Well Windows 7 should be better than XP. A 10yr old OS, come on. It would be the laughing stock of the world if it couldn't manage that. Oh wait, I forget Vista...
In a sense, that's Microsoft's core modus operandi. They copy stuff.
Windows 7 is fresh on the heels of Mac OS X and modern Linux desktop. Xbox 360, a copy of Playstation. Zune vs iPod. Powershell vs Linux and UNIX command line. C# vs Java. IE9 vs Chrome/Safari/Firefox/Opera. WP7 vs Android and iOS. The Marketplace vs AppStore / Android Market / Linux distro repositories. Silverlight vs Flash. Bing vs Google. I won't even go into the multitude of formats and standards they've attempted to undermine with their own (WMV, OOXML, XPS, ActiveX etc.)
Sure, they innovate as well. But they don't believe in what they do, they're not a trendsetter. They're a clueless, awkward giant who looks around and desperately replicates everything it sees, hoping that some of it will catch on. And it does... sort of. But there's no joy, no soul in it.
And what joy and soul can there be, if your core philosophy used to be "embrace and extinguish" and you haven't found another since?
I know they were so much better than the competition pre-iPhone, but with iOS, Android, and (internationally) Symbian, I don't really understand how they exist other than through corporate agreements that haven't expired yet.
iOS is focused on consumers, not business. Android is too young and nobody's polished it enough for business. Symbian does have offer lots of business devices but they're not by far as nicely integrated as what RIM offers, it's a wildly different range of products scattered across different manufacturers and backends.
Granted, Microsoft and WP7 could move into that business niche in force. Microsoft definitely has what it takes to offer an alternative to RIM's integrated services. Then again, one might argue that their core expertise lies with PC's, not mobiles, and all their previous efforts in this sector were more or less failures.
Let's just wait and see what actually happens, ok? After all these years I'm just a bit weary of Microsoft hype, FUD and vaporware. I'll give them the benefit of doubt, as always... but I want to see some cold hard results before I get excited.
The problem is that out of the box, Git does not keep track of who pushes what.
Yes, it does, what on Earth are you talking about? In Git, each changeset has an author AND a commiter, and they can be different persons. There's a clear distinction between which developer created the changeset originally and who's moving it around the repository, or to other repositories.
I don't see why a centralized repository is a problem, as long as you set the identities of the developers on the machine hosting the repository and as long as they authenticate properly.
If by "out of the box" you mean "I slapped a git repository in there and expect it to magically know who the developers are"... even that will happen, to some extent; when you do your first push git will try to infer your identity from the system account. Naturally, it cannot perform magic and deal with all possible remote setups. But I don't see how sloppy setup is Git's fault.
Not exactly. I mean, assuming you understand those git commands well (I can't tell not familiar with Mercurial), you may have found some equivalent hg commands.
But that's not the point.
The point is that the git command is extremely flexible. It has 3 components (reset; --soft vs --hard [and there's more reset methods, not just those two]; and the HEAD^ which is a "treeish", a way to specify history position, one out of many). Those components can be combined in a lot of ways. Furthermore, some of them are reusable; the treeishes are used by other commands, not just reset.
What I'm getting to is that git is extremely flexible. You've picked two particular combinations and found Mercurial equivalents... but what about the others? What about HEAD^2~4? What about reset --mixed? What about forward resets? What about combinations of all these?
Does reset --soft HEAD~5 remove any revisions from the repository?
No. Not explicitly. The state of the tree would be changed to reflect a past commit. The commits after that commit are still in the history.
If a new commit is done from that past point, the tree sprouts a branch and HEAD becomes assigned to it. Still, the old "abandoned" branch of the history is not deleted. It might however be garbage collected at some point, if no branch name is explicitly assigned to any of the commits in it, since they'd be left "dangling" with no explicit reference, which git will take to mean they're of no interest anymore.
What does the '~5' mean?
It means "go up the history 5 commits from the given place". If the name isn't given, it means from the current place the worktree is at. If a branch name is given, it uses it as reference. In this case HEAD was given, which is the default branch name.
