ROFL. Injecting someone with dimethylmercury would be overkill, in the extreme.
You only need to drop a small amount of high concentration of (CH3)2Hg to cause enough damage to kill them in a few weeks or so. Even if it's onto someone's hand when they're wearing a latex glove. It'll go through the glove, and through the skin, and give them the equivalent of an extremely high dose of heavy metals, which chelation therapy won't be able to deal with.
Yeah, I hate that. It's why i used to use linux for DVD playback almost exclusively.
That said, I recently watched a DVD on my xbox 360. I was very surprised when I was able to skip (using the 'next chapter' button) all of these supposedly unskippable parts. I'm sure it's just a bug, or something...:)
Actually, I'm pretty sure Child's play was started after Jack Thompson started his raving about how games only create deviants, and the Penny-arcade people wanted to show him up in a way that was more constructive than responding directly to his infantile arguments.
So far, Child's play has raised a huge amount of money, and helped make being hospitalized less sucky for lots of children, and given Gabe/Tycho a way to thumb their nose at Jack, which I'm all for. Not that it'll matter to Jack, mind you, since he's a raving lunatic, and incapable of dealing with rational arguments anyway.
The thing I find weird is that I don't see how myminicity is attractive to these morons. WTF is it anyway, and how does me clicking one link help them? Can't be much in the way of advertising revenue, since the returns on advertising these days are minimal in the extreme...
For those of you who aren't familiar with the Australian ballot, it's actually pretty easy to vote, once you turn up.
Most people have a general sense of who they prefer, either because of social, economic, or family pressure. (your first vote tends to be around age 18-20, and often you're still lending your ear to your family's opinions, or, alternatively, you're in university, and using your fellow students as a barometer, etc).
This means that for the lower house, they need to write 4, maybe 5 numbers, in order from 1 to 5, and the major parties usually have preference cards being handed out in front of the election facilities that give you their preferences, but you're free to reorder them (I usually do, but only because the Liberals rate fanatical conservative parties above labor, and I don't)
For the upper house (Senate), you can alternatively write 30-something numbers, or just *one* number, depending. Not surprisingly, most people, even people who think consciously about their decision in this area, still use the 'one' number above the line, because it takes a crap load less time.
Also, the system is geared such that minor parties with followers spread out still get some power, simply because the senate is a simple Australia-wide percentage system.
Heh. I made comments to this effect in the last article, and was roundly shouted down by one of my fellow Australians because the new Labor government can't possibly be evil, since the leader's already allocated 150 million dollars to aiding the homeless.
Well, here we are, as I said, both sides of the government are in love with censorship. Once again, I'm glad I don't currently live in Australia. With both Labor's and Family-First's tendencies on both sides of the line, this was kinda inevitable.
ROFL. Build your bridge already (although, whoever called you a redneck probably needs to look up the definition, last I checked, rednecks were conservative:) ). Plus, being tracked by the government is basically par for the course when you're working in the US.
National ID cards are a moot point anyway. There's already more than enough information floating around about your average citizen to track where they are, what they like to do, and what nasty habits they've got, on-line or off. A national ID card won't change that.
It also doesn't mandate that they *judge* what you do. I draw the line when I have people telling me what I can and can't read or watch. This is also why I've been distinctly disappointed in the Australian censorship system for a long time. Of course, there are still limits to be had, sane limits, such as ensuring that parents can take responsibility for what minors can get their hands on.
Well, I wasn't suggesting "go left instead of right, and it's death valley" so much as "guards are more aware of you, respond quicker, etc" if you're excessively violent. IE, the guards on rooftops increase in number and decrease in tolerance significantly if you keep killing them, and guards notice you quicker if you go around killing them all the time, and they start killing vigilantes if you rely on them too much.
More of a feedback system. Of course, this needs to be carefully balanced, and should be communicated to the player reasonably well, ie, people start saying "hey, doesn't that look like that killer the guards are talking about?!" and other telltale signs.
Tell me about it. Once i realised how little impact the socially-unacceptable behavior has most of the time, i spent a crapload of time just killing random guards for the hell of it.
It'd be nice if doing that kind of thing had an impact on the difficulty of the game over time (ie, you got rewarded with easier sneaking and blending because you weren't going on a rampage).
