If his copy got turned off by mistake, he will be QUITE unhappy to pay again for something that he already owns. In some circles this is called "extortion" if done intentionally. This will breed a LOT of ill will.
You almost seem to assume that this will happen. Might I ask whence your confidence comes? Sure, it is Microsoft and all, but even so, wouldn't this be something that should only happen extraordinarily rarely?
(Gnucash can't replace that until it learns how to handle inventory tracking)
I don't see the problem. It's not as if code on a USB stick is run automatically when you plug it in. The article you linked to involved putting a malicious executable on a USB stick and relied on a user picking the stick up and running the executing the file manually.
Both Solaris 10's ZFS (which is coming to Linux) and Plan9's default FS (fossil) can already do that, though (and I wouldn't be surprised if Reiser4 can too, but I don't know). I was just impressed that Microsoft pulled it off.;)
Actually, there was one thing that I was quite impressed with in the Vista beta; it's moderately hidden in the file/directory property window, but there's actually a tab that allows you to open an old version of a directory and view the files that were in it in that older version. It also appeared to automatically save "checkpoints" regularly.
I was really wondering exactly how they had implemented that. It looked rather ugly, since it (by looking at the path) appeared to go to a specially named SMB share at localhost (and I'm not very surprised either -- Microsoft doing something in an ugly manner? No way!), but even so, it definitely was there. I've been looking for details about it, but found none. Does anyone know how it is implemented?
I read your question in the original submission article as well, and I still don't understand it (in fact, I was surprised that it was featured and answered). Why would you be so concerned with something so immaterial as the curly brackets? Maybe I'm stupid, but I just don't see the problem.
I'll give my simple answer: Why ever should he have? In which possible way would using an XML dialect have made anything about CSS better? In contrast, not using XML makes the CSS syntax much terser than it would have been with XML.
Indeed. At least they've realized that they can't handle it -- that's why they ask each one of us to check for duplicates instead of doing the filtering themselves before passing them to poor Håkon.
1. What would you most like to change with CSS? That is, if you could go back in time and change one thing in the spec and have it reflected today, what would be the most important thing?
2. If you were allowed (perhaps by court order, which wouldn't be unthinkable) to force Microsoft to do one (1) change in Internet Explorer, what would that be?
As a bonus question: What do you think of Slashdot's CSS?;)
1. What would you most like to change with CSS? That is, if you could go back in time and change one thing in the spec and have it reflected today, what would be the most important thing?
2. If you were allowed (perhaps by court order, which wouldn't be unthinkable) to force Microsoft to do one (1) change in Internet Explorer, what would that be?
That's very interesting. FYI, I looked through the kernel sources a bit, and there is an equivalent way to do it through sysfs (might be interesting, since/proc/scsi is on its to deprecation). To delete a device, do e.g. "echo anything >/sys/block/sda/device/delete", and to rescan a host, do "echo channel id lun >/sys/class/scsi_host/host0/scan" (where channel, id and lun are 0 0 0 for S-ATA devices, but a dash can be used as wildcard as well).
Unfortunately, I don't have any disks to try it on right now, since they are all in active use.
Looking through the ChangeLog, I still see no S-ATA hotplug. I've been waiting more or less since the day S-ATA support was introduced in Linux to be able to add new drives without rebooting, and I just cannot understand how such a thing can take so long. I mean, I'm sure that the kernel developers have priorities and stuff, but I would think that adding S-ATA hotplug ought to be simple and important enough not to take more than a year to even get started...? I don't mean it as a complaint, I just find it really weird. Is it just much harder than I think, or is there no particular reason for it not having been done?
Here we finally see the big move happening that's the real mark between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0!
Are you referring to the site naming, by any chance? "Flickr", "Zooomr", "Tabblo"... call me backwards striving, but if this is the hallmark of Web 2.0, I'd rather stay with Web 1.0.
It's not interesting at all, only perfectly as it should be. RFC 2821 explicitly says to leave all headers be, exactly as they are. From section 3.7:
As discussed in section 2.4.1, a relay SMTP has no need to inspect or act upon the headers or body of the message data and MUST NOT do so except to add its own "Received:" header (section 4.4) and, optionally, to attempt to detect looping in the mail system (see section 6.2).