Note that, technically, using HEAD~5 doesn't say anything about where the worktree was at that time, only that we wanna switch to 5 places up the history from wherever HEAD is now. But in this particular example we're discussing we can probably assume the worktree was at HEAD, so ~5 and HEAD~5 mean the same thing: go 5 commits back.
How does the meaning of ~5 change if there are merges or branches in the very recent history?
I'm assuming by "very recent" you mean "within those 5 commits". Good question. Since this reset goes back in history, it has no interest in branches, which are going the opposite direction in the time flow. It's following the parent of each commit in turn.
However, if there were merges, that means one or more of those 5 commits may have 2 (or more) parents. In which case ~5 as specified above would pick the first one and go with that. If the user wants another parent they can use ^N, which picks the Nth parent.
Using ^ and ~ specs together allow the user to specify the "path" back up in history very exactly, because they can be chained. Example: let's say that 2 commits back there was a merge of 2 branches. Using ~5 would go up the first of them, but I want the other one. I would use ~2^2~3, which means: go back 2 commits, then pick the 2nd parent, then use that to go another 3 commits.
reset can also move forward in history, but there's no equivalent to ~ and ^ for forward moves. Not sure for the exact reason, but it's probably because ~ and ^ are also used by diff and log and so on, not just reset, they're a generic way of navigating back history. They're only one of the many ways to specify history positions.
And given the vast variation in Linux distros, you're probably better off releasing Windows games that are Wine-compatible than a Linux binary that won't run on Ubuntu 12.04 or Redhat 6.3.
I have no problem (on Ubuntu 10.04) playing HOMM3 (1999), Rune (2000), Doom 3 (2004), Cold War (2006), Gorky 17 (2007), H-Craft Championship (2007), Penumbra (2007), Prey (2008) etc. They are all native games or ports who keep running despite the fact they're the exact same copy released many years ago.
You seem to have a lot of faith in government (or in your government). The reason Slashdotters (and others) are skeptical of government power is that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It strikes me as interesting that most of the countries opposing UIDs on principle are island nations or otherwise isolated, who have never experienced occupation or dictatorship. It seems to me that in some respects they are still just theoretical experiments in democracy with no real-world validation.
What does "freedom" mean to a nation who's never had it taken away from them by force? It's just an empty word, something taken for granted. It's like a child imagining what it's like to be an adult or a rookie without the baptism of fire imagining war. They worry about meaningless things. Only once you've actually experienced the darkest form of denial of freedom you learn what freedom means, you value it, you learn to protect it. And then you stop worrying about silly things like UIDs.
The nations using UIDs have learned those lessons. Most European nations at some point in history have had to take shit from someone. It was a healthy exercise.
It's not that they trust their governments. Of course all governments are corrupt to some extent. Of course any system can and will be abused, since you have to trust someone at some point. They accept and live with this reality. You know who is the ultimate watchdog of the people's civil liberties? The people themselves. When liberties are trampled, such as an UID being misused, they react and correct the situation. When politicians step out of line they are reminded of it.
Opposing the technology itself is the solution of the person who has already given up on defending their civil liberties and sees no other hope. Is that what's going on the US and the UK?
As for biometrics, it's a stupid non-issue. We already use biometrics. Picture IDs are biometrics. Except they're very poor ones. Pics of the head taken once every 10 years? As the sole means of identification it's a stupid idea. They're worthless when you think of beards, scars, glasses, cosmetic surgery, haircuts, hats and so on. Easy to fake, unreliable. As long as that was the only technology we had it was alright but why not complement it with something better if we can?
Users will switch to other browsers if the use case is compelling enough.
Ideally. Most often, people do not change browser. The browser is a very personal choice and people show extraordinary resistance to changing it.
How would you react if someone came to you and told you "how about you switch to browser X?" Your knee jerk reaction would be "take a hike", most likely. You know it would.