Instead, I got to spend 3 days honing my counter-kill timing (btw, those are really challenging if you limit yourself to using the hidden blade while counter-killing, you basically get no block at all, so if you get hit, you get hit BAD, actually makes it more challenging.)
Still, running around on rooftops and climbing around on stuff was fun, and the game looks awesome, but it's just a bit too easy to bludgeon your way out of every situation, even after you've just assassinated your target, since it's mostly just a timing game. I force myself to watch for when guards take their eyes off me for a minute during a fight and strike at them just to keep things interesting.
Also, unskippable cutscenes!? wtf?! I only care about the chatty stuff the first time through, k?
Oh, ffs. Nevermind that I qualified my statement with the notion that *both* sides support the idea. It was rhetoric. Look it up. I wouldn't say that Labor's the worst offender, either.
My point was that I don't want to live in a state of forced censorship. I value that over a PM who seems 'intelligent' on your pet ideas. Yay, he's signing the kyoto protocol, woo for the homeless, etc. I was alive last time labor was in power, and I'm willing to bet they're going to screw it up just like they did last time. As you noted, parliament isn't in session yet. Watch what happens when the union bosses call in their debts.
Here's a hint: Every time labor's been in power, interest rates in Australia have sky-rocketed. Every. Time. And the working class certainly didn't win last time labor was in power, yet big spending was the ticket *then* too, which is exactly what our new PM seems to be doing!
And messing with the IR laws doesn't really sit well with me anyway, but maybe because *I* came out in front with them, but while I concede that some people may not have been happy, they weren't that bad. No-one actually got successfully screwed by the IR laws, regardless of labor's hooting, particularly once people got wind of their ability to get proper compensation, via official channels.
Please, if that's the way you feel, feel free to stay right where you are
Huh? If that's the way I feel I should stay out? How does that make sense? Because I'm not happy with the conservative nature of both parties right now?
There's still a *lot* that I like about the Australian political system. It's certainly not the three-ring circus that America has, and while it's clearly unbalanced some of the time, it's usually fairly sane, and gets quite a fair bit right, particularly it's ability to represent smaller parties.
For instance, regardless of what I thought about the man's inability to do his job, Senator Alston did push for better internet access, particularly in rural areas. Quite frankly, I fully believe that Australian internet is better (albeit slightly more expensive) than what's available in the US (these people haven't heard of ADSL2+ yet, they're trying to roll out fibre to the home, and at crappy speeds too). What I don't agree with is parties pandering to the ultra-conservative nature of people in order to play on the family-first sentiments that seems to exist.
Of course, with the way teenagers and young adults act nowadays, I'm not surprised that people WANT to do something to control them. The problem I have is that they're doing it too late to help the current lot, and they're not doing it the right way (It's called discipline people! an absence of porn or violent media isn't going to do anything to fix them!)
The other problem is that it's blown out of proportion. Most people are sane and good-natured, regardless of how much porn or violence they see. A minority are not, and the media does as much as it can to sensationalize it to the limit.
Hm. Zero Punctuation? That's published in the US, but produced in Australia, by a British guy.
Also, as an Australian currently working abroad, stuff like Chaser's war on everything, media watch, and other assorted publications matter to me (although they're all on hiatus since it's christmas time there.)
The bigger problem is that it might start other countries from just throwing their hands up and blocking Australia outright, since there's probably no simple (hell, probably not even a complex) solution to this particular mandate that's going into effect. This worries me greatly, and doesn't surprise me in the slightest. We've had a seriously over-protectionist bent for far FAR too long. The hooting from the conservative family-first types that push this crappy agenda may not be as loud as they are in the US, but clearly they've had enough of an effect.
Particularly since my braindead country just voted in the fucking party that's in love with the idea. Oh, wait, both parties are in love with the idea. Ah well, guess we're fucked either way. Glad I don't live there anymore, I certainly won't be going back any time soon.
That's okay. In Australia, we'll fine you if you don't vote. (Hint: in Australia, it's illegal to not vote, everyone has to, whether they want to or not. It changes the political system significantly, and judging by the way you people complain all the time, for the better.)
In sum, if Microsoft is so innovative, why can't we get something better than the Zune?
