Personally, I'm a huge fan of Apple hardware, truly a beautiful thing. For the most part though I think their software is sub par. I don't like the dock, I don't like the menu bar always at the top, I don't like the way it supposedly "intelligently" handles windows. In short, there are a ton of things I really don't like about it. Even as far as integration goes, there is nothing really spectacular about it, and sometimes its just outright annoying (i.e. searching for something in google and then going into xcode or something and having that search phrase in the find/replace dialogue for xcode... what the hell good is that? Its just annoying, things like that should remain application specific and not persist throughout the user interface. But that is only one minor thing, I could go on for a while). The only thing that I really find interesting from a software point of view is the voice recognition, and things like having the computer tell you a joke. Their graphics designers are good, in fact great. Everything looks stellar, but usability sucks. I personally run Fedora on my laptop, but have fairly extensive experience with most other major distros, Ubuntu in particular. I feel that honestly the integration provided on a modern linux desktop is just as good as, if not better than, the same experience provided under OS X and/or Windows (I prefer using Gnome under Linux, but KDE is nice too). In addition, the amount of choices I have under linux far surpasses anything Apple can offer. I intend to buy a Macbook shortly, and I'll be putting linux on there as soon as possible, OS X just doesn't do it for me and I'm not going to take part in that group think where every Apple user has to get their nose brown regardless of the legitimacy of the claims being made. Regards, Steve
In previous cases it was companies self-proclaiming. Now it is the other market leaders making the claim about a competitor and I'm not sure what to make of it. Two years ago Yahoo used Google for its search, maybe they'll go back to that. Regards, Steve
Umm.... the American market is at the bottom of its decline right now. I think you need to get your facts straight, or at least stop letting your bias against America blind you (you are blatantly biased in all of your posts, I guess some people just can't accept being inferior and need to keep repeating false information to convince themselves otherwise) The American economy is expected to strengthen significantly over the next 15 years, currently it is considered to be at its low point. Regards, Steve
I've got to disagree, this is not you're typical pendulum swinging anymore. In centuries past, nations were isolated. We live in a global economy now with rapid communication, if the pendulum is swinging, its not swinging much, but rather getting comfy in its final place.
I don't think India and China are going to be where the 21st century happens. Really their only benefit is they have a large population with which to pull work from. With the rapid replacement of manual labor with automated means (something I strongly support and push), sometime around 2030 or so you'll see most manual labor and even a good chunk of work once considered to require intellect replaced with machines. At that point India's and China's greatest strength (their population) will be their biggest burden because it will no longer be the nation with the largest work pool, but rather the nation with the most efficient machines. At this point, it seems that a number of nations could take that title, none being China or India.
China's government, while getting better, I doubt will change enough to support the kind of economy that would ensue from the continued succes that they've had for the past decade or so. India is in a similar situation, but not quite as bad. I do find it ironic however that some of the outsourcing firms in India are no longer using Indian programmers but rather outsourcing their work to Chinese programmers to save more money. It implies a trend of future economic stagnation, there are similar situations in other job sectors of India also. There are a few trends like this that seem to lead to only a short term period of prosperity (most likely not lasting more than 2 decades, maybe 3). Google around a bit and you'll see reports and forecasts predicting similar situations. Regards, Steve
You're being too narrow minded. First of all, you are visiting someone else's website, which in many cases is a service provided to you for free. They have every right to know what links you click on or don't click on. Gathering such statistics is useful for more than just marketing, it lets webmasters *understand* how users are using their site, and as a result the site can be designed better and with the user in mind. It is also good to know which links in an article users are following. If you link to 3rd parties, it is a good thing for you to know which types of links your users follow and which ones don't interest them. Every good website owner tracks this kind of thing and optimizes their site to accomodate their average user. If a webmaster decides to also use this information to maximize the marketing value of his website or to figure out which ads people aren't clicking so he can just remove them, then so be it, it is well within his rights to do so. If you don't like it, don't go to the site. I'd much rather have this ping attribute than redirects, messy javascript, or transparent 1x1 pixels everywhere for each source that needs to be pinged. This is a clean solution that isn't invasive. If someone knowing what links your following is somehow detrimental to your privacy then you've got far worse problems as in many cases everyone from the site owner, to your ISP, to people on your LAN (and anyone in between) can already track that information without you knowing. Regards, Steve