Now, they could go on explaining why the other browser is so much better. But (a) lots of people have trouble visualising something without seeing it in action; and (b) the arguments would be [highly] technical and would likely sound like gibberish to them.
Which means the second reaction is also likely to be "get lost, buddy".
I've tried to get friends and family off IE6 (hell, off IE in general) for a while now. You know what happens. Some need it because they use it work (where it's mandatory) and they don't want to "learn" to use more than one browser, so they use it at home too. Some are simply stubborn. Some have trouble visualising another browser in their head and aren't willing to try it live.
When I do manage to persuade them it's in particular circumstances. A buddy had just reinstalled Windows and was about to go into the default IE when I happened to catch him. At which point I quickly asked what he wants from a browser and his requirements "fast, absolute minimal fuss, don't care about ad blockers" automatically pointed at Chrome. So he started a new Windows install with Chrome and now loves it. But it would have never happened otherwise.
You're joking but actually at #7 (deleted files start dissapearing from screen) they're accurately describing a modern Linux desktop.:)
Think about it: * if you have a file manager open, such as Nautilus, and someone were to start deleting files, they would dissapear from view; * there's no undelete on Linux; * most people would not think to turn the computer off; they'd try mousing around or disconnecting the network; which would accomplish nothing if the deletion is a background job.
It's because of "mongoose". Shuttleworth was bitten by one as a child and has it in for them. Now, had you proposed "Menstruating Meerkat" on the other hand...
And to further expand on this, as well as respond to the GP's claims he filters everything: BT simply wasn't built for protecting privacy. No matter how much filtering and encryption you do, the fact of the matter is that your BT client will happily connect and exchange file pieces with anybody who wants it, and it is easy to prove that you had those pieces and knew what file(s) they were from. Thus potentially landing you in trouble.
What is needed here is something that will add real privacy and plausible deniability. The potentially malicious peer has to be unable to accurately claim that the owner of the IP which just gave him a piece of a file knew what it was and where it had come from. Something along the lines of a double blind. Trackers need to start mixing peers from several/all torrents and use them to send the pieces via one or several intermediaries who have no idea what the pieces are, where they come from or where they are going.
Yes, traffic will increase, unfortunately, so will requirements for local temporary storage space. The sad thing is that in this battle between MAFIAA and the end consumer, it's the IPS's that are caught in the middle.
[..]ever try to really -read- anything on a LCD screen for a long period of time? It is terrible.
I've been hearing this for so long that I finally have to speak up. Yes, I've been reading hundreds of books on a LCD screen (NEC MobilePro 900c). For years. With zero disconfort. No, I'm not a teenager with wonderful eyesight. I don't wear glasses either and I don't feel that my eyesight has dimished any in all those years. Eye exams once a year have confirmed that.
Do you think that maybe, dunno, setting the font size and background color might help? As in, not attempting to stare at minuscule letters on a bright white background? Use large fonts (as large as you feel confortable reading without straining your eyes at all), and grey, light greyish-yellow or light greyish-green background. Feel free to adjust the brightness and contrast too.
E-Ink is very nice, but it's not the killer feature of readers. The killer features are low price (sub-$100), no DRM, decent reader app, SD card and acting as a plain USB mass storage device with any OS. If any reader managed to offer that, e-Ink would be a nice perk, but not a must-have.
Getting back on topic, iPad will wipe the floor with all the so-called "readers" that are not really just readers but attempt to do anything more. Feature for feature, it's not even a contest.
[And before you call me an Apple whore: I don't own any Apple hardware and don't recall using their software recently.]
Hah, but in a sense can't you say that about any religion or indeed anything that requires you to accept things on faith alone?
In fact, it could be argued that the decay of the mind begins when the person stops using it to find their own answers and blindly accepts what is fed to it. Strangely, that's not an attribute of religion alone, but also of advertising, media, politics etc. And, conversely, a person can be religious and still keep an open mind.
It is possible because there's more to a religion than just the stories about how it came to be, a religion has theories on cosmology, life, morals etc. There's a philosophical component to most major religions that you can't simply ignore and which is not necessarily brain-dead and based on faith alone.
