My understanding, having glanced at TFA and knowing someone who uses wifi in Starbucks, is that Starbucks doesn't pay them for the wifi service. You get an account with T-Mobile to use their service, which is based in Starbucks locations. T-Mobile probably pays Starbucks for the privilege.
The contract with T-Mobile is set to expire soon, so Starbucks has now gotten a better deal with AT&T to provide free service for Starbucks-card-holding customers, and better rates for irregular ones. This is all fine and dandy, but the deal is that until the AT&T roll-out is complete, the existing T-Mobile deal is to stand. However, it appears that Starbucks has somehow disabled the authentication for the T-Mobile access points, so that all their locations can have free wifi.
I would add to this list "volume". Apple, moreso than most other computer companies, tries to keep their product line relatively narrow, with only a few configurations for any given platform. This means whoever builds their chips needs to deliver on volume in a big way, and it's possible, if not probable, that AMD wasn't prepared to give them the numbers they needed.
There's a cultural anthropology dissertation in there somewhere, to the effect that the past ten years of the War on Terrorism and government expansionism have equated "government rules" with "good" and "no rules/breaking the rules" with "bad". The longing for the sort of freedom that Kerouac wrote about is now gone. Everything is Law and Order vs Evil, Bad, and Wrong. In that respect it's kind of reminiscent of early D&D, where Law was equated with Good and Chaos with Evil.
I predict the game will also focus less on adventuring, exploring, and other "low-fantasy" concepts and more on questing and big epic conflicts of civilized humans/humanoid races vs. orcs, demons, and other monsters.
Which is a pity, because a good adventure in the wilderness is worth a hundred epic battles to save the world, which are invariably copies of each other.
Your parent poster should have said, "Support your local establishment that provides friendly, efficient, and knowledgeable service."
"Locally-owned" does not always mean "good." Sometimes it does, but more often than not it doesn't, and that's why chains succeed. You might not think much of McDonald's, but there's a reason people went there instead of diners and hamburger stands: McD's has always had high standards for customer service and cleanliness.
The same is true of bookstores. I remember the last time I went into an independent new book store (as opposed to used-book stores, which are always independent). They had no inventory system to speak of, and the girl behind the counter, who couldn't have been older than 16, didn't know where anything was or whether they had anything I was looking for. The shelves weren't kept in any order I could recognize, and most of the sections were mislabeled.
So what you're saying is, you concede that people can die as a result of second-hand smoke in places where it doesn't dissipate quickly. I.e., indoors in public establishments.
Basically, what it comes down to, is the idea that behavior that affects others can and should be regulated. Smoking is a perfect example, because it's been proven that second-hand smoke can kill people (Jack Ruby, to name one). You can make the case that it's a personal decision to smoke or not, and that's valid as far as it goes, but psychologists and economists alike have shown that people routinely ignore or deliberately underestimate the negative consequences of their own actions for others.
So people like you say, "Well, if that's the case, we'll let restaurant, bar, and nightclub owners decide for themselves whether to allow smoking, and let the market decide." But in practice, what happens is that no one bans smoking. There are about a dozen bars in my municipality of less than 50K people, but none of them are smoke free. The market consistently devalues the decisions of non-smokers to protect themselves, even though they are in the majority.
As a result I don't go to bars anymore. That hurts the economy, along with my love life, and that's bad.
There's a similar argument to made about handguns, but since there are a lot more variables at play the answer is a lot less clear. However, I will point out that if gun ownership was an effective protection against gun violence, gun-toting inner-city gangs would not be shooting and killing each other, along with the occasional bystander caught in the crossfire.
Both those lists are misleading, since the fine print on the bottom says that, in addition to money from PACs, any individual contribution from an employee of those companies gets counted.
You can't do it without either an identical or a random distribution of resources. The trick is that strategic depth derives from the equal viability of several strategic options, but most games rely on a Warhammer-type system where each side has specific weaknesses and specialties, and consequently only one good strategy.
I think if someone put half the effort that goes into some of these turn-based/tabletop WW2 sims into a realistic RTS, it would be fantastic.