Because craploads of our innovation isn't going into consumer-oriented products. One of the drawbacks of having such a ubiquitous platform is that it tends to overshadow a lot of the work we do. Also, there are lines of work here that consumers will simply never see directly, like our work in security, testing, IT management, development, and all sorts of other areas where we're making massive strides, with our target release dates being 2009 and beyond.
I know that's a giant link salad, but it's pretty clear to see that almost all of those tools aren't in any way aimed at consumers, and most will do a lot to drastically increase microsoft's business dominance. Without them, much of the third party products and inhouse tools that are going to come through the pipeline in much less connected and interoperable fashion. While some of these products may not be the winners we hope they will, they all add up to a pretty strong whole.
Microsoft would like to keep the power of the local machine strong. Actually, no we don't, at least, not necessarily.
While, for a majority of situations, it may well be more economical to just do it locally, the reality is, we're pushing a lot into both system level and app-level virtualization, breaking the user/kernel ties, and other efforts in order to make it possible to build decentralized processing well on windows, even to the app level that traditionally, would have been client-only (I'm looking at you, MYOB).
It's not the same approach as google, by any means, but it's certainly a valid thin-client direction, and one that's likely to be highly competetive, since it's much more flexible.
(That interview with Mark Russinovich is built on silverlight so you'll need to install it if you want to watch it online. There are download links further down however, so it's not essential.)
Okay, have you actually studied cryptography at even a basic level?
It's basically impossible (read, an NP-hard problem at least) to *prove* that a particular cryptosystem is unbreakable. If it's an obvious flaw, then sure, give whoever missed it a thorough kicking, but in my experience, 'obvious' is just another form of scapegoating, and is just a way of passing the buck from the guy who cut testing short, to the mathematician who did the testing.
The reality is, cryptography requires years of research and peer review to be reasonably sure that it's right. Look at all of the cyphers in the past that have suddenly been broken after N years of production use. Now also consider that government standards cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to create, and probably as much again to update. Then you need to consider that if you want to play in that market, you need to adhere to those standards, no matter how boneheaded. And since they cost so much to make and change, they don't change often, so they lag behind cryptographic science.
I'm pretty sure you can find this particular random number generator in other places, if you really try.
I don't know much about the merger in question, but usually the question *I* worry about when two media distribution companies merge is "Is this reducing the breadth of the opinion I have access to".
This is why, in Australia, the government regulatory bodies repeatedly told Packer that he couldn't buy fairfax (or whoever it was, I forget the details) The problem was, it'd give him far FAR too much of a majority of the opinionated press, and the ability to control what people read in all the papers.
Of course, this might not have been the case here, I don't know.
Actually. That's not true. I do feel your pain, but that was because FTP became really sucky in explorer and IE a long time ago, because of single-threadisms.
Conventions are a nice way of saying "that's the way it's always been, so that's the way it stays." Windows has similar problems left over from legacy, going all the way back to CP/M. Yes, this sucks, but so does some conventions in unixland. Just ask a Solaris 10 admin how much it sucks when your upstream vendor breaks decades-long convention.
Really? Ok, lets open up C:\Windows on one of our Windows servers. Hmmm a folder named "$hf_mig$". I suppose you know what that means or what convention that follows? Or C:\Windows\adam. Kinda looks like it might be some directory tools. Maybe ADAM = Active Directory AdMinistration? What's that doing there anyway? I could keep going down the list. I suppose there is a very good reason why there are.BMP files in C:\Windows? Desktop wallpapers? Come on. I wonder if they're related the other brilliantly named files such as SET2.tmp and SET3.tmp in that same directory. And don't get me started on the insanity that is C:\Windows\System32. Hardly a single file/folder that doesn't use 8.3 naming. I haven't clue what have that stuff is doing there.
You're not looking in the right place. Microsoft, love it or hate it, worked out a long time ago that 'filename' and 'metadata' aren't necessarily the same thing. The filename and path are just handy locational indexes, and don't necessarily need to mean *anything*. Sure, a DLL can, and often, for newer stuff, IS far longer than 8.3, but it wasn't until later versions of NT (3.5/4.0, I don't remember my history too well) that support for it kicked in well enough, and there's some legacy stuff around. You don't break legacy just because it's fun. Microsoft gets this right, even if they had to tread over it a fair bit in vista, and add some nasty hacks to deal with most of the fallout.