Oh god... I just had an image of a bunch of tourists running around screaming nothing but "Chuck Norris" and "Vin Deisel". Please don't let foreigners learn their english from WoW! Regards, Steve
Those things are discussed all the time and there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of proposals to fix issues like that (quite a few are pretty clever). Google scholar *might* find you some interesting results if you're interested. Regards, Steve
It is useful for knowing where to spread the money and resources. Alot of futurists are good at what they do (one of the best is Ray Kurzweil whose accuracy you can even check by reading "The Age of Intelligent Machines" which was writting in the mid 80's and was surprisingly accurate. This is why many large firms use him as a consultant. He's written a few more books since then and are all pretty decent) You only typically hear about ridiculous and wild speculation because its good for headlines or its amusing to laugh at a generation from 5 decades ago, but there are plenty of people out there being very accurate. You underestimate it all. Regards, Steve
Sounds great in theory, but some of the best submitters submit because they know that they will be rewarded well with a link to their site, i.e. that is their motivation. If you take away the motivation, you take away some of the best story submitters, just be careful as you don't want the quality of submissions to go down. A link back to their site is alot more valuable to most than 3 karma points, not to mention that I've always viewed it as slashdot's little way of giving back to the thousands upon thousands of geeks that link to slashdot:) But you're the man in charge, I'm sure you'll make the right decision. Regards, Steve
Patents are *never* an issue for the end user, only the distributor. If it is found that mono violates patents and MS sues and wins, only SuSE and the Fedora foundation would have to pay anything. Just like if MS violates a patent, every person using windows doesn't pay, only MS. In short, dont base your recommendation on this, worse case scenario is they just have to take it back out of the Fedora software repository. Regards, Steve
Ugh take out the bracketed content after the url,/. inserted it automagically, apparently it automatically links urls which I never knew. Regards, Steve
You might be interested in this post of mine from the other day. Regards, Steve
Re:Only with money in fractions
on
Rounding Algorithms
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think you might be mistaken. Round to the nearest even is statisticly significantly more accurate. Rounding halves up does nothing for accuracy as you seem to imply. Large data sets of any type of data will be biased if rounding halves up, whereas rounding to the nearest even is ever more accurate with each datapoint. Your statement about rounding to even being bad makes me think you haven't fully grasped the underlying concept, I've never seen rounding halves up used for anything in a major environment simply because it is almost always the wrong thing to use. Regards, Steve
As the other person who responded told you, under linux, bsd, and most *nixes in general, when you update, you can update literally everything installed on your system with one command. By "everything" I mean everything, including applciations that are not necessary for core functionality. You update your kernel just as easily as you update your email client, office suite, instant messenger, browser plugins, text editors, games, photo manipulation programs, media players, sound recording suites, literally every package installed on your system can be updated. Its akin to saying that Windows Update would update your Macromedia Flash plugin, Adobe Acrobat, Firefox, Spybot, and Norton AV for you automatically. Linux in particular makes updating extremely easy, under Fedora you can either click the little flashing exclamation mark in your tray when there are updates, or just run "yum update" and *poof* everything is brought up to date. Similar methods are used in Debian, Gentoo, and the other distros as well. I'd love to go into more detail about linux package management and its superiority, but I'd probably jsut bore you:) So hopefully that explains your question. Essentially what I was saying was that, rather than making the administrator go to 20 different sources to update Veritas, Symantec, (insert 20 more applicaitons here), Linux does it much cleaner using a central repository that does all the magic for you. Regards, Steve
So out of curiosity, I removed all (Updated) lines from the results,and all blatantly duplicate exploits, and also any non-linux exploits, just to see how they matched up. Keep in mind that I kept alot of the php, apache , and other exploits in the list but did not add them to windows despite that these also affect windows and should be included. The numbers I got were 784 to 672, Linux to Windows. Then, because in the windows list they strictly kept to vulnerabilities that only affected windows and not multiple platforms, I took out any vulnerabilties from the linux list that would 100% for certain be cross-platform and affect Windows as well. The list reduced to 669, which is right on par with Windows (keeping in mind that I left some exploits in the list because I was only say 80% or 90% sure and so I gave Windows the benefit of the doubt). Just out of curiosity, I then tookout any linux vulnerabilities that were specific to one vendor(i.e. Red Hat, Suse, Gentoo, Debian) for a number of reasons which I won't get into. This brought it down to 639. That last number doesn't really represent anything other than a curiosity of mine.