A problem shared with most RTS games is that effective defense is almost impossible, in spite of the belief of Klausewitz (and others) that the defensive position is the stronger. Overwhelming defenders with hordes is a very poor strategy. Think of Thermopylae, Khe Sanh, or any place on the Western front in the first World War. Truly overwhelming firepower along with a lot of artillery and a demoralized opponent were necessary to gain even a few hundred yards.
I'll see it, and raise Waterloo, Marathon, El Alamein, Chancellorsville, both Syracuses, Ramillies, Austerlitz, Bosworth Field, etc etc etc. I'll concede that a tactical victory does not always win the war, but that's why the game makes a campaign of them, yes?
Also, those are all naval leaders, not ground commanders.
Seriously. Everything[1] Google does, they do well. Internet search, desktop search, usenet, picasa, Google Earth/Maps, browser applications like Docs and Gmail, all phenomenal successes.
OOo is a piece of crap. No, really. I do not think you could come up with a worse productivity suite without specifically designing it that way, and you certainly wouldn't have as much adoption.
OOo is a (bad) clone of Word, mixed in with XML-pedantry and a really bad case of the second-system effect (made all the worse because none of the people involved had anything to do with the first system, which is Word itself).
It, in a nutshell, shows the reason why getting free software onto the desktop has been so difficult: half the community is focused on feature-for-feature competitiveness and replication of the original product, and measures its success in market-share, and the other half of the community just hates MS software and tries to do the exact opposite, under the guise of "doing it right the first time." As a result we get something that actually manages to be slower than its MS equivalent in every respect, because on top of all the original features we copied without trying much in the way of procedural abstraction or optimization, we have even more stupid ideas bolted on, like using compressed XML files for the native data format, questionable default parameters that someone decided are "more correct", and the occasional bizarre bug.
The same sort of thing is starting to happen to Firefox, too. It started out just trying to be fast, but then a number of advocates got on board and decided that more people should use it, and in order to get them to do that the browser should try to be all things to all people. Now Firefox is getting bigger, more bloated, and slower, and in a few years will just be another bald, fat, middle-aged, useless browser program that got passed by.
All this is a long way of saying that Google shouldn't touch OOo with a ten-foot pole. It goes against everything they stand for: simplicity, usability, obviousness.
More importantly, if you covered your tracks properly, you wouldn't need an excuse at all. Set up a fake persona to submit it, and you can even have your real self speak out against this sort of behavior.
That seems like it would lead to long-drawn out games where one side, and then the other, manage to grab temporary advantage, only to be pushed back to a state of near-equilibrium. Even good tactical thinking isn't really rewarded, as a stunning tactical victory can't be leveraged into anything other than a fleeting advantage.
I haven't played the game, FWIW, but that's what I imagine a game with those constraints would be like.
No marketing or sales executive will ever countenance the adding of "spare" sectors to a disk. If there are 100 billion physical sectors, then by God it's going to say so on the sales info.
In order to do wear leveling you have to have additional metadata, which will take up additional space on disk. With SSD you pay a premium per byte over a magnetic disk. Do you really want a file system that's not going to make the best use of the space you just bought for an arm and a leg?
I disagree that these disks should be used as a write cache. Frequent, incremental modifications to files is exactly what you DON'T want to use flash/SSD for, since it will wear out larger disk "blocks" faster than regular hard-disk writing. If you're not going to take advantage of HDD technology's superior write lifetime, you might as well not have one at all.
I'm not talking about day trading, I'm talking about buying for long-term. Just because something is a long-term purchase doesn't mean you don't want to try to get a better price for it. If I bought a stock that I thought was a good purchase at $18 I wouldn't regret that purchase just because it went down to $8 and stayed there a while; I would, however, be somewhat annoyed that I could have bought a lot more had I waited.
The US is in a recession. Generally, that means stock prices are going down. That means that it's a good time to buy, even if all the day traders are losing their shirts. 1999, when the market was strong and everybody was happy, was a lousy time to buy stocks.
Put it this way: Warren Buffet is richer than you. Warren Buffet does it this way. Case closed.
