A third window of opportunity - will the various Linux interest groups fumble again?
Yes.
And you know why?
If you play "follow the leader", you will never be the leader yourself. Microsoft have arguably been following Apple in many ways for years now and tend to be anything from 1-4 years behind. Then we have the Linux desktop which has been following Microsoft - and tends to be anything from 4-10 years behind.
Upshot?
The Linux interest groups are taking advantage of this opportunity with something that's years behind. Apple are taking advantage with something that's at least slightly ahead. Guess who's doing well?
Microsoft don't want you to roll your own LDAP/Kerberos solution. They'd much rather you migrated your current setup to Active Directory (which, as I'm sure you know, basically is LDAP/Kerberos). I think they've made that abundantly clear by now.
What they need to do is take advantage of a feature that's already in Windows. It's been in the Windows line (both pre and post-NT) for about twenty years: have the option to change the UI that's presented to the end user. It's only one registry entry that needs to change; the hardest part would be putting together some easy-to-find way for users to switch the UI.
The thing about any security issue is you've got to weigh up the cost versus the benefit.
First off: The hotel doesn't really care about the fact your digital camera might have holiday snaps from your once-in-a-lifetime holiday on there. Nor do they care that you brought your laptop (complete with the only photographs you have of your recently-deceased granny) and haven't backed it up lately.
All they care about is "How much is failing to fix this going to cost us? Will it be more than the cost of fixing it?". And given that most hotel rooms aren't exactly impregnable anyway, I don't think it's that much of a big deal - it's considerably easier and cheaper for an outsider to buy a set of overalls and a toolkit and force their way in that way. If questioned, simply produce a mocked-up job sheet that shows there's a fault with the lock and you're fixing it.
Such comparisons are normally made with couples wanting to conceive. If the rate of conception were 1 in 30 among the general population (including those using contraception), modern birth control would have failed horribly.
Creative and others had products that beat the iPod, both before and after the iPod's launch. In contrast to the iPod of the time, my old Zen Micro played more formats of music, supported music stores that had legal DRM-free music, received and recorded FM radio, allowed playlist editing on the device, had a user-replaceable battery, etc. etc. The explanation is the reality distortion field, not the inferiority of the competition.
On paper, maybe. But the thing is, everyone has their own priorities and it turns out "has a user interface that doesn't make me want to gouge out my eyes with a spoon" is a high priority to a lot of people, and that's something that most other MP3 players were sorely lacking.
Doesn't pass the F/OSS test. Nor does it pass the "must not include anyone sitting in the middle" test.
On the plus side, it does pass the "free as in beer for personal use" test.
OP: I think you're going to struggle unless you're prepared to compromise on some of your requirements. There are loads of proprietary solutions that provide this sort of functionality, but most of them are aimed at corporates that don't care too much about the architecture of the solution as long as it works - nor do they care about the price, as long as it's not silly.
Although Google inherited cases from Motorola, this is the first time Google has directly sued Apple. Google has been reticent to take on Apple directly but they don't have much choice left now.
I suspect Google wanted to take Apple on directly. After all, if Android develops a reputation of being a great smartphone platform provided you don't mind Apple keeping you in court until shortly after the heat death of the universe, it becomes substantially less attractive.
The problem is, as Google previously didn't manufacture any mobile phones - and were I to hazard a guess, probably didn't hold very many patents relevant to the industry - they didn't have grounds to go on the offensive.
It's not quite as clear-cut as that. Apple is the most visible aggressor - well, certainly the one reported most on sites like/. - but the entire mobile phone industry is a great big mess of everyone suing everyone else, and has been for a couple of years now.
Quite the reverse - this isn't the format used by OpenOffice natively, this is Microsoft's own format. The problem is that for all practical purposes, it's virtually impossible for anyone who isn't Microsoft to implement.
The MySQL data isn't stored on the browser, it's stored at the server end.
The content of pages may not be stored between browser sessions, but that's exactly where a hidden POST field lives. (In fact, if you've been following a site that uses hidden post fields, that would suggest that every page is generated as a result of something the browser POST'ed. RFC2616 effectively bans caching the result of such things, so there's no "may" about it. The content of such pages cannot be cached; the hidden POST field containing the session ID dies when you close the browser).
The only way the server can tie up the session data in the database with the browser that is connecting is if the browser submits some sort of information to the server to say "Hey, I want to use this session!". And it can't get that from the content, it can only get it from meta-data. The only bit of meta-data which can be cached across browser sessions and sent back from client to server is any cookies.
In principle you could, as you say, include a hidden POST field which the browser will submit back. Let me give a few examples which illustrate where this starts to break down.