I was originally going to have a disclaimer stating that these numbers are accurate probably to within +-30, but since they were so close, I don't think it's necessary. One observation I've noted is that the Linux vulnerabilities are spread over a far greater variety of applications. Another thing worth noting is that it looks like Windows can not easily be effectively secured as long as security updates are done as they are currently. Most linux distros (Red Hat/Fedora, Suse, Debian, Gentoo, etc.. off the top of my head) provide a central repository that will update everything on your system for you. This appears to be a much more optimal method of applying updates. If nothing else, these results show that not just core functionality, but also supporting functionalities must be kept up to date and are just as much of a security problem, if not more so. Linux distributions support such update methodolgies natively, Windows does not.
It appears that Linux is the winner here no matter how you look at it, and we didn't even begin to look at severity or the time from disclosure to time patched (which isn't available using the information in the report, but my inclination is to say that open source wins hands down here, call me biased if you will). For the files that I referenced and modified to get these numbers, you can get the windows list here and the first linux list here (the one with 784 exploits, not 669). These lists are not 100% accurate as I'm sure the regexs I used missed some things, or were too greedy in other cases. I also did some manual pruning that wasnt appropriate to be done with regexs, which I'm sure wasn't 100% accurate either, but these lists are close. Regards, Steve
Not only do they not take into account severity, a large portion of the vulnerabilites in the Linux list are tagged with "update" meaning that a large portion are just updates to previously filed bugs, but worst of all, their lists are just plain wrong. A huge chunk of the open source projects listed under *nix are not listed under Windows, yet they run on Windows and the vulnerabilities affected windows. There are Apache, Gaim, PHP, Zope, Clam AV, Vim, Emacs,Perl, MySql and many more vulnerabilities listed just under *nix, yet equally affect Windows. Even worse, Windows has 1 firefox vulnerability listed, yet *nix has 153 firefox vulnerabilities listed (including the couple of tens of updates) but every vulnerability I saw listed equally affected Windows. This list is separating vulnerabilities by pretty much whether its open source or not (for the most part, say 90%), not by what platform it runs on, yet the latter is how they are categorized. This whole list is a big giant piece of misinformation and someone needs to correct it.
It's also not intelligent to group together all Unix derived operating systems, as they all follow completely different security structures, development paradigms, and grouping them is simply serving to inflate already misleading numbers. The fact is that the only thing this list clearly shows is that open source projects are much better at following up on security problems(noting all of the updates), and that there are far more applications that run under *nix than under Windows once you account for all of the at least semi-popular open source projects. Regards, Steve
You're right in that there is no escape for average windows users, but using newer versions of Opera and Firefox you are prompted first (or so one of the articles claimed). I can only presume that they check for corrupted files first or something. Regards, Steve
Hey, I'd write a long reply, but Niles Eldridge has already said it better than I ever could. Not sure if I have permission to pass this along, but eh whatever:) Here is a thing Niles wrote that is about the sixth extinction, extremely informative. Regards, Steve
There have been 6 mass extinctions in earth's history. The first one wiped out around 85% of species and is attributed to rapid global cooling, this happened around 443 millions years ago. The second one (354 million years ago) wiped out around 70% of life and is attributed to rapid climate change and also anoxia from an algae-like species overpopulating and depleting the oceans of oxygen and other necessary things. Right before the dinosaurs came into town (295 million years ago), 95% (yes that is a 9 and a 5, pretty significant number, eh?) of species became extinct through a bolide impact, this opened up a ton of niches for new species to flourish. Not only did it lead to the dinosaurs but it led to more variety of species than ever before. Right between the triassic and jurassic periods, an extinction happened that killed 45% of animals, the dinosaurs survived this one (206 million years ago) and the cause of it is still being debated but may have resulted from abnormal levels of volcanism. The dinosaurs didn't make it through the next extinction which killed 65% of life on earth from a bolide impact that also led to rapid climate change, tsunamis, earthquakes and increased volcanism. That was 65 million years ago. The 6th mass extinction is happening today, and yea unfortunately its mostly due to us, but honestly its jsut the cyclical nature of life. Every couple hundred million years species start going extinct like crazy and the causes have varied, this time its us. We shouldn't necessarily go out of our way and discomfort ourselves because regardless of what we do, everything is going to hell anyway. I'd love to get into more detail but I have family to attend to. Regards, Steve