Anyway, as I was saying, you're not looking in the right place. Case study: C:\windows\system32\apss.dll: Microsoft(r) InfoTech Storage System Library. Problem solved. (it's not at all difficult to use something like powershell (or possibly other tools) to just print this out in a souped up version of ls with a little scripting, I might add, just like I can do a few similar scripting tricks on my debian system to tell you who owns the copyright to 90% of.so's in/usr/lib.)
Want another one?
c:\windows\System32\bitsigd.dll: Background Intelligent Transfer Service IGD Support
Oh look, another one, fully named.
Of course, this starts to fall down when the file doesn't contain metadata, but that's a problem for, say, XML schema files in/usr/share/ on linux too. The organisation might be a bit better, but not by much. The saving grace there is that I have dpkg to work shit out for me..NET goes even further. You can register as many different versions of a namespace as you like, and.NET will do the mapping for you if you request a specific version.
First of all, I was only talking about superficial organization. And if you want to see something nice, have a look at OS X some time. Not only is the System (/System) well organized, but most applications are neatly self contained in/Applications/Some.app. They usually don't spew files all over the place when installed. You know where the term DLL Hell comes from, don't you?
Yes. I do..NET does a good job of solving this quite nicely. Adds public/private keys into the mix too, plus a bunch of other mechanisms..NET isn't just for C# either. It deals with VB, C++, and (ahahahha) J# too. I will admit that the mac platform is neatly arranged, but their QA seems to have gone to the toilet right now. A place that windows' QA has emerged from rather nicely, I should mention.
As for random stuff appearing in random places, try dealing with commercial software. Even on linux, the developers will put shit in strange places. Open
Ok, but is the OS *still* organized like crap? I mean, is C:\Windows still a dumping ground for a bunch of arbitrarily named data files, log files, drivers, and libraries using, for the most part, the old 8.3 naming convention?
Dude, if you can't hack that right now, how are you dealing with unix instead?
If any platform's based on a standard of bizarre naming due to space saving stupidity, that's it. Far more so than windows. Infact, name any mature platform that's based on reasonable standards for it's underlying API's and structure.
Didn't think you could. While it's true that things like the FHS are helping on the unix side, try telling an oldschool developer like oracle that they need to follow it. They'll laugh. and laugh.
and laugh.
Windows is in much the same position. At least.NET has made this significantly less painful, because it was considered ahead of time (it's not much easier to actually manage, but that's the tools more than anything, and just takes a bit of experience.... which unsurprisingly, is what dealing with the idiosyncracies of the old systems take anyway!)
Put competent people in charge, then sure, I'll trust it, regardless of what it's running. Of course, since life support systems are usually buried in a shroud of red tape, overthought-by-committee requirements and whatnot, I doubt that's ever the case. (Except a few notable exceptions, but last I checked, my home country (Australia) was not one of them)
Relating the platform something's built on with the competence of the system, or the people running it just stinks of consultantware and big kickbacks.
You can build anything on almost anything from the more advanced systems. There might be more or less effort involved depending on which platform you actually choose, but the choice should be based on *people*, more specifically, the people who build and the people who maintain. (Not the people having lunch expensed by the proponents of a system)
Haha, thanks. Of course, the flip side is that i actually work for MS.
Not on the windows server dev team, mind you, I'm in connected tools, which is related to devdiv (visual studio) and a few other server and tools groups (biztalk, etc)
Now, of course, if you spoke to me a few years ago, you'd realise that moving here would be a bigger seachange than .
Slashdot Mirror
ROFL. Injecting someone with dimethylmercury would be overkill, in the extreme.
You only need to drop a small amount of high concentration of (CH3)2Hg to cause enough damage to kill them in a few weeks or so. Even if it's onto someone's hand when they're wearing a latex glove. It'll go through the glove, and through the skin, and give them the equivalent of an extremely high dose of heavy metals, which chelation therapy won't be able to deal with.
The stuff is *nasty*.
Yeah, I hate that. It's why i used to use linux for DVD playback almost exclusively.