Here's something I've never understood. Alice prepares a one-time pad and sends it along using this quantum dealie. Eve intercepts it. Now supposedly this thing changes every time someone observes it, but could Eve just generate a new one based on the data she acquired? Alice created one 'from scratch', why can't Eve?
Not necessarily, if you want to maximize your profitability you can time your share purchase precisely. The best way to do this is to buy strong companies during a recession, but even once you take that into account, if you're buying 500 shares, saving 1 or 2 percent can be a big deal. Obviously that's not 1 or 2 percent you can plan on taking to the bank, but if you can get it for the lower price, you should.
If you can install it to a system directory without being root or explicit access escalation (i.e., a password prompt), then that behavior is insecure and should be changed.
If you can't, it could still install to someplace like ~/bin, but if that's in your path at all, it should be at the end so as not to accidentally invoke it if it shares a name with a common executable (such as ls).
In summary: double-click installation of packages is not in itself a security flaw, but it may expose already-existing security conditions.
... do what job exactly? Enable people to distribute binaries with the execute bit on? Even if that's the case, as with tars they have to be willfully opened twice in order to do damage.
The only problem with 'free' competition among fiber ISPs is that municipal fiber costs a lot of money to put down, and until you do your network is worthless. That's a lot of capital to invest, making it exceptionally difficult to break into the market. The only way to make it work would be for someone like MS to subsidize their fiber branch with their other profitable branches so they can get a foot in the door, but that in itself is anti-competitive in the other direction.
Also, since all the telecom companies are against net neutrality, it would surprise me if they didn't act in collusion even when 'competing.'
I disagree, having to click in the goddamn "What do you want to do with this file?" dialog every damn time is one of the reasons I hate Windows.
On my Mac, I can option-click any link and it will download the target to my chosen downloads folder; there is also contextual (right-click) menu that gives the option "Download link to Downloads folder" when you click a link so you don't have to be disturbed by those annoying dialogs boxes.
The real issues are 1) there is no way to stop all javascript with a keystroke in case of bombing (I would like to see this on a Mac too, actually) and 2) Windows can run files downloaded directly from the internet.
With Unix, that doesn't happen, because downloaded files (ought to) have their mode masked to zero the execute bit. Executables can be transferred inside tar or dmg files, but then there's an added step that must be gone through to run it.
And fixing issue 2) should include.hta's,.bat's, etc etc etc in addition to.exe's.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding, having glanced at TFA and knowing someone who uses wifi in Starbucks, is that Starbucks doesn't pay them for the wifi service. You get an account with T-Mobile to use their service, which is based in Starbucks locations. T-Mobile probably pays Starbucks for the privilege.
The contract with T-Mobile is set to expire soon, so Starbucks has now gotten a better deal with AT&T to provide free service for Starbucks-card-holding customers, and better rates for irregular ones. This is all fine and dandy, but the deal is that until the AT&T roll-out is complete, the existing T-Mobile deal is to stand. However, it appears that Starbucks has somehow disabled the authentication for the T-Mobile access points, so that all their locations can have free wifi.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, though.
I would add to this list "volume". Apple, moreso than most other computer companies, tries to keep their product line relatively narrow, with only a few configurations for any given platform. This means whoever builds their chips needs to deliver on volume in a big way, and it's possible, if not probable, that AMD wasn't prepared to give them the numbers they needed.
There's a cultural anthropology dissertation in there somewhere, to the effect that the past ten years of the War on Terrorism and government expansionism have equated "government rules" with "good" and "no rules/breaking the rules" with "bad". The longing for the sort of freedom that Kerouac wrote about is now gone. Everything is Law and Order vs Evil, Bad, and Wrong. In that respect it's kind of reminiscent of early D&D, where Law was equated with Good and Chaos with Evil.
I predict the game will also focus less on adventuring, exploring, and other "low-fantasy" concepts and more on questing and big epic conflicts of civilized humans/humanoid races vs. orcs, demons, and other monsters.
Which is a pity, because a good adventure in the wilderness is worth a hundred epic battles to save the world, which are invariably copies of each other.
Your parent poster should have said, "Support your local establishment that provides friendly, efficient, and knowledgeable service."