SCENARIO 1: WHERE IT WORKS.
You visit my online shop and put some items in your cart.
Once you've chosen which items you want in your cart, you go through the purchasing process. Everything works just fine.
SCENARIO 2: WHERE IT WORKS. SORT OF. SUBJECT TO A FEW CAVEATS.
You visit my online shop and put some items in your cart.
You look at your cart and think "I need to buy something else". You right-click on a link somewhere else on the site and select "Open in new tab".
Provided I've accounted for this possibility - by ensuring that every link on the site is actually a submit button that forces your browser to POST the hidden fields as a form - this works just fine.
It's not ideal, however, for a number of reasons:
- It'll make the pages themselves larger - hence requiring more bandwidth.
- It'll make them more complicated - hence requiring more testing and introducing more scope for things to go wrong.
- Most existing shopping-type websites don't do this, changing them would be a lot of work.
- If I didn't write it myself but instead brought in the cart functionality from outside - maybe with a commercial product, maybe with a piece of F/OSS software - I may not be able to make these changes at all. This is something that the great majority of online shops do - very few people code their own cart functionality from scratch, it simply doesn't make sense.
- All of these changes cost money. Rather a lot of money, as it happens, particularly if I need to hire in outside expertise to make these changes because half-decent web developers aren't cheap. They're even dearer when you're asking them to re-architect a fundamental part of the site. It'd be a lot cheaper for my web developer to simply put a banner on saying "We use cookies, take it or leave it".
SCENARIO 3: WHERE IT STARTS TO BREAK DOWN.
You visit my online shop and put some items in your cart.
You look at your cart and think "I need to buy something else". You press Ctrl-T to open a new tab and, in that tab, visit my website by typing the URL into the URL bar.
Your browser doesn't submit the hidden value because you didn't visit the new tab via your existing session in the first one. You wind up with two separate sessions - and two separate carts - on the website.
The only way I can resolve this without using cookies is to force you to login in tab 1 and prompt you to login again in tab 2. Once you're logged in in both tabs, we can then merge your sessions. We'll have to do this again for each new tab you open.
Forcing people to login as part of the shopping process is a very good way to put prospective customers off, so I don't really want to do this. It's particularly a problem in this scenario because unless I force people to login, the shoppin
Very easily, I'd imagine. You've got a whole bunch of pupils, every pupil has parents, many parents have either old computers and/or contacts with old computers they want rid of.
Every parent wants their kids to have the best resources possible, but acknowledges the school may not have the money to go out and buy 100 brand-new computers.
A good office chair - once you adjust it, it'll stay adjusted until you adjust it again.
A cheap one may not.
If you've never priced it up before, you will be astonished how much good office furniture costs. While I don't think it's necessary to get silly with how much you spend, I do think it's necessary to spend a bit of money and have something half-decent; it may be expensive but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than having to stop working for a period of time or - worst case scenario - retraining to do something else entirely.
The same applies to your screen, keyboard and mouse. If you can't get on with your keyboard or you find a trackball/pad easier, do it first and ask questions later. Nobody can pay you enough to make it worth doing yourself an injury.
There's no such thing as a simple answer to this. Yes, you should sit with your back and legs straight - but it turns out that if you encounter any problems, there's no magic way to sit that will solve them.
This is why good quality office chairs are adjustable in various ways - you're expected to adjust the various bits to suit your own body and what feels comfortable to you.
It's not a "bad habit" to eat meat. Being a pure vegetarian is unnatural, but sustainable with supplements that you don't get from pure vegetables.
This is not true.
Of the various nutrients and such needed by the human body, most can be found from sources other than meat. Vitamin B12 is found in yeast extract (but alas not much else); every protein you need can be found in a varied ovo-lacto vegetarian diet.
A vegan diet (no animal products of any description) is possible but it's rather harder - there's a few proteins don't have very many vegetable sources. Unless you actively go out and learn precisely what it is you need and make efforts to ensure you include it in your diet, you can do yourself serious harm.
A diet with meat in doesn't need anything like the same level of care and understanding.
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There's plenty of Windows people who know how to click "Next... Next... Next..." but no more than this.
Well and good if that's all you need, but you'll get someone a lot more productive if they know a bit of Powershell, VBS and batch scripting.
Not sure that means much. Most company's stock value has taken a battering in the last five years.
You haven't seen Lexmark's drivers or firmware lately. They've already made a damn good start.
The quality's okay (it works, but don't expect spectacular build quality) but Lexmark's firmware has been shaky for as long as I can remember.
A third window of opportunity - will the various Linux interest groups fumble again?
Yes.
And you know why?