:)
That said, I recently watched a DVD on my xbox 360. I was very surprised when I was able to skip (using the 'next chapter' button) all of these supposedly unskippable parts. I'm sure it's just a bug, or something...
Actually, I'm pretty sure Child's play was started after Jack Thompson started his raving about how games only create deviants, and the Penny-arcade people wanted to show him up in a way that was more constructive than responding directly to his infantile arguments.
So far, Child's play has raised a huge amount of money, and helped make being hospitalized less sucky for lots of children, and given Gabe/Tycho a way to thumb their nose at Jack, which I'm all for. Not that it'll matter to Jack, mind you, since he's a raving lunatic, and incapable of dealing with rational arguments anyway.
ash
The thing I find weird is that I don't see how myminicity is attractive to these morons. WTF is it anyway, and how does me clicking one link help them? Can't be much in the way of advertising revenue, since the returns on advertising these days are minimal in the extreme...
Ah well
ash
For those of you who aren't familiar with the Australian ballot, it's actually pretty easy to vote, once you turn up.
Most people have a general sense of who they prefer, either because of social, economic, or family pressure. (your first vote tends to be around age 18-20, and often you're still lending your ear to your family's opinions, or, alternatively, you're in university, and using your fellow students as a barometer, etc).
This means that for the lower house, they need to write 4, maybe 5 numbers, in order from 1 to 5, and the major parties usually have preference cards being handed out in front of the election facilities that give you their preferences, but you're free to reorder them (I usually do, but only because the Liberals rate fanatical conservative parties above labor, and I don't)
For the upper house (Senate), you can alternatively write 30-something numbers, or just *one* number, depending. Not surprisingly, most people, even people who think consciously about their decision in this area, still use the 'one' number above the line, because it takes a crap load less time.
Also, the system is geared such that minor parties with followers spread out still get some power, simply because the senate is a simple Australia-wide percentage system.
ash
Heh. I made comments to this effect in the last article, and was roundly shouted down by one of my fellow Australians because the new Labor government can't possibly be evil, since the leader's already allocated 150 million dollars to aiding the homeless.
Well, here we are, as I said, both sides of the government are in love with censorship. Once again, I'm glad I don't currently live in Australia. With both Labor's and Family-First's tendencies on both sides of the line, this was kinda inevitable.
I hope it fails miserably, and spectacularly.
But will the HDTV blend? [cue music]
ROFL. Build your bridge already (although, whoever called you a redneck probably needs to look up the definition, last I checked, rednecks were conservative :) ). Plus, being tracked by the government is basically par for the course when you're working in the US.
National ID cards are a moot point anyway. There's already more than enough information floating around about your average citizen to track where they are, what they like to do, and what nasty habits they've got, on-line or off. A national ID card won't change that.
It also doesn't mandate that they *judge* what you do. I draw the line when I have people telling me what I can and can't read or watch. This is also why I've been distinctly disappointed in the Australian censorship system for a long time. Of course, there are still limits to be had, sane limits, such as ensuring that parents can take responsibility for what minors can get their hands on.
Well, I wasn't suggesting "go left instead of right, and it's death valley" so much as "guards are more aware of you, respond quicker, etc" if you're excessively violent. IE, the guards on rooftops increase in number and decrease in tolerance significantly if you keep killing them, and guards notice you quicker if you go around killing them all the time, and they start killing vigilantes if you rely on them too much.
:)
More of a feedback system. Of course, this needs to be carefully balanced, and should be communicated to the player reasonably well, ie, people start saying "hey, doesn't that look like that killer the guards are talking about?!" and other telltale signs.
ah well.
Tell me about it. Once i realised how little impact the socially-unacceptable behavior has most of the time, i spent a crapload of time just killing random guards for the hell of it.
It'd be nice if doing that kind of thing had an impact on the difficulty of the game over time (ie, you got rewarded with easier sneaking and blending because you weren't going on a rampage).
Instead, I got to spend 3 days honing my counter-kill timing (btw, those are really challenging if you limit yourself to using the hidden blade while counter-killing, you basically get no block at all, so if you get hit, you get hit BAD, actually makes it more challenging.)
