Before a bubble can burst it has to be defined. Since nobody actually knows what the nebulous term "Web 2.0" actually means then it's chances of bursting are akin to that of a black hole getting laid.
Furthermore, a Kerry-Edwards administration will not sign up to the Kyoto Protocol, partly because the short-term goals are unfeasible, says Devona Dolliole, a spokeswoman for the campaign. She says that they want to develop an alternative to Kyoto with more achievable targets.
A somewhat related example is Unreal Tournament 2003 for Linux. It works, but only if you have a GeForce.
When it comes to gaming only two graphic card manufacturers count, and that is ATI and Nvidia. Nobody else makes cards that can run modern games (with the possible exception of the Matrox and the over-priced Parhelia). Of ATI and Nvidia only Nvidia have decent drivers for Linux. This is why you need a GeForce to run UT 2003/4, not because of anything inherent to the game. If ATI released decent Linix drivers with good OpenGL support, you could run it on Radeon etc.
I get the impression that the majority of people who vehemently oppose surveillance cameras live in nice, affluent suburbs lined with picket fences and friendly neighbours. How nice for you.
Tell you what, try living in an inner-city hell-hole, where you are in constant fear of being attacked. You think car bombs outside police stations are something that only happens in Iraq and not in the UK? Think again. You try living in an area where people think it's fun to throw hand-grenades through your windows. The fact is, survey after survey shows that people who live in high-crime areas in the UK welcome CCTV - it reassures them and makes them feel safer. Perhaps if you had to live here too, you might feel different?
The fact is, in Britain we don't have a history of being quite so paranoid about the government as our US cousins. We don't feel the need to carry guns or spend the weekend in militias training to overthrow the government. Most of us realise that the majority of CCTV cameras are not even watched (they merely record footage that can then be referenced in the event of a crime). We are not so ego-centric as to think that anyone would even be particularly interested in watching a pixelated image of us walking to the shop to buy a pint of milk. We have long reconciled ourselves to the fact that liberty and freedom are never absolute because if they we would live in a state of anarchy and mob rule. Oh, and we enjoy reading about the dumbasses caught on camera, too:)
Re:When did the Communists take over outer space?
on
Lawyers In Space...
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"
The solution is simple - roll out like America's Western expansion"
Apart from the wee small fact that the land was already occupied and you had to commit genocide to 'own' it...
Yep, those martians better watch out because McDonald's is coming...
"One small step for Americankind..." just doesn't have the same ring to it, somehow.
Where I live there is a camera on every street
on
1984 Comes To Boston
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Where I live in city-centre Liverpool (England) there are CCTV cameras on all the main streets. If I walk out of my house, I'm on camera, and if I walk into the town centre nearly every step of the way I'm on camera. The aim is to have around 240 cameras around the city centre monitoring millions of square metres as part for the Liverpool CitySafe Initiative.
And you know what? When I'm walking back from town at night I'm extremely glad of it. When you've been assaulted and most of your friends who live nearby have been mugged then perhaps you'll understand why. I'm normally extremely libertarian in my views but when you and your partners safety are in question then it sadly pays to be pragmatic. The Guardian newspaper featured an interesting article on CCTV in Liverpool and it's privacy implications, but the fact remains that surveys show that 93% of people are in favour. It works, too, because crime has been cut quite dramatically as part of the initiative.
Of course, were are more accustomed to CCTV cameras in Britain. We have the highest ratio of CCTV cameras per population of any country - something like 4m (or one for every 13 people). There are traffic cameras on many roads capable of snapping speeding drivers or those that jump red lights. It is estimated that each person in Britain is caught on camera 300 times a day. The implications are worrying, and the situation needs to be carefully monitored, but when I'm walking back from the pub at night I can't help but feel a little more reassured.