If you play "follow the leader", you will never be the leader yourself. Microsoft have arguably been following Apple in many ways for years now and tend to be anything from 1-4 years behind. Then we have the Linux desktop which has been following Microsoft - and tends to be anything from 4-10 years behind.
Upshot?
The Linux interest groups are taking advantage of this opportunity with something that's years behind. Apple are taking advantage with something that's at least slightly ahead. Guess who's doing well?
Still no native NFS/LDAP/Kerberos support
Microsoft don't want you to roll your own LDAP/Kerberos solution. They'd much rather you migrated your current setup to Active Directory (which, as I'm sure you know, basically is LDAP/Kerberos). I think they've made that abundantly clear by now.
They don't need a tablet OS.
What they need to do is take advantage of a feature that's already in Windows. It's been in the Windows line (both pre and post-NT) for about twenty years: have the option to change the UI that's presented to the end user. It's only one registry entry that needs to change; the hardest part would be putting together some easy-to-find way for users to switch the UI.
The thing about any security issue is you've got to weigh up the cost versus the benefit.
First off: The hotel doesn't really care about the fact your digital camera might have holiday snaps from your once-in-a-lifetime holiday on there. Nor do they care that you brought your laptop (complete with the only photographs you have of your recently-deceased granny) and haven't backed it up lately.
All they care about is "How much is failing to fix this going to cost us? Will it be more than the cost of fixing it?". And given that most hotel rooms aren't exactly impregnable anyway, I don't think it's that much of a big deal - it's considerably easier and cheaper for an outsider to buy a set of overalls and a toolkit and force their way in that way. If questioned, simply produce a mocked-up job sheet that shows there's a fault with the lock and you're fixing it.
How often do you think hotels have someone examine the underside of their locks?
Such comparisons are normally made with couples wanting to conceive. If the rate of conception were 1 in 30 among the general population (including those using contraception), modern birth control would have failed horribly.
Creative and others had products that beat the iPod, both before and after the iPod's launch. In contrast to the iPod of the time, my old Zen Micro played more formats of music, supported music stores that had legal DRM-free music, received and recorded FM radio, allowed playlist editing on the device, had a user-replaceable battery, etc. etc. The explanation is the reality distortion field, not the inferiority of the competition.
On paper, maybe. But the thing is, everyone has their own priorities and it turns out "has a user interface that doesn't make me want to gouge out my eyes with a spoon" is a high priority to a lot of people, and that's something that most other MP3 players were sorely lacking.
Doesn't pass the F/OSS test. Nor does it pass the "must not include anyone sitting in the middle" test.
On the plus side, it does pass the "free as in beer for personal use" test.
OP: I think you're going to struggle unless you're prepared to compromise on some of your requirements. There are loads of proprietary solutions that provide this sort of functionality, but most of them are aimed at corporates that don't care too much about the architecture of the solution as long as it works - nor do they care about the price, as long as it's not silly.
Although Google inherited cases from Motorola, this is the first time Google has directly sued Apple. Google has been reticent to take on Apple directly but they don't have much choice left now.
I suspect Google wanted to take Apple on directly. After all, if Android develops a reputation of being a great smartphone platform provided you don't mind Apple keeping you in court until shortly after the heat death of the universe, it becomes substantially less attractive.
The problem is, as Google previously didn't manufacture any mobile phones - and were I to hazard a guess, probably didn't hold very many patents relevant to the industry - they didn't have grounds to go on the offensive.
It's not quite as clear-cut as that. Apple is the most visible aggressor - well, certainly the one reported most on sites like /. - but the entire mobile phone industry is a great big mess of everyone suing everyone else, and has been for a couple of years now.
How are batteries doing in terms of energy density in proportion to weight?
Not sarcastic, I honestly want to know.
Quite the reverse - this isn't the format used by OpenOffice natively, this is Microsoft's own format. The problem is that for all practical purposes, it's virtually impossible for anyone who isn't Microsoft to implement.
You'd better tell all the members of 3GPP. Most of them are companies that make equipment used in the mobile phone industry.
Allowing a single multinational corporation to draft the standard all by themselves, however - yeah, I'd agree with you there.
The MySQL data isn't stored on the browser, it's stored at the server end.
The content of pages may not be stored between browser sessions, but that's exactly where a hidden POST field lives. (In fact, if you've been following a site that uses hidden post fields, that would suggest that every page is generated as a result of something the browser POST'ed. RFC2616 effectively bans caching the result of such things, so there's no "may" about it. The content of such pages cannot be cached; the hidden POST field containing the session ID dies when you close the browser).