Still, running around on rooftops and climbing around on stuff was fun, and the game looks awesome, but it's just a bit too easy to bludgeon your way out of every situation, even after you've just assassinated your target, since it's mostly just a timing game. I force myself to watch for when guards take their eyes off me for a minute during a fight and strike at them just to keep things interesting.
Also, unskippable cutscenes!? wtf?! I only care about the chatty stuff the first time through, k?
Wish they'd patch in a 'skip cutscene' button.
ash
Oh, ffs. Nevermind that I qualified my statement with the notion that *both* sides support the idea. It was rhetoric. Look it up. I wouldn't say that Labor's the worst offender, either.
My point was that I don't want to live in a state of forced censorship. I value that over a PM who seems 'intelligent' on your pet ideas. Yay, he's signing the kyoto protocol, woo for the homeless, etc. I was alive last time labor was in power, and I'm willing to bet they're going to screw it up just like they did last time. As you noted, parliament isn't in session yet. Watch what happens when the union bosses call in their debts.
Here's a hint: Every time labor's been in power, interest rates in Australia have sky-rocketed. Every. Time. And the working class certainly didn't win last time labor was in power, yet big spending was the ticket *then* too, which is exactly what our new PM seems to be doing!
And messing with the IR laws doesn't really sit well with me anyway, but maybe because *I* came out in front with them, but while I concede that some people may not have been happy, they weren't that bad. No-one actually got successfully screwed by the IR laws, regardless of labor's hooting, particularly once people got wind of their ability to get proper compensation, via official channels.
ash
Please, if that's the way you feel, feel free to stay right where you are
Huh? If that's the way I feel I should stay out? How does that make sense? Because I'm not happy with the conservative nature of both parties right now?
There's still a *lot* that I like about the Australian political system. It's certainly not the three-ring circus that America has, and while it's clearly unbalanced some of the time, it's usually fairly sane, and gets quite a fair bit right, particularly it's ability to represent smaller parties.
For instance, regardless of what I thought about the man's inability to do his job, Senator Alston did push for better internet access, particularly in rural areas. Quite frankly, I fully believe that Australian internet is better (albeit slightly more expensive) than what's available in the US (these people haven't heard of ADSL2+ yet, they're trying to roll out fibre to the home, and at crappy speeds too). What I don't agree with is parties pandering to the ultra-conservative nature of people in order to play on the family-first sentiments that seems to exist.
Of course, with the way teenagers and young adults act nowadays, I'm not surprised that people WANT to do something to control them. The problem I have is that they're doing it too late to help the current lot, and they're not doing it the right way (It's called discipline people! an absence of porn or violent media isn't going to do anything to fix them!)
The other problem is that it's blown out of proportion. Most people are sane and good-natured, regardless of how much porn or violence they see. A minority are not, and the media does as much as it can to sensationalize it to the limit.
Hm. Zero Punctuation?
That's published in the US, but produced in Australia, by a British guy.
Also, as an Australian currently working abroad, stuff like Chaser's war on everything, media watch, and other assorted publications matter to me (although they're all on hiatus since it's christmas time there.)
The bigger problem is that it might start other countries from just throwing their hands up and blocking Australia outright, since there's probably no simple (hell, probably not even a complex) solution to this particular mandate that's going into effect. This worries me greatly, and doesn't surprise me in the slightest. We've had a seriously over-protectionist bent for far FAR too long. The hooting from the conservative family-first types that push this crappy agenda may not be as loud as they are in the US, but clearly they've had enough of an effect.
Particularly since my braindead country just voted in the fucking party that's in love with the idea. Oh, wait, both parties are in love with the idea. Ah well, guess we're fucked either way. Glad I don't live there anymore, I certainly won't be going back any time soon.
ash
That's okay. In Australia, we'll fine you if you don't vote. (Hint: in Australia, it's illegal to not vote, everyone has to, whether they want to or not. It changes the political system significantly, and judging by the way you people complain all the time, for the better.)
In sum, if Microsoft is so innovative, why can't we get something better than the Zune?
Because craploads of our innovation isn't going into consumer-oriented products. One of the drawbacks of having such a ubiquitous platform is that it tends to overshadow a lot of the work we do. Also, there are lines of work here that consumers will simply never see directly, like our work in security, testing, IT management, development, and all sorts of other areas where we're making massive strides, with our target release dates being 2009 and beyond.
