I have some excellent sandwich bars and cafes near me which serve good food, cheap (by UK standards) and relatively fast.
However they tend to be the smaller independent operators which are generally only known to the people who live and work in the area. I can't think of a chain which manages all three.
Tesco is a supermarket, it has thousands of product lines at various levels of profitability. As long as any given product line turns areasonable profit, it doesn't much matter if it's huge or not.
Microsoft is a software company. It has a handful of product lines, of which only two are profitable. One of those is Office.
There's plenty of middle ground - people who've done exactly this then had to call that geeky kid up the street when their PC started crawling, only to get a telling off for installing every shitty thing they could find online.
That's the target market, and I reckon it's plenty big enough - particularly for a product where someone else has gone to the expense of developing it (after all, it's
It's an existing bunch of packages, possibly rebranded (that doesn't seem to be very clear yet) and sold at a tenth the price. The reception is likely to be exactly the same as it is to all Tesco's other "value"-branded products: cheap, does the job, not as pretty or as functional as the competition but at a tenth the price who's complaining? Plenty will take up the offer and not complain, particularly as each successive version of office becomes harder to pirate.
You know, before Microsoft gained an effective monopoly in office suites, there were plenty of others. WordPerfect office suite, Lotus SmartSuite. Why can't there be again?
How many of Intel's customers are end users? Rough guess?
I'd say about 2%. The other 98% are OEMs like HP, Lenovo, Dell et al.
How many OEMs give a fsck about supporting anything other than Windows on desktop hardware? Server hardware, now that's a different kettle of fish. But server hardware tends to be rather more conservative and rather less likely to ship with Intel's latest, greatest, flakiest bit of hardware.
I will buy hardware that has an open support commitment and prove those vendors right in there move.
Off you go then. You go out and buy your PC which can run with:
- Fully open-sourced wireless network drivers which support all features of the hardware. - Fully open-sourced graphics drivers which support all features of the hardware.
When you've done that, come back and tell us what you bought.
It is not when the language is interpreted and the security issue under discussion comes from the interpreter itself rather than code which was passed to it. An issue which exists in the interpreter which renders it insecure in a particular set of circumstances is an issue with the interpreter, not the whole technology. Otherwise you could extrapolate the exact same argument to the point where you say that an OS which is capable of executing arbitary code is at fault. That may be, but until everyone is using TCPA compliant systems, an operating system which doesn't is going to be fairly useless.
You cannot just rely on the guy who wrote the app to know enough about programming.....to not leak a shitload of memory
Are we still talking about JavaScript here? How do you leak memory in an interpreted language which doesn't expect you to allocate your own memory and doesn't expect you to explicitly pass pointers everywhere in the first place?
The interpreter can have a memory leak, and malicious code may be able to use that to its advantage, but that is going beyond the laguage specifications and into specific bugs in the interpreter - how's that different from a bug in the OS?
or write arbitrary text in the HTML code.
There wouldn't be a lot of point in JavaScript if it couldn't generate arbitary HTML.
Granted, but the original context was "the best way to secure JavaScript is to remove it".
Anyone can write insecure code in any language - that's not the issue. The issue is "is JavaScript so fundamentally broken that you're better off without it?" - to which my answer would be "not in theory, but in practise that may sometimes be the case".
Not at all. The iPod supports USB mass storage, but you need something (either iTunes or gtkTunes) to update its database or it doesn't matter how much music you put on there, it will never play it.
Even worse, each station only plays about 10 songs, in a continuous loop; the only time you'll hear something new is when ClearChannel is working with the RIAA to brainwash us into buying some new album, and they have to update their loop with the one song they'll ever play on that album
To my mind, if someone has gone to the trouble to block adverts (and trouble it is - no browser does so by default), it implies that they have no interest whatsoever in them.
It therefore follows that they probably have even less interest in buying a specific product on the strength of its advert. So what's the point in even chasing such people?
I have; it came from trying to migrate a VM by creating a new VM on the target host, pausing the VM on the source host then copying the files which formed the disk image across. This is about all you can do with VMWare server as it doesn't support the "on-the-fly" moving offered by VMWare ESX.
Turns out that VMWare is able to emulate a few different fundamental pieces of hardware (in this case SCSI cards) and the new VM had been configured with a different emulated SCSI card to the original.
IANAL, but AIUI the consensus of opinion is that the judge is playing everything by the book, dotting every last "i" and crossing every last "t", in order to ensure that neither party can come back and say "Not fair!" when judgement day comes.