A few years ago the company I worked for used to supply a few of us with ISDN lines (this was before cable/DSL was readily available) so we could work from home. They paid for the connection and footed the bill for rental and calls. At the time, though, ISDN was still metered by the minute in the UK and so you paid for the duration of your call - what's more, if you bonded the two channels into one 128Kb connection then you paid for each channel (ie. it was effectively two separate phone calls). Off peak this could be as much as 5p per minute per channel. In otherwords it wasn't cheap:)
Well, all was fine until the sorry day when I downloaded the Unreal Tournament demo to try out. Suddenly I found that being one of the l337 few with a 'low ping' connection I was really good and so I bought the full game when it was released. Next thing I knew I joined a clan and was playing all the time. Then - you guessed it - the bills started arriving....
You try explaining to your boss how you've managed to wrack up a bill for over 100 ($185) a month by 'working from home'. Not easy, especially when the server logs seem to indicate you'd never actually telneted to the server more than a couple of times to read your mail... Bah!
A little Norwegian company which poses no threat to Microsoft, and in fact builds it business on Microsoft products (Windows)
Firstly Opera are a major player in the fast-growing mobile browser sector. They are in partnership with some of the biggest manufacturers, such as Nokia, IBM, Sony Ericsson, Kyocera, Sharp and Psion. Opera's small-screen rendering technology is far more advanced than anything Microsoft have, and they know it. Opera are also a powerful voice on the W3C committee (it was an Opera employee who came up with the idea of CSS) and are committed to web standards.
As well as offering true cross-platform support (LINUX, Mac, Windows, Solaris, OS/2, Symbian) Opera is also far more feature rich than anything Microsoft have. If you think Opera aren't a potential threat to Microsoft then you are incredibly naive.
Why can't they make a simple HTML page that is standards compliant and not littered with mark-up errors? It's not like their search page is even remotely complex, either. I just can't understand why a company as big as Google, whose name is virtually synonymous with the web, can not be able or bothered to make a basic HTML page that is correct?
Check the signatories of the PNAC Statement Of Principles and note the signatures include Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and Lewis Libby.
Now read this letter published on their website in May 1998 :
"
We should establish and maintain a strong U.S. military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests in the Gulf - and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power."
"
The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
The document also :
Refers to key allies such as the UK as 'the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership';
Describes peace-keeping missions as 'demanding American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations';
Reveals worries in the administration that Europe could rival the USA;
Says 'even should Saddam pass from the scene' bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently -- despite domestic opposition in the Gulf regimes to the stationing of US troops -- as 'Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has';
Pinpoints North Korea, Libya, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes and says their existence justifies the creation of a 'world-wide command-and-control system'.
For those that are interested (and that should be every free-thinking person) I've collected a lot more associated evidence which I published in an article on my website.
There's no language that prevents these types of things. Even if you write with a language that supposedly does not have Buffer Overflows, you still rely on other modules that were written in a language that does allow them ot happen.
Actually, a managed language like C# produces code that is very difficult to produce overflows in, since the CLR (Common Language Runtime) keeps tabs on memory access..NET programs execute in a 'sandbox' in the same way Java aps do. Whilst nothing is 100% secure, Longhorn is being built around the.NET framework and thus managed code. This is a definite step in the right direction.
'The.NET Framework in general, and Managed Code in specific, represent the future direction that Microsoft is heading in the programming model that will be used for developing all Windows applications. In "Longhorn", the codename for the next version of Windows, we will expose an entirely managed API for developing applications with, and this will be the primary method for developing applications for "Longhorn".'
There's nothing wrong with lots of functions per se if they are consistantly named and logically organised (within namespaces or classes, for example). However, in PHP there is no internal organisation of functions whatsoever, only that which the manual decides.
Can anyway really remember the difference between, for instance, the following badly named PHP functions:
strpos, strripos , strrpos and stripos ?
Why is it that you need different functions for case-insensitive string searches and case-sensitive ones? Wouldn't it be better to have overloaded functions that took an extra optional parameter to indicate whether it was, say, case-sensitive or binary-safe? But no, PHP just add yet another similarly named function and, if you don't read the manual every day, you probably miss half of them!