Dismissing religion out-of-hand with this kind of label is, ironically, very akin to what you were objecting to in the first place.
[..]Oracle is at least twenty years ahead of all of their competitors in database technology.
Hyperbole aside, yeah, Oracle is in a league of its own. That's exactly why the idea that Oracle "fears" MySQL and would want to squash it is so utterly ridiculous.
It makes a lot more sense to me that Oracle would acknowledge the fact that not everybody needs or wants Oracle db, so they might very well turn MySQL into a low-end offering, thus catering to a wider audience.
OK, so they might make it close source and commercial only. I highly doubt it because they'd lose the network effect that MySQL currently enjoys, but let's say for the sake of argument they would. So what? They bought the copyright fair and square, it was sold to them. If Widenius didn't want that he shouldn't have sold. And the source is still out there and it can be forked so I really really don't see what his problem is.
On a side note, MySQL is quite lame on technical merits. I suspect Oracle would have been much better off buying something like Postgres. Except that the Postgres copyright is not for sale.
OK but there's also the question of availability. Firebird is not readily available on most hosting plans. Postgres is getting there, most half-decent hosters will provide it. As for MySQL, it's everywhere. It's part of why it's so popular (and viceversa).
OD?:) I'd like to hope my kid was bright enough to stop gurgling the drain cleaner after the first taste, not go on and OD on the stuff before he learns that something's wrong:)
Unless, of course, you meant the blueberry drain cleaner. That thing tastes SO GOOD.
And if it was bundled MS would end up being sued by Faronics for abusing their monopoly position, the EU would sanction MS until they removed it, and everyone would complain about how evil MS is for trying to take over another sector of the computer business.
You got it backwards.
First Microsoft became an abusive monopoly and then everybody started complaining about them bundling stuff into Windows. Not the other way around.
Usually, if a random entity, who holds no monopoly, bundles something with their OS, nobody cares. I don't see people up in arms about Ubuntu coming with Firefox or OS X with Safari. Why is that? Because neither Canonical or Apple have a history of actively strangling competition.
Seriously tho, can anybody please explain this to a layman? The Atom is x86, right? OS X runs on x86. How do you "break" support for a particular CPU of the same architecture?
#2 Raise the Apple marketshare of Mac OSX based devices.
But it would be a market they can't control. Apple doesn't want a market of "Mac OS X based devices", it wants a market of hardware made and controlled fully by them.
May I point out that there's no need to be a masoqist?:) For $100 you can get a Celeron from the Conroe-L family which will idle at 8W and push 25W in full load and a regular mATX board with 4xSATA, Gigabit and builtin video card. Add a bit of used DDR2 (256MB should about do it), any old case with room for 4 HDD's, an extra cooling fan, an old CF card and a CF-IDE adapter, and you shouldn't pass the $100 mark. This baby should run Linux software RAID like a champion.
Point being, you don't need to torture yourself with 500 MHz when you can do 1.5GHz. If you want to go cheap, regular commodity hardware is still the best way to go.
If all else fails, yeah, you should have done it better, but why should the user suffer for it? Wouldn't you (and him) wish there was one more obstacle that might just trip the hacker? Anything? ASLR is something.
Computer security (good security) goes for redundancy. You add as much protection as makes sense. You never say 'that layer is perfect, there's no need for another layer' (there's no such thing as perfect). You don't say 'we're not a target' (everybody is, since attacks have been automated). You don't say 'but why would someone do that?' (because they can). These are just dumb excuses from people who STILL DON'T GET IT.
If you have two extra methods of protection you damn right put them in there, no matter how redundant they seem. Apple put just one, and Miller asks why oh why can't they just put the other one in already?
To make an analogy, it's like using 3 condoms. Yeah, one should be enough and 2 is already over the top, but when you deal with computers and you have 3 of them, you use 3.