While you may think that microsoft's world revolves around the consumer giants, office and windows, the reality is, these two stay afloat because it's supported by ever more effective pontoons of tools like visual studio, system centre, identity lifecycle management, WPF, WCF, WF, Cardspace, Biztalk, and Unified Communications, not to mention several others..
I know that's a giant link salad, but it's pretty clear to see that almost all of those tools aren't in any way aimed at consumers, and most will do a lot to drastically increase microsoft's business dominance. Without them, much of the third party products and inhouse tools that are going to come through the pipeline in much less connected and interoperable fashion. While some of these products may not be the winners we hope they will, they all add up to a pretty strong whole.
ash
Microsoft would like to keep the power of the local machine strong.
Actually, no we don't, at least, not necessarily.
While, for a majority of situations, it may well be more economical to just do it locally, the reality is, we're pushing a lot into both system level and app-level virtualization, breaking the user/kernel ties, and other efforts in order to make it possible to build decentralized processing well on windows, even to the app level that traditionally, would have been client-only (I'm looking at you, MYOB).
It's not the same approach as google, by any means, but it's certainly a valid thin-client direction, and one that's likely to be highly competetive, since it's much more flexible.
(That interview with Mark Russinovich is built on silverlight so you'll need to install it if you want to watch it online. There are download links further down however, so it's not essential.)
Okay, have you actually studied cryptography at even a basic level?
It's basically impossible (read, an NP-hard problem at least) to *prove* that a particular cryptosystem is unbreakable. If it's an obvious flaw, then sure, give whoever missed it a thorough kicking, but in my experience, 'obvious' is just another form of scapegoating, and is just a way of passing the buck from the guy who cut testing short, to the mathematician who did the testing.
The reality is, cryptography requires years of research and peer review to be reasonably sure that it's right. Look at all of the cyphers in the past that have suddenly been broken after N years of production use. Now also consider that government standards cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to create, and probably as much again to update. Then you need to consider that if you want to play in that market, you need to adhere to those standards, no matter how boneheaded. And since they cost so much to make and change, they don't change often, so they lag behind cryptographic science.
I'm pretty sure you can find this particular random number generator in other places, if you really try.
ash
I don't know much about the merger in question, but usually the question *I* worry about when two media distribution companies merge is "Is this reducing the breadth of the opinion I have access to".
This is why, in Australia, the government regulatory bodies repeatedly told Packer that he couldn't buy fairfax (or whoever it was, I forget the details) The problem was, it'd give him far FAR too much of a majority of the opinionated press, and the ability to control what people read in all the papers.
Of course, this might not have been the case here, I don't know.
Wouldn't the appropriate symbolism to be to toss the cds and dvds into the worlds biggest microwave and have some kind of spectacular lightshow?
Although that would be far more harmful than tossing it into the river, given the magic smoke that'd get released in epic proportions. hm.
Actually. That's not true. I do feel your pain, but that was because FTP became really sucky in explorer and IE a long time ago, because of single-threadisms.
To this, I can only say Shell != Kernel, and let it go at that. I can't comment on these problems, mainly because i rarely run into them personally.
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Because at least Unix has conventions.
.BMP files in C:\Windows? Desktop wallpapers? Come on. I wonder if they're related the other brilliantly named files such as SET2.tmp and SET3.tmp in that same directory. And don't get me started on the insanity that is C:\Windows\System32. Hardly a single file/folder that doesn't use 8.3 naming. I haven't clue what have that stuff is doing there.
.so's in /usr/lib.)
/usr/share/ on linux too. The organisation might be a bit better, but not by much. The saving grace there is that I have dpkg to work shit out for me. .NET goes even further. You can register as many different versions of a namespace as you like, and .NET will do the mapping for you if you request a specific version.
/Applications/Some.app. They usually don't spew files all over the place when installed. You know where the term DLL Hell comes from, don't you?
.NET does a good job of solving this quite nicely. Adds public/private keys into the mix too, plus a bunch of other mechanisms. .NET isn't just for C# either. It deals with VB, C++, and (ahahahha) J# too.
