My understanding was (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that Netscape's code wasn't exactly that great, and so it underwent some fairly major overhauling before becoming what we know today as Mozilla/Firefox.
This year has 366 days in it instead of the normal 365.
So if you did (365-day) you could end up with -1 which might cause either a crash or freeze.
Just one (likely) possible cause. If that is the case it should fix its self tomorrow.
Now while that may be true, it's an absolutely pathetic reason. Come on, people get taught in junior school that there are 29 days in February in a leap year and hence the year is a day longer.
To be fair, my original point was more attempting to second-guess what the law was intended to deal with.
This is taking the "give the lawmakers the benefit of the doubt approach." Though it does require two things to be accepted:
1. That the law as passed is so broadly worded that Tom and Jerry could be considered cartoon porn. (When was the last time you saw either Tom or Jerry clothed?). Most civilised countries have a whole heap of bad laws, this isn't much of a leap of faith.
2. That the lawmakers were sufficiently prescient as to anticipate drawings which are to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from photographs. Most countries tend to legislate after the fact, so this is quite a large leap of faith.
People WANT an open source groupware server and the ones that exist now seem to lack in one way or another.
People don't. Businesses probably don't much care.
What they do want is a cheap/free groupware server. Which doesn't suck donkey balls. And works well with a desktop client without requiring proprietary plugins which sort-of work and mostly don't (please, I've had replies regarding Citadel before and unless something's changed dramatically, it is not a dropin replacement for Exchange and is a long way from ever being one).
Where things become difficult (and, I suspect, where this law is aimed at) is when computer-generated images look so realistic that any lay person would have trouble recognising it as being computer generated.
It prevents real perverts being able to use a defence of "It's all fake, no offence was committed".
(Before you ask, yes there are talented artists right now producing photorealistic images which are entirely computer generated. I've seen them myself but I haven't been able to dig any examples out).
It's not the best route, but a violent revolution (global this time) seems to be not far off from coming.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Violent revolutions do not happen because a form of information got censored. Violent revolutions happen because a sufficiently large proportion of the populace cannot eat or because a sufficiently large proportion are being repressed (repression in this context means "taken away at night and never seen again", not "prevented from posting what they like in their blog").
Even then it's amazing what people will put up with. Note that Robert Mugabe is still in power, for instance.
They were great. Sun and Oracle were right. The problem is that corporate America lacked vision. The amount you can save on real estate more on IT is amazing.
It is still a very very good idea.
They may be great, but they require individual people to change the way they work without any perceivable benefit to themselves.
I note that virtually none of the major commercial scanners found anything.
I have trouble believing there's any significant malware that is generally known to the AV industry but is not detected by any of McAfee, Sophos, Symantec or Kaspersky. Particularly when the industry depends so heavily on scaring people into believing they are likely to become infected.
Except by the time it's released, manufacturers will have had a good few years to sort out their Vista driver issues. So while it may be Vista SP2 in all but name, that may not cause it to be such a train wreck.
And in 1999, Sun were telling us that we'd all be using JavaStations (not-terribly-glorified dumb terminals) connected to a central computer which does all the work.
I'm sure you'll see something similar repeated every few years going right back to the days when that was actually true.
"Please RESTART your computer before you go home. You read that right: restart, NOT shutdown."
Not really. You're back with the problem of people not doing something because it's not convenient to them.
Remember that as far as your average end-user is concerned, they expect to have to mess around with their PC about as much as they expect to mess around with their toaster. And "mess around" in this context means "do anything which isn't directly related to the job they're paid to do". You can moan about this all you like (and on/., lots of people will moan at great volume) but at the end of the day the whole fscking point of IT is to provide and manage IT. Not to delegate that onto end users.
No, that may or may not work depending on privileges that they have, it requires them to jump through hoops and frankly, unless your PCs are very tightly managed from the day they're built onwards, may or may not work.
Far better to take advantage of the remote control features that any modern OS offers.
As a new user, if I go to control panel and know I want to do something with programs,
Really? All the new users I've ever worked with think that the logical thing to do with a program you don't want any more is to delete it, same as you might delete a file.
You'd be amazed how many Windows users have deleted the icon from their desktop (and maybe even their start menu) and consider the application is therefore gone.
OK, where to start... I'll leave aside the wording of your email, seeing as most people will glaze over as soon as they see it's from IT in the first place.