Or, it's like placing extra guards inside the bank safe. Yeah, there are guards outside, the door is locked, police 30 seconds away and the safe walls are 2 feet thick, of steel and concrete. If all that fails something went terribly wrong. But when you deal with computer security, you still put a guy with a shotgun inside the safe.
Computers aren't real life. They are a mostly theoretical realm where the slightest possibility, no matter how unpractical, sometimes happens. That's what you plan for, to expect the unexpected.
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Well Windows 7 should be better than XP. A 10yr old OS, come on. It would be the laughing stock of the world if it couldn't manage that. Oh wait, I forget Vista...
In a sense, that's Microsoft's core modus operandi. They copy stuff.
Windows 7 is fresh on the heels of Mac OS X and modern Linux desktop. Xbox 360, a copy of Playstation. Zune vs iPod. Powershell vs Linux and UNIX command line. C# vs Java. IE9 vs Chrome/Safari/Firefox/Opera. WP7 vs Android and iOS. The Marketplace vs AppStore / Android Market / Linux distro repositories. Silverlight vs Flash. Bing vs Google. I won't even go into the multitude of formats and standards they've attempted to undermine with their own (WMV, OOXML, XPS, ActiveX etc.)
Sure, they innovate as well. But they don't believe in what they do, they're not a trendsetter. They're a clueless, awkward giant who looks around and desperately replicates everything it sees, hoping that some of it will catch on. And it does... sort of. But there's no joy, no soul in it.
And what joy and soul can there be, if your core philosophy used to be "embrace and extinguish" and you haven't found another since?
iOS is focused on consumers, not business. Android is too young and nobody's polished it enough for business. Symbian does have offer lots of business devices but they're not by far as nicely integrated as what RIM offers, it's a wildly different range of products scattered across different manufacturers and backends.
Granted, Microsoft and WP7 could move into that business niche in force. Microsoft definitely has what it takes to offer an alternative to RIM's integrated services. Then again, one might argue that their core expertise lies with PC's, not mobiles, and all their previous efforts in this sector were more or less failures.
Let's just wait and see what actually happens, ok? After all these years I'm just a bit weary of Microsoft hype, FUD and vaporware. I'll give them the benefit of doubt, as always... but I want to see some cold hard results before I get excited.
Git is MacGyver, Mercurial is James Bond. Use the one that fits your work style and requirements. The right tool at the right time.
Yes, it does, what on Earth are you talking about? In Git, each changeset has an author AND a commiter, and they can be different persons. There's a clear distinction between which developer created the changeset originally and who's moving it around the repository, or to other repositories.
I don't see why a centralized repository is a problem, as long as you set the identities of the developers on the machine hosting the repository and as long as they authenticate properly.
If by "out of the box" you mean "I slapped a git repository in there and expect it to magically know who the developers are"... even that will happen, to some extent; when you do your first push git will try to infer your identity from the system account. Naturally, it cannot perform magic and deal with all possible remote setups. But I don't see how sloppy setup is Git's fault.
Not exactly. I mean, assuming you understand those git commands well (I can't tell not familiar with Mercurial), you may have found some equivalent hg commands.
But that's not the point.
The point is that the git command is extremely flexible. It has 3 components (reset; --soft vs --hard [and there's more reset methods, not just those two]; and the HEAD^ which is a "treeish", a way to specify history position, one out of many). Those components can be combined in a lot of ways. Furthermore, some of them are reusable; the treeishes are used by other commands, not just reset.
What I'm getting to is that git is extremely flexible. You've picked two particular combinations and found Mercurial equivalents... but what about the others? What about HEAD^2~4? What about reset --mixed? What about forward resets? What about combinations of all these?
No. Not explicitly. The state of the tree would be changed to reflect a past commit. The commits after that commit are still in the history.
If a new commit is done from that past point, the tree sprouts a branch and HEAD becomes assigned to it. Still, the old "abandoned" branch of the history is not deleted. It might however be garbage collected at some point, if no branch name is explicitly assigned to any of the commits in it, since they'd be left "dangling" with no explicit reference, which git will take to mean they're of no interest anymore.
