install the linux drivers, didn't bother updating the card's firmware, etc. That'd be PCs4everyone in Boston, FYI.) I had a Seagate PATA drive with barely a dozen hours on it that started clonking like crazy if you wrote data at high speed to it for too long (no, this was not the 7200.8, which had similar issues, relating to a motor driver circuit overheating. This was a 7200.9!) Seriously- the drive would completely stop writing data if you wrote to it continuously for about 40-50GB. The only thing that let me successfully complete the imaging was a borrowed fan directly cooling the drive.
I'm not too optimistic that Maxtor and Seagate will benefit each other in terms of technology the end user will care about; what is more likely is that Seagate will go enterprise, and Maxtor will go consumer, since that is what each brand is best known for.
I got to wondering what the screen pixel count was, and found "170 DPI". Curious to put that down as "numbers I know"; my 20" dell is 1680 pixels wide and ~17 inches wide; almost exactly 100dpi. This is a fair bit higher (not quite twice!) so they should be able to put down a fair amount of decent-looking print on a "page".
It's slightly disappointing that HTML support isn't standard; they support everything else, but HTML requires "conversion." Yuck.
You know what I like best, though? Battery life is rated in "page turns", not minutes...and it charges off USB. With that kind of battery life, you can cut down on the number of charge cycles and keep the liion battery living longer.
Did you read anything else from the article? The population was ready to revolt, and half of the military and civilian government were dead-set against continuing the war. They tried to establish diplomatic ties with Russia to save their country and avoid invasion; the US demanded unconditional surrender, the Japanese not surprisingly said "pass", but KEPT WORKING ON HOW TO END THE WAR. Christ, man! Read the article.
US history books make it out like they were rabid, crazed defenders of their almighty emperor that would have fought to the last man, and that our atomic bombs "shocked" them back to "reason" and "saved lives". It's all a blatant lie.
Case in point. Japan started the fight and they would not surrender. Very conservative estimates of an invasion of Japan's homeland put American deaths at a million and Japanese deaths as a multiple of that. As horrific the destruction caused by the 2 atomic bombs, those bombs saved American and Japanese lives.
This is the common lie/myth, as is the western belief that the Japanese would "fight to the death to protect the emperor." It's all a bunch of crap. YES, the emperor was advised that his 'house' was in danger if he continued the war...but the Japanese leadership was worried about a coup or revolt, NOT setting up plans for farmers with pitchforks to fight off GI Joe to the death.
The Japanese were on the verge of surrendering already. Go study WW2 history- it's patently obvious Japan was already losing AND that they knew it. The atomic bombs were almost completely unnecessary, except to establish US dominance in the world theater by demonstrating god-like firepower.
Try this google search on for size.
Incidentally, does the political division and the emperor's "stay the course" position sound familiar to you? Those who do not study history, blah blah.
I think you're half right. All the stuff Republicans care about (defense and pork barrel spending) will either please the people who see it (ie, pork barrel spending, ie "wow, Joe Congresscritter brought in the jobs for us this year! Let's re-elect him!") or won't be included (Defense and/or Homeland inSecurity.) The defense budget is where we need to be trimming the fat more than anywhere else, and under Clinton, we balanced the budget simply by telling the military to chill out. We spend more money on defense, both total and per capita, than any other nation in the world, including China and North Korea.
What will be painfully visible will be the stuff that Joe Sixpack doesn't "see" why we need to spend money on. Things like school lunch assistance programs, PBS and NPR ("liberal media") funding...anything that has a slightly abstract benefit to society as a whole. All that will come of this is a lot of armchair socio-accounting, where Joe Sixpack gets outraged that HE is paying for ____________. It doesn't matter that only one cent out of his income tax goes to that tiny little thing and hundreds of dollars go to military hardware...
One thing seems consistent about Republican policy: cater the lowest common denominator in regards to people's ability to understand the flow of government dollars and how it helps "them." Hence the massive farm subsidies and a national diet that revolves around corn no matter how unhealthy it is, tarriffs on imported farm goods, corn-to-ethanol programs, and absurd "homeland (in)security" spending.
Pretty soon we'll all be corn-bloated, our kids will be mired in at least two foreign wars and dumb as fence posts, and we'll have an explosion of crime and homelessness...but at least we'll have shiny new police cars every year.
Just 33 years old, it might seem strange for someone to write an autobiographical narrative so soon, but like a lot of youth who've grown up in the age of the home computer, O'Hara's gotten a lot of living done in that short time.
Uh...I thought the usual joke was that BBSers DIDN'T get out and live life. How about giving an example of this "lot of living done"?
The only difference is there's no professional editor jamming through the work before it gets to you. It's easy to find flaws in a lack of slickness and flow in a self-published book, but also no real filtering out of "the good stuff", either. So I think of this book as a real sweet homebrew creation, rough-hewn but full of heart, not unlike the boards it talks about. Because of this, the first few dozen pages are choppy
A few dozen pages of "choppy" (poorly written) material? Look. I know it's popular to discredit professions; these days we've got bloggers running around claiming they're journalists, for example...but editors exist for a reason. Sure, there are companies that will laugh and tell you to take a hike, or insist you 'sex up' the story. That's not an editing decision; that's a PUBISHING and MARKETING decision; get it straight. He could have worked with a professional editor (there are many who are independent; my aunt is one of them) and THEN published...or offered up an electronic edition for community review and then published a printed edition.
Memoirs are written by people who have a unique, interesting story to tell about their lives- or people who are really good storytellers/writers. Rarely are they both, which is why many memoirs are ghost-written. From the sounds of it, this is just one of a hundred thousand plus people who traded warez, writing about...how he traded warez, and how cool he is for doing it. He's too life-inexperienced to realize that the same fights and drama occur in every situation in society where a bunch of people are involved in something.
Lastly- is there ever a time where Jason Scott doesn't hawk his film? His "disclaimer" wasn't; it was a blatant ad.