1. Your email is more than 5 lines long. IME, most people don't read beyond the first few lines so there's no point in bothering with any more than that.
2. You expect your end users to jump through hoops for nobody's benefit but your own. Wake on LAN should deal with PCs that are turned off, if they're not turned off I leave setting up a remote reboot script to your imagination.
3. Rewritten email:
"We will be applying updates to your PC, part of which will involve remotely rebooting your system at 20:00 tonight. Please notify us if this is inconvenient".
Andrews also said that this could hurt the integrity of the Speed Camera Program. "It will cause potential problems for the Speed Camera Program in terms of the confidence in it," he said.
If we're lucky.
We've got speed cameras in the UK. Thousands of the damn things, in fact.
They're almost universally despised, being widely perceived as both a cash cow and a substitute for real policing.
The problem with any serious effort to get rid of them is that the authorities with the data to provide useful statistics (like "how much good have these things actually done?") are the same authorities who are making money out of them. Which means that they've been very careful not to publicise any potentially damaging statistics - so the only real argument against them is "I don't like being caught speeding" - not an argument that's going to get anyone very far.
In the mean time, I simply have utterly given up, I think we would need 3 or 4 generation of basic scientific education from the 1st grade onward to change the trend. The way it is now, people as a whole will never be able to recognize homeopathy for the pathetic scam it is. Even if you rub their nose in it.
So exactly the same problem they'd face with Open Source, then ?
Pretty much, yes. Certainly GCC needs a functioning C 90 compiler to bootstrap itself. I'd be surprised if there exists a compiler in common use today for which something similar isn't true.
software does eventually get EOLed by the vendor and needs to be replaced if you want any support for it.
The number of systems still running software that was EOL'd some time ago should give you some clue as to how important vendor support is for many people.
They might have done, but I have serious doubts that there exists any modern C compiler can easily be built without a pre-existing compiler of some sort to bootstrap it.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding was (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that Netscape's code wasn't exactly that great, and so it underwent some fairly major overhauling before becoming what we know today as Mozilla/Firefox.
This year has 366 days in it instead of the normal 365.
So if you did (365-day) you could end up with -1 which might cause either a crash or freeze.
Just one (likely) possible cause. If that is the case it should fix its self tomorrow.
Now while that may be true, it's an absolutely pathetic reason. Come on, people get taught in junior school that there are 29 days in February in a leap year and hence the year is a day longer.
Which just goes to show that in markets where Microsoft don't have a monopoly, they're a perfectly good company to deal with.
To be fair, my original point was more attempting to second-guess what the law was intended to deal with.
This is taking the "give the lawmakers the benefit of the doubt approach." Though it does require two things to be accepted:
1. That the law as passed is so broadly worded that Tom and Jerry could be considered cartoon porn. (When was the last time you saw either Tom or Jerry clothed?). Most civilised countries have a whole heap of bad laws, this isn't much of a leap of faith.
2. That the lawmakers were sufficiently prescient as to anticipate drawings which are to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from photographs. Most countries tend to legislate after the fact, so this is quite a large leap of faith.
People WANT an open source groupware server and the ones that exist now seem to lack in one way or another.
People don't. Businesses probably don't much care.
What they do want is a cheap/free groupware server. Which doesn't suck donkey balls. And works well with a desktop client without requiring proprietary plugins which sort-of work and mostly don't (please, I've had replies regarding Citadel before and unless something's changed dramatically, it is not a dropin replacement for Exchange and is a long way from ever being one).
Where things become difficult (and, I suspect, where this law is aimed at) is when computer-generated images look so realistic that any lay person would have trouble recognising it as being computer generated.
It prevents real perverts being able to use a defence of "It's all fake, no offence was committed".
(Before you ask, yes there are talented artists right now producing photorealistic images which are entirely computer generated. I've seen them myself but I haven't been able to dig any examples out).
It's not the best route, but a violent revolution (global this time) seems to be not far off from coming.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Violent revolutions do not happen because a form of information got censored. Violent revolutions happen because a sufficiently large proportion of the populace cannot eat or because a sufficiently large proportion are being repressed (repression in this context means "taken away at night and never seen again", not "prevented from posting what they like in their blog").
Even then it's amazing what people will put up with. Note that Robert Mugabe is still in power, for instance.
They were great. Sun and Oracle were right. The problem is that corporate America lacked vision. The amount you can save on real estate more on IT is amazing.