It means "go up the history 5 commits from the given place". If the name isn't given, it means from the current place the worktree is at. If a branch name is given, it uses it as reference. In this case HEAD was given, which is the default branch name.
Note that, technically, using HEAD~5 doesn't say anything about where the worktree was at that time, only that we wanna switch to 5 places up the history from wherever HEAD is now. But in this particular example we're discussing we can probably assume the worktree was at HEAD, so ~5 and HEAD~5 mean the same thing: go 5 commits back.
I'm assuming by "very recent" you mean "within those 5 commits". Good question. Since this reset goes back in history, it has no interest in branches, which are going the opposite direction in the time flow. It's following the parent of each commit in turn.
However, if there were merges, that means one or more of those 5 commits may have 2 (or more) parents. In which case ~5 as specified above would pick the first one and go with that. If the user wants another parent they can use ^N, which picks the Nth parent.
Using ^ and ~ specs together allow the user to specify the "path" back up in history very exactly, because they can be chained. Example: let's say that 2 commits back there was a merge of 2 branches. Using ~5 would go up the first of them, but I want the other one. I would use ~2^2~3, which means: go back 2 commits, then pick the 2nd parent, then use that to go another 3 commits.
reset can also move forward in history, but there's no equivalent to ~ and ^ for forward moves. Not sure for the exact reason, but it's probably because ~ and ^ are also used by diff and log and so on, not just reset, they're a generic way of navigating back history. They're only one of the many ways to specify history positions.
I have no problem (on Ubuntu 10.04) playing HOMM3 (1999), Rune (2000), Doom 3 (2004), Cold War (2006), Gorky 17 (2007), H-Craft Championship (2007), Penumbra (2007), Prey (2008) etc. They are all native games or ports who keep running despite the fact they're the exact same copy released many years ago.
It strikes me as interesting that most of the countries opposing UIDs on principle are island nations or otherwise isolated, who have never experienced occupation or dictatorship. It seems to me that in some respects they are still just theoretical experiments in democracy with no real-world validation.
What does "freedom" mean to a nation who's never had it taken away from them by force? It's just an empty word, something taken for granted. It's like a child imagining what it's like to be an adult or a rookie without the baptism of fire imagining war. They worry about meaningless things. Only once you've actually experienced the darkest form of denial of freedom you learn what freedom means, you value it, you learn to protect it. And then you stop worrying about silly things like UIDs.
The nations using UIDs have learned those lessons. Most European nations at some point in history have had to take shit from someone. It was a healthy exercise.
It's not that they trust their governments. Of course all governments are corrupt to some extent. Of course any system can and will be abused, since you have to trust someone at some point. They accept and live with this reality. You know who is the ultimate watchdog of the people's civil liberties? The people themselves. When liberties are trampled, such as an UID being misused, they react and correct the situation. When politicians step out of line they are reminded of it.
Opposing the technology itself is the solution of the person who has already given up on defending their civil liberties and sees no other hope. Is that what's going on the US and the UK?
As for biometrics, it's a stupid non-issue. We already use biometrics. Picture IDs are biometrics. Except they're very poor ones. Pics of the head taken once every 10 years? As the sole means of identification it's a stupid idea. They're worthless when you think of beards, scars, glasses, cosmetic surgery, haircuts, hats and so on. Easy to fake, unreliable. As long as that was the only technology we had it was alright but why not complement it with something better if we can?
Ideally. Most often, people do not change browser. The browser is a very personal choice and people show extraordinary resistance to changing it.
How would you react if someone came to you and told you "how about you switch to browser X?" Your knee jerk reaction would be "take a hike", most likely. You know it would.
Now, they could go on explaining why the other browser is so much better. But (a) lots of people have trouble visualising something without seeing it in action; and (b) the arguments would be [highly] technical and would likely sound like gibberish to them.
Which means the second reaction is also likely to be "get lost, buddy".