"Locally-owned" does not always mean "good." Sometimes it does, but more often than not it doesn't, and that's why chains succeed. You might not think much of McDonald's, but there's a reason people went there instead of diners and hamburger stands: McD's has always had high standards for customer service and cleanliness.
The same is true of bookstores. I remember the last time I went into an independent new book store (as opposed to used-book stores, which are always independent). They had no inventory system to speak of, and the girl behind the counter, who couldn't have been older than 16, didn't know where anything was or whether they had anything I was looking for. The shelves weren't kept in any order I could recognize, and most of the sections were mislabeled.
No thanks, I'd rather go to Borders or BN.
So what you're saying is, you concede that people can die as a result of second-hand smoke in places where it doesn't dissipate quickly. I.e., indoors in public establishments.
Which is where smoking is being banned.
Yes, but it's a long story.
Basically, what it comes down to, is the idea that behavior that affects others can and should be regulated. Smoking is a perfect example, because it's been proven that second-hand smoke can kill people (Jack Ruby, to name one). You can make the case that it's a personal decision to smoke or not, and that's valid as far as it goes, but psychologists and economists alike have shown that people routinely ignore or deliberately underestimate the negative consequences of their own actions for others.
So people like you say, "Well, if that's the case, we'll let restaurant, bar, and nightclub owners decide for themselves whether to allow smoking, and let the market decide." But in practice, what happens is that no one bans smoking. There are about a dozen bars in my municipality of less than 50K people, but none of them are smoke free. The market consistently devalues the decisions of non-smokers to protect themselves, even though they are in the majority.
As a result I don't go to bars anymore. That hurts the economy, along with my love life, and that's bad.
There's a similar argument to made about handguns, but since there are a lot more variables at play the answer is a lot less clear. However, I will point out that if gun ownership was an effective protection against gun violence, gun-toting inner-city gangs would not be shooting and killing each other, along with the occasional bystander caught in the crossfire.
Both those lists are misleading, since the fine print on the bottom says that, in addition to money from PACs, any individual contribution from an employee of those companies gets counted.
A better comparison is here:
McCain
Obama
One of the most successful computers in history, the VAX, died out long before it's address space got full.
I think what will kill x86 is a combination of rising energy costs and the growth of platform and architecture agnostic open source apps.
You can't do it without either an identical or a random distribution of resources. The trick is that strategic depth derives from the equal viability of several strategic options, but most games rely on a Warhammer-type system where each side has specific weaknesses and specialties, and consequently only one good strategy.
I think if someone put half the effort that goes into some of these turn-based/tabletop WW2 sims into a realistic RTS, it would be fantastic.
A problem shared with most RTS games is that effective defense is almost impossible, in spite of the belief of Klausewitz (and others) that the defensive position is the stronger. Overwhelming defenders with hordes is a very poor strategy. Think of Thermopylae, Khe Sanh, or any place on the Western front in the first World War. Truly overwhelming firepower along with a lot of artillery and a demoralized opponent were necessary to gain even a few hundred yards.
I'll see it, and raise Waterloo, Marathon, El Alamein, Chancellorsville, both Syracuses, Ramillies, Austerlitz, Bosworth Field, etc etc etc. I'll concede that a tactical victory does not always win the war, but that's why the game makes a campaign of them, yes?
Also, those are all naval leaders, not ground commanders.
Seriously. Everything[1] Google does, they do well. Internet search, desktop search, usenet, picasa, Google Earth/Maps, browser applications like Docs and Gmail, all phenomenal successes.
OOo is a piece of crap. No, really. I do not think you could come up with a worse productivity suite without specifically designing it that way, and you certainly wouldn't have as much adoption.
OOo is a (bad) clone of Word, mixed in with XML-pedantry and a really bad case of the second-system effect (made all the worse because none of the people involved had anything to do with the first system, which is Word itself).
It, in a nutshell, shows the reason why getting free software onto the desktop has been so difficult: half the community is focused on feature-for-feature competitiveness and replication of the original product, and measures its success in market-share, and the other half of the community just hates MS software and tries to do the exact opposite, under the guise of "doing it right the first time." As a result we get something that actually manages to be slower than its MS equivalent in every respect, because on top of all the original features we copied without trying much in the way of procedural abstraction or optimization, we have even more stupid ideas bolted on, like using compressed XML files for the native data format, questionable default parameters that someone decided are "more correct", and the occasional bizarre bug.