The whole lanuage is disorganised, loose and indisciplined. If I take over someone else' code I don't want to have to learn the templating system they have been using, I want to learn just one, and use that always. If a language is OOP orientated then I expect it to have been designed that way, not hacked on as an after-thought (see C++).
I've used PHP for over 5 years now, and was a great fan, but now I'm more and more tempted by the lure of Java/J2EE and (god forbid) ASP.NET with C#, both of which are far more elegant and solve many of the problems that are inherent in PHP (ie. they are properly type-safe, OOP frameworks that clearly separate content from design and are compiled at run-time for performance).
The fact there are many different templating engines for PHP nicely illustrates PHPs major weakness - it's become a sprawling, bloated mess of a language that has no properly defined standards and no clear structure.
Every time I look at the PHP manual there seems to be 20 new (inconstantly named) functions, 3 new beta libraries and 5 subtle changes to the syntax (that will bite you later on). Instead of having one clear set of standards that people can learn and adhere to you have dozens, making integrating other peoples' code a nightmare.
PHP is becoming like Windows - more and more functionality is being bolted on whilst trying to maintain backwards compatability and the end result is a complete mess. It needs re-thinking and re-writing from scratch.
My personal experience with my own website says this is true. When I redesigned it so it validated as XHTML1.1 Strict the number of hits I got from Google increased by a massive amount.
I believe Google actually respects a well-formed document and weights (for example) keywords found in header ( H1 - H6) tags above those found in, say, paragraph tags. It also extrapolates info from the much under-used TITLE and ALT tags, which a lot of WYSIWIG desined sites fail to incorporate properly.
Plus, as anyone who has played with XML can tell you, a well-formed document is easier to parse than one that's composed of tag-soup.
Opera Software, the makers of the Opera browser, have known this for a long time, which is why they include (by default) a 'super-search' option in Opera that searches both Google and All-Of-The-Web simultaneously and opens the results in two side-by-side windows. If you have Opera just type 's search term' into Opera's address bar and see...
Going back a good few years I remember finding one of the first sites to allow online shopping. Unbelievable as it might now seem they actually passed the id and the PRICE of the item you were attempting to purchase via the GET method in a query string! I remember having fun changing all the prices to negative numbers, and seeing the total come to around - $1,000,000. Of course I never had the balls to enter my credit card number and see if they would bill it for a negative amount:)
Not re-inventing the wheel is one thing, but maintaining your virtual monopoly by buying out all the competition is quite another. "Good business sense" it may be, but what's good for shareholders isn't necessarily good for the consumer.
Slashdot Mirror
Before a bubble can burst it has to be defined. Since nobody actually knows what the nebulous term "Web 2.0" actually means then it's chances of bursting are akin to that of a black hole getting laid.
Nevermind using random garbage to crash a browser, you can make IE6 crash with perfectly valid strict HTML.
Try this page in IE6 and then hover your pointer over the link. Crash!!!
When it comes to gaming only two graphic card manufacturers count, and that is ATI and Nvidia. Nobody else makes cards that can run modern games (with the possible exception of the Matrox and the over-priced Parhelia). Of ATI and Nvidia only Nvidia have decent drivers for Linux. This is why you need a GeForce to run UT 2003/4, not because of anything inherent to the game. If ATI released decent Linix drivers with good OpenGL support, you could run it on Radeon etc.
I get the impression that the majority of people who vehemently oppose surveillance cameras live in nice, affluent suburbs lined with picket fences and friendly neighbours. How nice for you.
Tell you what, try living in an inner-city hell-hole, where you are in constant fear of being attacked. You think car bombs outside police stations are something that only happens in Iraq and not in the UK? Think again. You try living in an area where people think it's fun to throw hand-grenades through your windows. The fact is, survey after survey shows that people who live in high-crime areas in the UK welcome CCTV - it reassures them and makes them feel safer. Perhaps if you had to live here too, you might feel different?