Um... did you forget about that other option? Keep metadata specific to the computer. Infact, never have it directly attached to the file data. One simple way to visualize this would say you have a file access table, this table is essentially array with one column being the file name and one column being its beginning sector, one column for file size, and now you just add another column for the start of the metadata and the size of it. Essentially treat the metadata like a separate file that is pointed to by the real file's table. When you copy the file through the shell (including explorer), the program doing the copying could go out of its way to copy the metadate with the file, but by default the metadata should not be moved with the original file, no matter what. Now when you upload a file, the browser or email client will by default not send the metadata. Pretty simple concpet really, infact I convoluted it quite a bit in the above explanation. Essentially keep metadata local and unattached to the file, just because you send me a picture doesn't mean I want the metadata to say "my children", because they are actually your children, not mine, and I'd have it say "my nephews and nieces" or something like that. Metadata is nothing more than the user's personal opinion and idea of what is in the file, no need to send it around by default. I can understand why in some companies would like metadata to stay (i.e. labeling documents as various customers and roles, etc...) but for once Microsoft should start off by making the smart and safe choice of defaulting to no, and let the damn company create a policy to allow metadata in certain files to persist. Regards, Steve
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'm a huge fan of Apple hardware, truly a beautiful thing. For the most part though I think their software is sub par. I don't like the dock, I don't like the menu bar always at the top, I don't like the way it supposedly "intelligently" handles windows. In short, there are a ton of things I really don't like about it. Even as far as integration goes, there is nothing really spectacular about it, and sometimes its just outright annoying (i.e. searching for something in google and then going into xcode or something and having that search phrase in the find/replace dialogue for xcode... what the hell good is that? Its just annoying, things like that should remain application specific and not persist throughout the user interface. But that is only one minor thing, I could go on for a while). The only thing that I really find interesting from a software point of view is the voice recognition, and things like having the computer tell you a joke. Their graphics designers are good, in fact great. Everything looks stellar, but usability sucks. I personally run Fedora on my laptop, but have fairly extensive experience with most other major distros, Ubuntu in particular. I feel that honestly the integration provided on a modern linux desktop is just as good as, if not better than, the same experience provided under OS X and/or Windows (I prefer using Gnome under Linux, but KDE is nice too). In addition, the amount of choices I have under linux far surpasses anything Apple can offer. I intend to buy a Macbook shortly, and I'll be putting linux on there as soon as possible, OS X just doesn't do it for me and I'm not going to take part in that group think where every Apple user has to get their nose brown regardless of the legitimacy of the claims being made.
Regards,
Steve
In previous cases it was companies self-proclaiming. Now it is the other market leaders making the claim about a competitor and I'm not sure what to make of it. Two years ago Yahoo used Google for its search, maybe they'll go back to that.
Regards,
Steve
Umm.... the American market is at the bottom of its decline right now. I think you need to get your facts straight, or at least stop letting your bias against America blind you (you are blatantly biased in all of your posts, I guess some people just can't accept being inferior and need to keep repeating false information to convince themselves otherwise) The American economy is expected to strengthen significantly over the next 15 years, currently it is considered to be at its low point.
Regards,
Steve
I've got to disagree, this is not you're typical pendulum swinging anymore. In centuries past, nations were isolated. We live in a global economy now with rapid communication, if the pendulum is swinging, its not swinging much, but rather getting comfy in its final place.