You see, the first batch to be produced will be of films which haven't previously been released on DVD - so you can't make a direct comparison (except possibly "it did so well in the cinema, how come nobody's buying the DVD? Must be the pirates....") and I really doubt there will be two side-by-side versions in the shops which are identical in every way except for the RFID chip.
medical costs in the USA are rising rapidly, with no end in sight.
Not so. As soon as the medical profession realises it must either find some way to compete or wind up doing little more than diagnosis and emergency work, it will do so.
At least, that's the theory. The years running up to that actually happening aren't much fun for anyone, though.
The argument is that some consumer watchdog organisation says "Don't buy this product, it's made from dead babies" (which of course it isn't).
${MANUFACTURER} isn't too happy with this report, so decides to sue the consumer watchdog.
All well and good so far. What doesn't make sense is why ${MANUFACTURER} should sue the consumer watchdog in a country other than the one where the watchdog is based - after all, the consumer watchdog is going to completely ignore the court.
My point is that were I the manufacturer, I'd be suing the consumer watchdog in the country it's based in.
1. I wrote to my MP regarding ID cards. The logic being presented at the time was that they would make life harder for criminals because the criminal's ID card would get them. My point was that criminals, by definition, aren't too bothered about the law - so they'll beg, borrow or steal a fake ID quite happily.
Broadly speaking, the response was "We know criminals don't obey the law. We're trying to find a solution to that one, anyone with any ideas is invited to write to us..."
2. The same MP sent me some propaganda from the government about ID cards. They had lumped together those who didn't reply with those in favour, so it read:
"12% were against. 88% were either in favour or showed no preference" - obviously spinning it to look like most of the country wants something.
To paraphrase from Douglas Adams, anyone who wants to be in power probably shouldn't be.
Slashdot Mirror
I have some excellent sandwich bars and cafes near me which serve good food, cheap (by UK standards) and relatively fast.
However they tend to be the smaller independent operators which are generally only known to the people who live and work in the area. I can't think of a chain which manages all three.
It's solid pig fat.
There are reasons people tend to live next to rivers, and oceans. They need something to pee into.
And something to drink out of, but we'll forget this basic physiological fact in order to make a cheap toilet gag.
It's more that it's fast, and it's food, and its fairly inexpensive.
Don't know about where you are, but here in the UK it fails all three of those tests in pretty much any reasonably sized town.
Tesco is a supermarket, it has thousands of product lines at various levels of profitability. As long as any given product line turns areasonable profit, it doesn't much matter if it's huge or not.
Microsoft is a software company. It has a handful of product lines, of which only two are profitable. One of those is Office.
And Safeway split from its US parent company many years before it was bought by Morrissions.
(Yes, I used to work there. Depressing, isn't it?)
There's plenty of middle ground - people who've done exactly this then had to call that geeky kid up the street when their PC started crawling, only to get a telling off for installing every shitty thing they could find online.
That's the target market, and I reckon it's plenty big enough - particularly for a product where someone else has gone to the expense of developing it (after all, it's
It's an existing bunch of packages, possibly rebranded (that doesn't seem to be very clear yet) and sold at a tenth the price. The reception is likely to be exactly the same as it is to all Tesco's other "value"-branded products: cheap, does the job, not as pretty or as functional as the competition but at a tenth the price who's complaining? Plenty will take up the offer and not complain, particularly as each successive version of office becomes harder to pirate.
You know, before Microsoft gained an effective monopoly in office suites, there were plenty of others. WordPerfect office suite, Lotus SmartSuite. Why can't there be again?
If you arent a large enough customer
How many of Intel's customers are end users? Rough guess?
I'd say about 2%. The other 98% are OEMs like HP, Lenovo, Dell et al.
How many OEMs give a fsck about supporting anything other than Windows on desktop hardware? Server hardware, now that's a different kettle of fish. But server hardware tends to be rather more conservative and rather less likely to ship with Intel's latest, greatest, flakiest bit of hardware.
I will buy hardware that has an open support commitment and prove those vendors right in there move.
Off you go then. You go out and buy your PC which can run with:
- Fully open-sourced wireless network drivers which support all features of the hardware.
- Fully open-sourced graphics drivers which support all features of the hardware.
When you've done that, come back and tell us what you bought.
That absolutely is the issue.
It is not when the language is interpreted and the security issue under discussion comes from the interpreter itself rather than code which was passed to it. An issue which exists in the interpreter which renders it insecure in a particular set of circumstances is an issue with the interpreter, not the whole technology. Otherwise you could extrapolate the exact same argument to the point where you say that an OS which is capable of executing arbitary code is at fault. That may be, but until everyone is using TCPA compliant systems, an operating system which doesn't is going to be fairly useless.