The fact is, in Britain we don't have a history of being quite so paranoid about the government as our US cousins. We don't feel the need to carry guns or spend the weekend in militias training to overthrow the government. Most of us realise that the majority of CCTV cameras are not even watched (they merely record footage that can then be referenced in the event of a crime). We are not so ego-centric as to think that anyone would even be particularly interested in watching a pixelated image of us walking to the shop to buy a pint of milk. We have long reconciled ourselves to the fact that liberty and freedom are never absolute because if they we would live in a state of anarchy and mob rule. Oh, and we enjoy reading about the dumbasses caught on camera, too :)
Apart from the wee small fact that the land was already occupied and you had to commit genocide to 'own' it...
Yep, those martians better watch out because McDonald's is coming...
"One small step for Americankind..." just doesn't have the same ring to it, somehow.
Where I live in city-centre Liverpool (England) there are CCTV cameras on all the main streets. If I walk out of my house, I'm on camera, and if I walk into the town centre nearly every step of the way I'm on camera. The aim is to have around 240 cameras around the city centre monitoring millions of square metres as part for the Liverpool CitySafe Initiative.
And you know what? When I'm walking back from town at night I'm extremely glad of it. When you've been assaulted and most of your friends who live nearby have been mugged then perhaps you'll understand why. I'm normally extremely libertarian in my views but when you and your partners safety are in question then it sadly pays to be pragmatic. The Guardian newspaper featured an interesting article on CCTV in Liverpool and it's privacy implications, but the fact remains that surveys show that 93% of people are in favour. It works, too, because crime has been cut quite dramatically as part of the initiative.
Of course, were are more accustomed to CCTV cameras in Britain. We have the highest ratio of CCTV cameras per population of any country - something like 4m (or one for every 13 people). There are traffic cameras on many roads capable of snapping speeding drivers or those that jump red lights. It is estimated that each person in Britain is caught on camera 300 times a day. The implications are worrying, and the situation needs to be carefully monitored, but when I'm walking back from the pub at night I can't help but feel a little more reassured.
A few years ago the company I worked for used to supply a few of us with ISDN lines (this was before cable/DSL was readily available) so we could work from home. They paid for the connection and footed the bill for rental and calls. At the time, though, ISDN was still metered by the minute in the UK and so you paid for the duration of your call - what's more, if you bonded the two channels into one 128Kb connection then you paid for each channel (ie. it was effectively two separate phone calls). Off peak this could be as much as 5p per minute per channel. In otherwords it wasn't cheap :)
Well, all was fine until the sorry day when I downloaded the Unreal Tournament demo to try out. Suddenly I found that being one of the l337 few with a 'low ping' connection I was really good and so I bought the full game when it was released. Next thing I knew I joined a clan and was playing all the time. Then - you guessed it - the bills started arriving....
You try explaining to your boss how you've managed to wrack up a bill for over 100 ($185) a month by 'working from home'. Not easy, especially when the server logs seem to indicate you'd never actually telneted to the server more than a couple of times to read your mail... Bah!
Firstly Opera are a major player in the fast-growing mobile browser sector. They are in partnership with some of the biggest manufacturers, such as Nokia, IBM, Sony Ericsson, Kyocera, Sharp and Psion. Opera's small-screen rendering technology is far more advanced than anything Microsoft have, and they know it. Opera are also a powerful voice on the W3C committee (it was an Opera employee who came up with the idea of CSS) and are committed to web standards.
As well as offering true cross-platform support (LINUX, Mac, Windows, Solaris, OS/2, Symbian) Opera is also far more feature rich than anything Microsoft have. If you think Opera aren't a potential threat to Microsoft then you are incredibly naive.
Sloppy.
Why can't they make a simple HTML page that is standards compliant and not littered with mark-up errors? It's not like their search page is even remotely complex, either. I just can't understand why a company as big as Google, whose name is virtually synonymous with the web, can not be able or bothered to make a basic HTML page that is correct?