I don't think India and China are going to be where the 21st century happens. Really their only benefit is they have a large population with which to pull work from. With the rapid replacement of manual labor with automated means (something I strongly support and push), sometime around 2030 or so you'll see most manual labor and even a good chunk of work once considered to require intellect replaced with machines. At that point India's and China's greatest strength (their population) will be their biggest burden because it will no longer be the nation with the largest work pool, but rather the nation with the most efficient machines. At this point, it seems that a number of nations could take that title, none being China or India.
China's government, while getting better, I doubt will change enough to support the kind of economy that would ensue from the continued succes that they've had for the past decade or so. India is in a similar situation, but not quite as bad. I do find it ironic however that some of the outsourcing firms in India are no longer using Indian programmers but rather outsourcing their work to Chinese programmers to save more money. It implies a trend of future economic stagnation, there are similar situations in other job sectors of India also. There are a few trends like this that seem to lead to only a short term period of prosperity (most likely not lasting more than 2 decades, maybe 3). Google around a bit and you'll see reports and forecasts predicting similar situations.
Regards,
Steve
Some of us prefer to live it and influence its course, not just watch it go by.
Regards,
Steve
You're being too narrow minded. First of all, you are visiting someone else's website, which in many cases is a service provided to you for free. They have every right to know what links you click on or don't click on. Gathering such statistics is useful for more than just marketing, it lets webmasters *understand* how users are using their site, and as a result the site can be designed better and with the user in mind. It is also good to know which links in an article users are following. If you link to 3rd parties, it is a good thing for you to know which types of links your users follow and which ones don't interest them. Every good website owner tracks this kind of thing and optimizes their site to accomodate their average user. If a webmaster decides to also use this information to maximize the marketing value of his website or to figure out which ads people aren't clicking so he can just remove them, then so be it, it is well within his rights to do so. If you don't like it, don't go to the site. I'd much rather have this ping attribute than redirects, messy javascript, or transparent 1x1 pixels everywhere for each source that needs to be pinged. This is a clean solution that isn't invasive. If someone knowing what links your following is somehow detrimental to your privacy then you've got far worse problems as in many cases everyone from the site owner, to your ISP, to people on your LAN (and anyone in between) can already track that information without you knowing.
Regards,
Steve
Oh god... I just had an image of a bunch of tourists running around screaming nothing but "Chuck Norris" and "Vin Deisel". Please don't let foreigners learn their english from WoW!
Regards,
Steve
Those things are discussed all the time and there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of proposals to fix issues like that (quite a few are pretty clever). Google scholar *might* find you some interesting results if you're interested.
Regards,
Steve
It is useful for knowing where to spread the money and resources. Alot of futurists are good at what they do (one of the best is Ray Kurzweil whose accuracy you can even check by reading "The Age of Intelligent Machines" which was writting in the mid 80's and was surprisingly accurate. This is why many large firms use him as a consultant. He's written a few more books since then and are all pretty decent) You only typically hear about ridiculous and wild speculation because its good for headlines or its amusing to laugh at a generation from 5 decades ago, but there are plenty of people out there being very accurate. You underestimate it all.
Regards,
Steve
Sounds great in theory, but some of the best submitters submit because they know that they will be rewarded well with a link to their site, i.e. that is their motivation. If you take away the motivation, you take away some of the best story submitters, just be careful as you don't want the quality of submissions to go down. A link back to their site is alot more valuable to most than 3 karma points, not to mention that I've always viewed it as slashdot's little way of giving back to the thousands upon thousands of geeks that link to slashdot :) But you're the man in charge, I'm sure you'll make the right decision.
Regards,
Steve
Patents are *never* an issue for the end user, only the distributor. If it is found that mono violates patents and MS sues and wins, only SuSE and the Fedora foundation would have to pay anything. Just like if MS violates a patent, every person using windows doesn't pay, only MS. In short, dont base your recommendation on this, worse case scenario is they just have to take it back out of the Fedora software repository.
Regards,
Steve
Ugh take out the bracketed content after the url, /. inserted it automagically, apparently it automatically links urls which I never knew.
Regards,
Steve
while true; do wget http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/hs/ &> /dev/null; done;
Regards,
Steve
You might be interested in this post of mine from the other day.