You cannot just rely on the guy who wrote the app to know enough about programming.....to not leak a shitload of memory
Are we still talking about JavaScript here? How do you leak memory in an interpreted language which doesn't expect you to allocate your own memory and doesn't expect you to explicitly pass pointers everywhere in the first place?
The interpreter can have a memory leak, and malicious code may be able to use that to its advantage, but that is going beyond the laguage specifications and into specific bugs in the interpreter - how's that different from a bug in the OS?
or write arbitrary text in the HTML code.
There wouldn't be a lot of point in JavaScript if it couldn't generate arbitary HTML.
Granted, but the original context was "the best way to secure JavaScript is to remove it".
Anyone can write insecure code in any language - that's not the issue. The issue is "is JavaScript so fundamentally broken that you're better off without it?" - to which my answer would be "not in theory, but in practise that may sometimes be the case".
Javascript per se is perfectly secure - in theory, there's pretty much nothing nasty you can do in it.
In theory.
However, it seems nobody's yet come up with an implementation which doesn't resemble chicken wire in terms of "number of holes".
Not at all. The iPod supports USB mass storage, but you need something (either iTunes or gtkTunes) to update its database or it doesn't matter how much music you put on there, it will never play it.
Even worse, each station only plays about 10 songs, in a continuous loop; the only time you'll hear something new is when ClearChannel is working with the RIAA to brainwash us into buying some new album, and they have to update their loop with the one song they'll ever play on that album
Sounds like GWR.
To my mind, if someone has gone to the trouble to block adverts (and trouble it is - no browser does so by default), it implies that they have no interest whatsoever in them.
It therefore follows that they probably have even less interest in buying a specific product on the strength of its advert. So what's the point in even chasing such people?
I have; it came from trying to migrate a VM by creating a new VM on the target host, pausing the VM on the source host then copying the files which formed the disk image across. This is about all you can do with VMWare server as it doesn't support the "on-the-fly" moving offered by VMWare ESX.
Turns out that VMWare is able to emulate a few different fundamental pieces of hardware (in this case SCSI cards) and the new VM had been configured with a different emulated SCSI card to the original.
I want to know which of these operating systems will run on my old ass laptop with a low end P4 in it
Really? I want to know which will do that AND run software appropriate to my needs with minimal hassle. But hey, each to their own.
I think many "typical Linux users" are in the same boat: not too interested in playing games, want good performance for normal 2D and video.
But the market is more focussed on gaming than on this,
Or you could use Xgl....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xgl
IANAL, but AIUI the consensus of opinion is that the judge is playing everything by the book, dotting every last "i" and crossing every last "t", in order to ensure that neither party can come back and say "Not fair!" when judgement day comes.
You see, the first batch to be produced will be of films which haven't previously been released on DVD - so you can't make a direct comparison (except possibly "it did so well in the cinema, how come nobody's buying the DVD? Must be the pirates....") and I really doubt there will be two side-by-side versions in the shops which are identical in every way except for the RFID chip.
medical costs in the USA are rising rapidly, with no end in sight.
Not so. As soon as the medical profession realises it must either find some way to compete or wind up doing little more than diagnosis and emergency work, it will do so.
At least, that's the theory. The years running up to that actually happening aren't much fun for anyone, though.
The argument is that some consumer watchdog organisation says "Don't buy this product, it's made from dead babies" (which of course it isn't).
${MANUFACTURER} isn't too happy with this report, so decides to sue the consumer watchdog.
All well and good so far. What doesn't make sense is why ${MANUFACTURER} should sue the consumer watchdog in a country other than the one where the watchdog is based - after all, the consumer watchdog is going to completely ignore the court.
My point is that were I the manufacturer, I'd be suing the consumer watchdog in the country it's based in.
Two true stories for you:
1. I wrote to my MP regarding ID cards. The logic being presented at the time was that they would make life harder for criminals because the criminal's ID card would get them. My point was that criminals, by definition, aren't too bothered about the law - so they'll beg, borrow or steal a fake ID quite happily.
Broadly speaking, the response was "We know criminals don't obey the law. We're trying to find a solution to that one, anyone with any ideas is invited to write to us..."
2. The same MP sent me some propaganda from the government about ID cards. They had lumped together those who didn't reply with those in favour, so it read:
"12% were against. 88% were either in favour or showed no preference" - obviously spinning it to look like most of the country wants something.
To paraphrase from Douglas Adams, anyone who wants to be in power probably shouldn't be.
Yes, we have a television show which has been known to occasionally document such abuses. It's called "You've been Framed".