Conventions are a nice way of saying "that's the way it's always been, so that's the way it stays." Windows has similar problems left over from legacy, going all the way back to CP/M. Yes, this sucks, but so does some conventions in unixland. Just ask a Solaris 10 admin how much it sucks when your upstream vendor breaks decades-long convention.
Really? Ok, lets open up C:\Windows on one of our Windows servers. Hmmm a folder named "$hf_mig$". I suppose you know what that means or what convention that follows? Or C:\Windows\adam. Kinda looks like it might be some directory tools. Maybe ADAM = Active Directory AdMinistration? What's that doing there anyway? I could keep going down the list. I suppose there is a very good reason why there are
You're not looking in the right place. Microsoft, love it or hate it, worked out a long time ago that 'filename' and 'metadata' aren't necessarily the same thing. The filename and path are just handy locational indexes, and don't necessarily need to mean *anything*. Sure, a DLL can, and often, for newer stuff, IS far longer than 8.3, but it wasn't until later versions of NT (3.5/4.0, I don't remember my history too well) that support for it kicked in well enough, and there's some legacy stuff around. You don't break legacy just because it's fun. Microsoft gets this right, even if they had to tread over it a fair bit in vista, and add some nasty hacks to deal with most of the fallout.
Anyway, as I was saying, you're not looking in the right place. Case study: C:\windows\system32\apss.dll: Microsoft(r) InfoTech Storage System Library.
Problem solved. (it's not at all difficult to use something like powershell (or possibly other tools) to just print this out in a souped up version of ls with a little scripting, I might add, just like I can do a few similar scripting tricks on my debian system to tell you who owns the copyright to 90% of
Want another one?
c:\windows\System32\bitsigd.dll: Background Intelligent Transfer Service IGD Support
Oh look, another one, fully named.
Of course, this starts to fall down when the file doesn't contain metadata, but that's a problem for, say, XML schema files in
First of all, I was only talking about superficial organization. And if you want to see something nice, have a look at OS X some time. Not only is the System (/System) well organized, but most applications are neatly self contained in
Yes. I do.
I will admit that the mac platform is neatly arranged, but their QA seems to have gone to the toilet right now. A place that windows' QA has emerged from rather nicely, I should mention.
As for random stuff appearing in random places, try dealing with commercial software. Even on linux, the developers will put shit in strange places. Open
Ok, but is the OS *still* organized like crap? I mean, is C:\Windows still a dumping ground for a bunch of arbitrarily named data files, log files, drivers, and libraries using, for the most part, the old 8.3 naming convention?
.NET has made this significantly less painful, because it was considered ahead of time (it's not much easier to actually manage, but that's the tools more than anything, and just takes a bit of experience.... which unsurprisingly, is what dealing with the idiosyncracies of the old systems take anyway!)
Dude, if you can't hack that right now, how are you dealing with unix instead?
If any platform's based on a standard of bizarre naming due to space saving stupidity, that's it. Far more so than windows. Infact, name any mature platform that's based on reasonable standards for it's underlying API's and structure.
Didn't think you could. While it's true that things like the FHS are helping on the unix side, try telling an oldschool developer like oracle that they need to follow it. They'll laugh. and laugh.
and laugh.
Windows is in much the same position. At least
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I trust people, not machines.
Put competent people in charge, then sure, I'll trust it, regardless of what it's running. Of course, since life support systems are usually buried in a shroud of red tape, overthought-by-committee requirements and whatnot, I doubt that's ever the case. (Except a few notable exceptions, but last I checked, my home country (Australia) was not one of them)
Relating the platform something's built on with the competence of the system, or the people running it just stinks of consultantware and big kickbacks.
You can build anything on almost anything from the more advanced systems. There might be more or less effort involved depending on which platform you actually choose, but the choice should be based on *people*, more specifically, the people who build and the people who maintain. (Not the people having lunch expensed by the proponents of a system)
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Haha, thanks. Of course, the flip side is that i actually work for MS.
Not on the windows server dev team, mind you, I'm in connected tools, which is related to devdiv (visual studio) and a few other server and tools groups (biztalk, etc)
Now, of course, if you spoke to me a few years ago, you'd realise that moving here would be a bigger seachange than .
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