Regards,
Steve
I think you might be mistaken. Round to the nearest even is statisticly significantly more accurate. Rounding halves up does nothing for accuracy as you seem to imply. Large data sets of any type of data will be biased if rounding halves up, whereas rounding to the nearest even is ever more accurate with each datapoint. Your statement about rounding to even being bad makes me think you haven't fully grasped the underlying concept, I've never seen rounding halves up used for anything in a major environment simply because it is almost always the wrong thing to use.
Regards,
Steve
As the other person who responded told you, under linux, bsd, and most *nixes in general, when you update, you can update literally everything installed on your system with one command. By "everything" I mean everything, including applciations that are not necessary for core functionality. You update your kernel just as easily as you update your email client, office suite, instant messenger, browser plugins, text editors, games, photo manipulation programs, media players, sound recording suites, literally every package installed on your system can be updated. Its akin to saying that Windows Update would update your Macromedia Flash plugin, Adobe Acrobat, Firefox, Spybot, and Norton AV for you automatically. Linux in particular makes updating extremely easy, under Fedora you can either click the little flashing exclamation mark in your tray when there are updates, or just run "yum update" and *poof* everything is brought up to date. Similar methods are used in Debian, Gentoo, and the other distros as well. I'd love to go into more detail about linux package management and its superiority, but I'd probably jsut bore you :) So hopefully that explains your question. Essentially what I was saying was that, rather than making the administrator go to 20 different sources to update Veritas, Symantec, (insert 20 more applicaitons here), Linux does it much cleaner using a central repository that does all the magic for you.
Regards,
Steve
So out of curiosity, I removed all (Updated) lines from the results,and all blatantly duplicate exploits, and also any non-linux exploits, just to see how they matched up. Keep in mind that I kept alot of the php, apache , and other exploits in the list but did not add them to windows despite that these also affect windows and should be included. The numbers I got were 784 to 672, Linux to Windows. Then, because in the windows list they strictly kept to vulnerabilities that only affected windows and not multiple platforms, I took out any vulnerabilties from the linux list that would 100% for certain be cross-platform and affect Windows as well. The list reduced to 669, which is right on par with Windows (keeping in mind that I left some exploits in the list because I was only say 80% or 90% sure and so I gave Windows the benefit of the doubt). Just out of curiosity, I then tookout any linux vulnerabilities that were specific to one vendor(i.e. Red Hat, Suse, Gentoo, Debian) for a number of reasons which I won't get into. This brought it down to 639. That last number doesn't really represent anything other than a curiosity of mine.
I was originally going to have a disclaimer stating that these numbers are accurate probably to within +-30, but since they were so close, I don't think it's necessary. One observation I've noted is that the Linux vulnerabilities are spread over a far greater variety of applications. Another thing worth noting is that it looks like Windows can not easily be effectively secured as long as security updates are done as they are currently. Most linux distros (Red Hat/Fedora, Suse, Debian, Gentoo, etc.. off the top of my head) provide a central repository that will update everything on your system for you. This appears to be a much more optimal method of applying updates. If nothing else, these results show that not just core functionality, but also supporting functionalities must be kept up to date and are just as much of a security problem, if not more so. Linux distributions support such update methodolgies natively, Windows does not.
It appears that Linux is the winner here no matter how you look at it, and we didn't even begin to look at severity or the time from disclosure to time patched (which isn't available using the information in the report, but my inclination is to say that open source wins hands down here, call me biased if you will). For the files that I referenced and modified to get these numbers, you can get the windows list here and the first linux list here (the one with 784 exploits, not 669). These lists are not 100% accurate as I'm sure the regexs I used missed some things, or were too greedy in other cases. I also did some manual pruning that wasnt appropriate to be done with regexs, which I'm sure wasn't 100% accurate either, but these lists are close.