In other words, an SMTP server shouldn't even look at the headers, even less modify then, be they X-* or not. (The funny thing is that section 2.4.1 doesn't seem to exist, though...)
If they came up with a great file format I see no reason why MS would be a problem.
Do you really not? I don't want to be against Microsoft just by principal, but it's not as if they don't have a history of locking formats up in ways that lead to Windows lock-in (whether or not that is the purpose). Sure, WMP might be a really swell format with liberal licensing and all, but considering such things as the other formats in the Windows Media family, the new Office XML formats, the VFAT filesystem, etc., I would require extensive proof before I were to trust it.
it really does make a difference if the readers can understand what's being written.
Ramen to that. Of course, it doesn't just apply to the editors here on Slashdot, but to many posters as well (needless to say, though, the editors should be expected to know better English than the posters). I don't know if it's just me, but it has definitely made me enter a different reading mode when reading on Slashdot than on most sites out there, where I just scan for keywords in each sentence, rather than looking at the precise sentence construction. Needless to say, one potentially misses a lot of information this way, but it's a hopeless quest to try to read Slashdot precisely without stumbling a minute on every other sentence.
Well, I'm sure they'd be able to patent "accelerometers in wireless video game controllers", or "accelerometers in video game controllers made 2006 or later". I wouldn't be too surprised about them actually patenting "accelerometers in video game controllers" straight away -- after all, if Microsoft could patent double clicking, I don't see the problem...
As for me, I simply think that the compile times are acceptable for what I get out of it, but it definitely is a bother. In particular, it is quite a bit annoying when one is working on something, finds that one needs a certain program to continue or needs to recompile a package with different USE flags, and then has to wait for half an hour while it compiles. While most smaller packages might only take a few minutes, there aren't too few occassions when you find yourself without something like BIND, SBCL, gcc without some use flag (I've experienced FORTRAN and Java), or similar. Especially annoying when you find yourself on a 500 MHz box or slower.
I haven't ever experienced that being a problem in any RPM based distro I've tried (only Red Hat and Fedora, but nonetheless). I haven't tried upgrading e.g. from X.org 6.9 to 7.0 with yum, so I don't know if that would be a problem, but upgrading glibc or X.org between minor versions aren't a problem at all. I don't quite understand why you think that would be a problem.
OTOH, I've heard that people still reinstall FC when each new version is released. If true, that's pathetic.
Indeed, this is me greatest gripe with Fedora Core these days, and one of the primary reasons why I wouldn't ever switch from Gentoo to it. It does indeed have an upgrade functionality to allow upgrading between distro versions, but I've had some bad experiences when using it. For example, when I tried upgrading an FC2 system to FC3 using that, there were lots of major things it never upgraded, such as from a static/dev to udev, it never installed SELinux and I wonder if it didn't even skip HAL (I guess it should have, considering it didn't install udev...), which was my main reason to upgrade that system to FC3. Since then, I've never trusted it. I've never had those kinds of problems with Gentoo, and from what I've heard, Ubuntu doesn't have any problems with it either.
On the other, one of my absolute favorites about portage is that I can tell it to apply patches to programs before having it compile them. Does anyone know if there are provisions in dpkg/apt to do such things as easily? If so, I just might switch to Debian or Ubuntu.
dependencies are worked out and all is downloaded, compiled and installed for you.
You know it's the same thing with yum, right? Except that the packages are pre-compiled, that is, so you don't have to wait half an hour to install anything moderately large like PHP or half a day for something like GNOME, Xorg or Mozilla. Don't get me wrong, I use Gentoo myself, but automatic installation isn't exactly exclusive to it, and it's not as if binary packages only have disadvantages.
That would apply to much of current technology anyway. The time is pretty much over when you could use a hard drive while it was open. The last hard drives larger than 20 GB or so that I've opened have completely broke more or less by just opening the lid for a while and closing it again, because so much as a speck of dust on the platter will result in a head crash.
Likewise, you can't really hope to expose the "components" of a microchip and expect it to work afterwards, now can you?