I've tried to get friends and family off IE6 (hell, off IE in general) for a while now. You know what happens. Some need it because they use it work (where it's mandatory) and they don't want to "learn" to use more than one browser, so they use it at home too. Some are simply stubborn. Some have trouble visualising another browser in their head and aren't willing to try it live.
When I do manage to persuade them it's in particular circumstances. A buddy had just reinstalled Windows and was about to go into the default IE when I happened to catch him. At which point I quickly asked what he wants from a browser and his requirements "fast, absolute minimal fuss, don't care about ad blockers" automatically pointed at Chrome. So he started a new Windows install with Chrome and now loves it. But it would have never happened otherwise.
Umm no. If you mean a continental context you would say "North American" or "South American".
If you mean citizen of a country you use the appropriate Demonym: Canadian, Mexican, Belizean, Brazilian etc.
US citizens are the only ones called Americans. Citizens of other countries are not.
You're joking but actually at #7 (deleted files start dissapearing from screen) they're accurately describing a modern Linux desktop. :)
Think about it:
* if you have a file manager open, such as Nautilus, and someone were to start deleting files, they would dissapear from view;
* there's no undelete on Linux;
* most people would not think to turn the computer off; they'd try mousing around or disconnecting the network; which would accomplish nothing if the deletion is a background job.
It's because of "mongoose". Shuttleworth was bitten by one as a child and has it in for them. Now, had you proposed "Menstruating Meerkat" on the other hand...
And to further expand on this, as well as respond to the GP's claims he filters everything: BT simply wasn't built for protecting privacy. No matter how much filtering and encryption you do, the fact of the matter is that your BT client will happily connect and exchange file pieces with anybody who wants it, and it is easy to prove that you had those pieces and knew what file(s) they were from. Thus potentially landing you in trouble.
What is needed here is something that will add real privacy and plausible deniability. The potentially malicious peer has to be unable to accurately claim that the owner of the IP which just gave him a piece of a file knew what it was and where it had come from. Something along the lines of a double blind. Trackers need to start mixing peers from several/all torrents and use them to send the pieces via one or several intermediaries who have no idea what the pieces are, where they come from or where they are going.
Yes, traffic will increase, unfortunately, so will requirements for local temporary storage space. The sad thing is that in this battle between MAFIAA and the end consumer, it's the IPS's that are caught in the middle.
I've been hearing this for so long that I finally have to speak up. Yes, I've been reading hundreds of books on a LCD screen (NEC MobilePro 900c). For years. With zero disconfort. No, I'm not a teenager with wonderful eyesight. I don't wear glasses either and I don't feel that my eyesight has dimished any in all those years. Eye exams once a year have confirmed that.
Do you think that maybe, dunno, setting the font size and background color might help? As
in, not attempting to stare at minuscule letters on a bright white background? Use large fonts (as large as you feel confortable reading without straining your eyes at all), and grey, light greyish-yellow or light greyish-green background. Feel free to adjust the brightness and contrast too.
E-Ink is very nice, but it's not the killer feature of readers. The killer features are low price (sub-$100), no DRM, decent reader app, SD card and acting as a plain USB mass storage device with any OS. If any reader managed to offer that, e-Ink would be a nice perk, but not a must-have.
Getting back on topic, iPad will wipe the floor with all the so-called "readers" that are not really just readers but attempt to do anything more. Feature for feature, it's not even a contest.
[And before you call me an Apple whore: I don't own any Apple hardware and don't recall using their software recently.]
Hah, but in a sense can't you say that about any religion or indeed anything that requires you to accept things on faith alone?
In fact, it could be argued that the decay of the mind begins when the person stops using it to find their own answers and blindly accepts what is fed to it. Strangely, that's not an attribute of religion alone, but also of advertising, media, politics etc. And, conversely, a person can be religious and still keep an open mind.
It is possible because there's more to a religion than just the stories about how it came to be, a religion has theories on cosmology, life, morals etc. There's a philosophical component to most major religions that you can't simply ignore and which is not necessarily brain-dead and based on faith alone.