Regards,
Steve
Not only do they not take into account severity, a large portion of the vulnerabilites in the Linux list are tagged with "update" meaning that a large portion are just updates to previously filed bugs, but worst of all, their lists are just plain wrong. A huge chunk of the open source projects listed under *nix are not listed under Windows, yet they run on Windows and the vulnerabilities affected windows. There are Apache, Gaim, PHP, Zope, Clam AV, Vim, Emacs,Perl, MySql and many more vulnerabilities listed just under *nix, yet equally affect Windows. Even worse, Windows has 1 firefox vulnerability listed, yet *nix has 153 firefox vulnerabilities listed (including the couple of tens of updates) but every vulnerability I saw listed equally affected Windows. This list is separating vulnerabilities by pretty much whether its open source or not (for the most part, say 90%), not by what platform it runs on, yet the latter is how they are categorized. This whole list is a big giant piece of misinformation and someone needs to correct it.
It's also not intelligent to group together all Unix derived operating systems, as they all follow completely different security structures, development paradigms, and grouping them is simply serving to inflate already misleading numbers. The fact is that the only thing this list clearly shows is that open source projects are much better at following up on security problems(noting all of the updates), and that there are far more applications that run under *nix than under Windows once you account for all of the at least semi-popular open source projects.
Regards,
Steve
You shouldn't be modded as a troll.
And don't forget, AOL has a patent on instant messaging (seriously).
You're right in that there is no escape for average windows users, but using newer versions of Opera and Firefox you are prompted first (or so one of the articles claimed). I can only presume that they check for corrupted files first or something.
Regards,
Steve
The only web browser icon on the desktop is firefox, and yes it is also the default.
Regards,
Steve
Hey, I'd write a long reply, but Niles Eldridge has already said it better than I ever could. Not sure if I have permission to pass this along, but eh whatever:) Here is a thing Niles wrote that is about the sixth extinction, extremely informative.
Regards,
Steve
There have been 6 mass extinctions in earth's history. The first one wiped out around 85% of species and is attributed to rapid global cooling, this happened around 443 millions years ago. The second one (354 million years ago) wiped out around 70% of life and is attributed to rapid climate change and also anoxia from an algae-like species overpopulating and depleting the oceans of oxygen and other necessary things. Right before the dinosaurs came into town (295 million years ago), 95% (yes that is a 9 and a 5, pretty significant number, eh?) of species became extinct through a bolide impact, this opened up a ton of niches for new species to flourish. Not only did it lead to the dinosaurs but it led to more variety of species than ever before. Right between the triassic and jurassic periods, an extinction happened that killed 45% of animals, the dinosaurs survived this one (206 million years ago) and the cause of it is still being debated but may have resulted from abnormal levels of volcanism. The dinosaurs didn't make it through the next extinction which killed 65% of life on earth from a bolide impact that also led to rapid climate change, tsunamis, earthquakes and increased volcanism. That was 65 million years ago. The 6th mass extinction is happening today, and yea unfortunately its mostly due to us, but honestly its jsut the cyclical nature of life. Every couple hundred million years species start going extinct like crazy and the causes have varied, this time its us. We shouldn't necessarily go out of our way and discomfort ourselves because regardless of what we do, everything is going to hell anyway. I'd love to get into more detail but I have family to attend to.
Regards,
Steve
Um... did you forget about that other option? Keep metadata specific to the computer. Infact, never have it directly attached to the file data. One simple way to visualize this would say you have a file access table, this table is essentially array with one column being the file name and one column being its beginning sector, one column for file size, and now you just add another column for the start of the metadata and the size of it. Essentially treat the metadata like a separate file that is pointed to by the real file's table. When you copy the file through the shell (including explorer), the program doing the copying could go out of its way to copy the metadate with the file, but by default the metadata should not be moved with the original file, no matter what. Now when you upload a file, the browser or email client will by default not send the metadata. Pretty simple concpet really, infact I convoluted it quite a bit in the above explanation. Essentially keep metadata local and unattached to the file, just because you send me a picture doesn't mean I want the metadata to say "my children", because they are actually your children, not mine, and I'd have it say "my nephews and nieces" or something like that. Metadata is nothing more than the user's personal opinion and idea of what is in the file, no need to send it around by default. I can understand why in some companies would like metadata to stay (i.e. labeling documents as various customers and roles, etc...) but for once Microsoft should start off by making the smart and safe choice of defaulting to no, and let the damn company create a policy to allow metadata in certain files to persist.
Regards,
Steve