It is still a very very good idea.
They may be great, but they require individual people to change the way they work without any perceivable benefit to themselves.
This is almost always an uphill struggle.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=964MLq1db4s
I note that virtually none of the major commercial scanners found anything.
I have trouble believing there's any significant malware that is generally known to the AV industry but is not detected by any of McAfee, Sophos, Symantec or Kaspersky. Particularly when the industry depends so heavily on scaring people into believing they are likely to become infected.
Except by the time it's released, manufacturers will have had a good few years to sort out their Vista driver issues. So while it may be Vista SP2 in all but name, that may not cause it to be such a train wreck.
And in 1999, Sun were telling us that we'd all be using JavaStations (not-terribly-glorified dumb terminals) connected to a central computer which does all the work.
I'm sure you'll see something similar repeated every few years going right back to the days when that was actually true.
I have a better one:
"Please RESTART your computer before you go home. You read that right: restart, NOT shutdown."
Not really. You're back with the problem of people not doing something because it's not convenient to them.
Remember that as far as your average end-user is concerned, they expect to have to mess around with their PC about as much as they expect to mess around with their toaster. And "mess around" in this context means "do anything which isn't directly related to the job they're paid to do". You can moan about this all you like (and on /., lots of people will moan at great volume) but at the end of the day the whole fscking point of IT is to provide and manage IT. Not to delegate that onto end users.
No, that may or may not work depending on privileges that they have, it requires them to jump through hoops and frankly, unless your PCs are very tightly managed from the day they're built onwards, may or may not work.
Far better to take advantage of the remote control features that any modern OS offers.
It's also what you did on RISC OS, on the Amiga... in fact, on virtually every other major desktop computing platform I can think of.
As a new user, if I go to control panel and know I want to do something with programs,
Really? All the new users I've ever worked with think that the logical thing to do with a program you don't want any more is to delete it, same as you might delete a file.
You'd be amazed how many Windows users have deleted the icon from their desktop (and maybe even their start menu) and consider the application is therefore gone.
OT, but how the hell do you kill yourself with pastry?
OK, where to start... I'll leave aside the wording of your email, seeing as most people will glaze over as soon as they see it's from IT in the first place.
1. Your email is more than 5 lines long. IME, most people don't read beyond the first few lines so there's no point in bothering with any more than that.
2. You expect your end users to jump through hoops for nobody's benefit but your own. Wake on LAN should deal with PCs that are turned off, if they're not turned off I leave setting up a remote reboot script to your imagination.
3. Rewritten email:
"We will be applying updates to your PC, part of which will involve remotely rebooting your system at 20:00 tonight. Please notify us if this is inconvenient".
It can work. They've proven it before.
Quite the reverse, actually. They've proven it can't work before and cancelled such a programme.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#Jobs_ends_the_official_program
If we're lucky.
We've got speed cameras in the UK. Thousands of the damn things, in fact.
They're almost universally despised, being widely perceived as both a cash cow and a substitute for real policing.
The problem with any serious effort to get rid of them is that the authorities with the data to provide useful statistics (like "how much good have these things actually done?") are the same authorities who are making money out of them. Which means that they've been very careful not to publicise any potentially damaging statistics - so the only real argument against them is "I don't like being caught speeding" - not an argument that's going to get anyone very far.
In the mean time, I simply have utterly given up, I think we would need 3 or 4 generation of basic scientific education from the 1st grade onward to change the trend. The way it is now, people as a whole will never be able to recognize homeopathy for the pathetic scam it is. Even if you rub their nose in it.
One word for you: Religion.
So exactly the same problem they'd face with Open Source, then ?
Pretty much, yes. Certainly GCC needs a functioning C 90 compiler to bootstrap itself. I'd be surprised if there exists a compiler in common use today for which something similar isn't true.
software does eventually get EOLed by the vendor and needs to be replaced if you want any support for it.
The number of systems still running software that was EOL'd some time ago should give you some clue as to how important vendor support is for many people.
They might have done, but I have serious doubts that there exists any modern C compiler can easily be built without a pre-existing compiler of some sort to bootstrap it.
What makes you think they haven't got a contract with Microsoft for access to the source code ?
Even if they do, unless they compile the source code themselves with a compiler they know they can trust there's no certainty over what is running.
Ken Thompson pointed that one out. What a lot of people don't mention is the date at the top - he pointed that one out in 1984 .