Dismissing religion out-of-hand with this kind of label is, ironically, very akin to what you were objecting to in the first place.
Hyperbole aside, yeah, Oracle is in a league of its own. That's exactly why the idea that Oracle "fears" MySQL and would want to squash it is so utterly ridiculous.
It makes a lot more sense to me that Oracle would acknowledge the fact that not everybody needs or wants Oracle db, so they might very well turn MySQL into a low-end offering, thus catering to a wider audience.
OK, so they might make it close source and commercial only. I highly doubt it because they'd lose the network effect that MySQL currently enjoys, but let's say for the sake of argument they would. So what? They bought the copyright fair and square, it was sold to them. If Widenius didn't want that he shouldn't have sold. And the source is still out there and it can be forked so I really really don't see what his problem is.
On a side note, MySQL is quite lame on technical merits. I suspect Oracle would have been much better off buying something like Postgres. Except that the Postgres copyright is not for sale.
OK but there's also the question of availability. Firebird is not readily available on most hosting plans. Postgres is getting there, most half-decent hosters will provide it. As for MySQL, it's everywhere. It's part of why it's so popular (and viceversa).
OD? :) I'd like to hope my kid was bright enough to stop gurgling the drain cleaner after the first taste, not go on and OD on the stuff before he learns that something's wrong :)
Unless, of course, you meant the blueberry drain cleaner. That thing tastes SO GOOD.
You got it backwards.
First Microsoft became an abusive monopoly and then everybody started complaining about them bundling stuff into Windows. Not the other way around.
Usually, if a random entity, who holds no monopoly, bundles something with their OS, nobody cares. I don't see people up in arms about Ubuntu coming with Firefox or OS X with Safari. Why is that? Because neither Canonical or Apple have a history of actively strangling competition.
Microsoft dug their own grave.
Seriously tho, can anybody please explain this to a layman? The Atom is x86, right? OS X runs on x86. How do you "break" support for a particular CPU of the same architecture?
But it would be a market they can't control. Apple doesn't want a market of "Mac OS X based devices", it wants a market of hardware made and controlled fully by them.
May I point out that there's no need to be a masoqist? :) For $100 you can get a Celeron from the Conroe-L family which will idle at 8W and push 25W in full load and a regular mATX board with 4xSATA, Gigabit and builtin video card. Add a bit of used DDR2 (256MB should about do it), any old case with room for 4 HDD's, an extra cooling fan, an old CF card and a CF-IDE adapter, and you shouldn't pass the $100 mark. This baby should run Linux software RAID like a champion.
Point being, you don't need to torture yourself with 500 MHz when you can do 1.5GHz. If you want to go cheap, regular commodity hardware is still the best way to go.
I believe you, and what do you mean "sometimes"?
If all else fails, yeah, you should have done it better, but why should the user suffer for it? Wouldn't you (and him) wish there was one more obstacle that might just trip the hacker? Anything? ASLR is something.
Computer security (good security) goes for redundancy. You add as much protection as makes sense. You never say 'that layer is perfect, there's no need for another layer' (there's no such thing as perfect). You don't say 'we're not a target' (everybody is, since attacks have been automated). You don't say 'but why would someone do that?' (because they can). These are just dumb excuses from people who STILL DON'T GET IT.
If you have two extra methods of protection you damn right put them in there, no matter how redundant they seem. Apple put just one, and Miller asks why oh why can't they just put the other one in already?
To make an analogy, it's like using 3 condoms. Yeah, one should be enough and 2 is already over the top, but when you deal with computers and you have 3 of them, you use 3.
Or, it's like placing extra guards inside the bank safe. Yeah, there are guards outside, the door is locked, police 30 seconds away and the safe walls are 2 feet thick, of steel and concrete. If all that fails something went terribly wrong. But when you deal with computer security, you still put a guy with a shotgun inside the safe.
Computers aren't real life. They are a mostly theoretical realm where the slightest possibility, no matter how unpractical, sometimes happens. That's what you plan for, to expect the unexpected.