The GNOME project always keeps reiterating how much they work to make GNOME accessible. For example, see the GNOME Accessibility Project. I'm not disabled and don't know anything at all about these technologies, so I can't verify their claims, though. Does anyone know how it compares with Windows/MS Office?
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds like a serious security flaw in Windows, doesn't it? Does anyone have more details?
I don't see the problem. It's not as if code on a USB stick is run automatically when you plug it in. The article you linked to involved putting a malicious executable on a USB stick and relied on a user picking the stick up and running the executing the file manually.
Both Solaris 10's ZFS (which is coming to Linux) and Plan9's default FS (fossil) can already do that, though (and I wouldn't be surprised if Reiser4 can too, but I don't know). I was just impressed that Microsoft pulled it off. ;)
I was really wondering exactly how they had implemented that. It looked rather ugly, since it (by looking at the path) appeared to go to a specially named SMB share at localhost (and I'm not very surprised either -- Microsoft doing something in an ugly manner? No way!), but even so, it definitely was there. I've been looking for details about it, but found none. Does anyone know how it is implemented?
I read your question in the original submission article as well, and I still don't understand it (in fact, I was surprised that it was featured and answered). Why would you be so concerned with something so immaterial as the curly brackets? Maybe I'm stupid, but I just don't see the problem.
I'll give my simple answer: Why ever should he have? In which possible way would using an XML dialect have made anything about CSS better? In contrast, not using XML makes the CSS syntax much terser than it would have been with XML.
Indeed. At least they've realized that they can't handle it -- that's why they ask each one of us to check for duplicates instead of doing the filtering themselves before passing them to poor Håkon.
1. What would you most like to change with CSS? That is, if you could go back in time and change one thing in the spec and have it reflected today, what would be the most important thing?
2. If you were allowed (perhaps by court order, which wouldn't be unthinkable) to force Microsoft to do one (1) change in Internet Explorer, what would that be?
As a bonus question: What do you think of Slashdot's CSS? ;)
1. What would you most like to change with CSS? That is, if you could go back in time and change one thing in the spec and have it reflected today, what would be the most important thing? 2. If you were allowed (perhaps by court order, which wouldn't be unthinkable) to force Microsoft to do one (1) change in Internet Explorer, what would that be?
Unfortunately, I don't have any disks to try it on right now, since they are all in active use.
Looking through the ChangeLog, I still see no S-ATA hotplug. I've been waiting more or less since the day S-ATA support was introduced in Linux to be able to add new drives without rebooting, and I just cannot understand how such a thing can take so long. I mean, I'm sure that the kernel developers have priorities and stuff, but I would think that adding S-ATA hotplug ought to be simple and important enough not to take more than a year to even get started...? I don't mean it as a complaint, I just find it really weird. Is it just much harder than I think, or is there no particular reason for it not having been done?
Well, I'm sure they'd be able to patent "accelerometers in wireless video game controllers", or "accelerometers in video game controllers made 2006 or later". I wouldn't be too surprised about them actually patenting "accelerometers in video game controllers" straight away -- after all, if Microsoft could patent double clicking, I don't see the problem...
Sorry, but I'm afraid you will have to turn in your geek badge. One shalt never, I say thee, never throw away old computers.
As for me, I simply think that the compile times are acceptable for what I get out of it, but it definitely is a bother. In particular, it is quite a bit annoying when one is working on something, finds that one needs a certain program to continue or needs to recompile a package with different USE flags, and then has to wait for half an hour while it compiles. While most smaller packages might only take a few minutes, there aren't too few occassions when you find yourself without something like BIND, SBCL, gcc without some use flag (I've experienced FORTRAN and Java), or similar. Especially annoying when you find yourself on a 500 MHz box or slower.
On the other, one of my absolute favorites about portage is that I can tell it to apply patches to programs before having it compile them. Does anyone know if there are provisions in dpkg/apt to do such things as easily? If so, I just might switch to Debian or Ubuntu.
Likewise, you can't really hope to expose the "components" of a microchip and expect it to work afterwards, now can you?
The GNOME project always keeps reiterating how much they work to make GNOME accessible. For example, see the GNOME Accessibility Project. I'm not disabled and don't know anything at all about these technologies, so I can't verify their claims, though. Does anyone know how it compares with Windows/MS Office?