The only way the server can tie up the session data in the database with the browser that is connecting is if the browser submits some sort of information to the server to say "Hey, I want to use this session!". And it can't get that from the content, it can only get it from meta-data. The only bit of meta-data which can be cached across browser sessions and sent back from client to server is any cookies.
In principle you could, as you say, include a hidden POST field which the browser will submit back. Let me give a few examples which illustrate where this starts to break down.
SCENARIO 1: WHERE IT WORKS.
You visit my online shop and put some items in your cart.
Once you've chosen which items you want in your cart, you go through the purchasing process. Everything works just fine.
SCENARIO 2: WHERE IT WORKS. SORT OF. SUBJECT TO A FEW CAVEATS.
You visit my online shop and put some items in your cart.
You look at your cart and think "I need to buy something else". You right-click on a link somewhere else on the site and select "Open in new tab".
Provided I've accounted for this possibility - by ensuring that every link on the site is actually a submit button that forces your browser to POST the hidden fields as a form - this works just fine.
It's not ideal, however, for a number of reasons:
- It'll make the pages themselves larger - hence requiring more bandwidth.
- It'll make them more complicated - hence requiring more testing and introducing more scope for things to go wrong.
- Most existing shopping-type websites don't do this, changing them would be a lot of work.
- If I didn't write it myself but instead brought in the cart functionality from outside - maybe with a commercial product, maybe with a piece of F/OSS software - I may not be able to make these changes at all. This is something that the great majority of online shops do - very few people code their own cart functionality from scratch, it simply doesn't make sense.
- All of these changes cost money. Rather a lot of money, as it happens, particularly if I need to hire in outside expertise to make these changes because half-decent web developers aren't cheap. They're even dearer when you're asking them to re-architect a fundamental part of the site. It'd be a lot cheaper for my web developer to simply put a banner on saying "We use cookies, take it or leave it".
SCENARIO 3: WHERE IT STARTS TO BREAK DOWN.
You visit my online shop and put some items in your cart.
You look at your cart and think "I need to buy something else". You press Ctrl-T to open a new tab and, in that tab, visit my website by typing the URL into the URL bar.
Your browser doesn't submit the hidden value because you didn't visit the new tab via your existing session in the first one. You wind up with two separate sessions - and two separate carts - on the website.
The only way I can resolve this without using cookies is to force you to login in tab 1 and prompt you to login again in tab 2. Once you're logged in in both tabs, we can then merge your sessions. We'll have to do this again for each new tab you open.
Forcing people to login as part of the shopping process is a very good way to put prospective customers off, so I don't really want to do this. It's particularly a problem in this scenario because unless I force people to login, the shoppin
That's well and good for a single session, but it doesn't deal with one that persists once the browser's closed and reopened.
How exactly does MySQL solve the problem?
Very easily, I'd imagine. You've got a whole bunch of pupils, every pupil has parents, many parents have either old computers and/or contacts with old computers they want rid of.
Every parent wants their kids to have the best resources possible, but acknowledges the school may not have the money to go out and buy 100 brand-new computers.
Even so, I've never had to turn a series of dials just so I can reach the dial that lets me change the cabin temperature.
Good point - extra banana ration, that ape.
A good office chair - once you adjust it, it'll stay adjusted until you adjust it again.
A cheap one may not.
If you've never priced it up before, you will be astonished how much good office furniture costs. While I don't think it's necessary to get silly with how much you spend, I do think it's necessary to spend a bit of money and have something half-decent; it may be expensive but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than having to stop working for a period of time or - worst case scenario - retraining to do something else entirely.
The same applies to your screen, keyboard and mouse. If you can't get on with your keyboard or you find a trackball/pad easier, do it first and ask questions later. Nobody can pay you enough to make it worth doing yourself an injury.
There's no such thing as a simple answer to this. Yes, you should sit with your back and legs straight - but it turns out that if you encounter any problems, there's no magic way to sit that will solve them.
This is why good quality office chairs are adjustable in various ways - you're expected to adjust the various bits to suit your own body and what feels comfortable to you.
It's not a "bad habit" to eat meat. Being a pure vegetarian is unnatural, but sustainable with supplements that you don't get from pure vegetables.
This is not true.
Of the various nutrients and such needed by the human body, most can be found from sources other than meat. Vitamin B12 is found in yeast extract (but alas not much else); every protein you need can be found in a varied ovo-lacto vegetarian diet.
A vegan diet (no animal products of any description) is possible but it's rather harder - there's a few proteins don't have very many vegetable sources. Unless you actively go out and learn precisely what it is you need and make efforts to ensure you include it in your diet, you can do yourself serious harm.
A diet with meat in doesn't need anything like the same level of care and understanding.