Now read this letter published on their website in May 1998 :
From the PNAC document 'Rebuilding Americas Defenses' dated September 2000 :
The document also :
For those that are interested (and that should be every free-thinking person) I've collected a lot more associated evidence which I published in an article on my website.
Actually, a managed language like C# produces code that is very difficult to produce overflows in, since the CLR (Common Language Runtime) keeps tabs on memory access. .NET programs execute in a 'sandbox' in the same way Java aps do. Whilst nothing is 100% secure, Longhorn is being built around the .NET framework and thus managed code. This is a definite step in the right direction.
MSDN: Managed Code in LonghornTry C# - seriously.
There's nothing wrong with lots of functions per se if they are consistantly named and logically organised (within namespaces or classes, for example). However, in PHP there is no internal organisation of functions whatsoever, only that which the manual decides.
Can anyway really remember the difference between, for instance, the following badly named PHP functions :
strpos, strripos , strrpos and stripos ?
Why is it that you need different functions for case-insensitive string searches and case-sensitive ones? Wouldn't it be better to have overloaded functions that took an extra optional parameter to indicate whether it was, say, case-sensitive or binary-safe? But no, PHP just add yet another similarly named function and, if you don't read the manual every day, you probably miss half of them!
The whole lanuage is disorganised, loose and indisciplined. If I take over someone else' code I don't want to have to learn the templating system they have been using, I want to learn just one, and use that always. If a language is OOP orientated then I expect it to have been designed that way, not hacked on as an after-thought (see C++).
I've used PHP for over 5 years now, and was a great fan, but now I'm more and more tempted by the lure of Java/J2EE and (god forbid) ASP .NET with C#, both of which are far more elegant and solve many of the problems that are inherent in PHP (ie. they are properly type-safe, OOP frameworks that clearly separate content from design and are compiled at run-time for performance).
The fact there are many different templating engines for PHP nicely illustrates PHPs major weakness - it's become a sprawling, bloated mess of a language that has no properly defined standards and no clear structure.
Every time I look at the PHP manual there seems to be 20 new (inconstantly named) functions, 3 new beta libraries and 5 subtle changes to the syntax (that will bite you later on). Instead of having one clear set of standards that people can learn and adhere to you have dozens, making integrating other peoples' code a nightmare.
PHP is becoming like Windows - more and more functionality is being bolted on whilst trying to maintain backwards compatability and the end result is a complete mess. It needs re-thinking and re-writing from scratch.
Exactly - Outlook 2003 has stolen a good deal of great ideas from M2 (Opera's Mail Client) and is much better for it :)
Because It isn't.
See?
My personal experience with my own website says this is true. When I redesigned it so it validated as XHTML1.1 Strict the number of hits I got from Google increased by a massive amount.
I believe Google actually respects a well-formed document and weights (for example) keywords found in header ( H1 - H6) tags above those found in, say, paragraph tags. It also extrapolates info from the much under-used TITLE and ALT tags, which a lot of WYSIWIG desined sites fail to incorporate properly.
Plus, as anyone who has played with XML can tell you, a well-formed document is easier to parse than one that's composed of tag-soup.
Opera Software, the makers of the Opera browser, have known this for a long time, which is why they include (by default) a 'super-search' option in Opera that searches both Google and All-Of-The-Web simultaneously and opens the results in two side-by-side windows. If you have Opera just type 's search term ' into Opera's address bar and see...
Going back a good few years I remember finding one of the first sites to allow online shopping. Unbelievable as it might now seem they actually passed the id and the PRICE of the item you were attempting to purchase via the GET method in a query string! I remember having fun changing all the prices to negative numbers, and seeing the total come to around - $1,000,000. Of course I never had the balls to enter my credit card number and see if they would bill it for a negative amount :)
Strange, because a Google search for acronyms used in sms comes up with loads of useful sites...
Not re-inventing the wheel is one thing, but maintaining your virtual monopoly by buying out all the competition is quite another. "Good business sense" it may be, but what's good for shareholders isn't necessarily good for the consumer.