The same sort of thing is starting to happen to Firefox, too. It started out just trying to be fast, but then a number of advocates got on board and decided that more people should use it, and in order to get them to do that the browser should try to be all things to all people. Now Firefox is getting bigger, more bloated, and slower, and in a few years will just be another bald, fat, middle-aged, useless browser program that got passed by.
All this is a long way of saying that Google shouldn't touch OOo with a ten-foot pole. It goes against everything they stand for: simplicity, usability, obviousness.
[1]: Except Orkut. Sorry.
More importantly, if you covered your tracks properly, you wouldn't need an excuse at all. Set up a fake persona to submit it, and you can even have your real self speak out against this sort of behavior.
I just have no capital to invest. It takes money to make money!
That seems like it would lead to long-drawn out games where one side, and then the other, manage to grab temporary advantage, only to be pushed back to a state of near-equilibrium. Even good tactical thinking isn't really rewarded, as a stunning tactical victory can't be leveraged into anything other than a fleeting advantage.
I haven't played the game, FWIW, but that's what I imagine a game with those constraints would be like.
No marketing or sales executive will ever countenance the adding of "spare" sectors to a disk. If there are 100 billion physical sectors, then by God it's going to say so on the sales info.
In order to do wear leveling you have to have additional metadata, which will take up additional space on disk. With SSD you pay a premium per byte over a magnetic disk. Do you really want a file system that's not going to make the best use of the space you just bought for an arm and a leg?
I disagree that these disks should be used as a write cache. Frequent, incremental modifications to files is exactly what you DON'T want to use flash/SSD for, since it will wear out larger disk "blocks" faster than regular hard-disk writing. If you're not going to take advantage of HDD technology's superior write lifetime, you might as well not have one at all.
I'm not talking about day trading, I'm talking about buying for long-term. Just because something is a long-term purchase doesn't mean you don't want to try to get a better price for it. If I bought a stock that I thought was a good purchase at $18 I wouldn't regret that purchase just because it went down to $8 and stayed there a while; I would, however, be somewhat annoyed that I could have bought a lot more had I waited.
The US is in a recession. Generally, that means stock prices are going down. That means that it's a good time to buy, even if all the day traders are losing their shirts. 1999, when the market was strong and everybody was happy, was a lousy time to buy stocks.
Put it this way: Warren Buffet is richer than you. Warren Buffet does it this way. Case closed.
Here's something I've never understood. Alice prepares a one-time pad and sends it along using this quantum dealie. Eve intercepts it. Now supposedly this thing changes every time someone observes it, but could Eve just generate a new one based on the data she acquired? Alice created one 'from scratch', why can't Eve?
Not necessarily, if you want to maximize your profitability you can time your share purchase precisely. The best way to do this is to buy strong companies during a recession, but even once you take that into account, if you're buying 500 shares, saving 1 or 2 percent can be a big deal. Obviously that's not 1 or 2 percent you can plan on taking to the bank, but if you can get it for the lower price, you should.
I'll have to look into that. The website doesn't mention anything about it, only the ability to blacklist/whitelist different sites.
If you can install it to a system directory without being root or explicit access escalation (i.e., a password prompt), then that behavior is insecure and should be changed.
If you can't, it could still install to someplace like ~/bin, but if that's in your path at all, it should be at the end so as not to accidentally invoke it if it shares a name with a common executable (such as ls).
In summary: double-click installation of packages is not in itself a security flaw, but it may expose already-existing security conditions.
... do what job exactly? Enable people to distribute binaries with the execute bit on? Even if that's the case, as with tars they have to be willfully opened twice in order to do damage.
The only problem with 'free' competition among fiber ISPs is that municipal fiber costs a lot of money to put down, and until you do your network is worthless. That's a lot of capital to invest, making it exceptionally difficult to break into the market. The only way to make it work would be for someone like MS to subsidize their fiber branch with their other profitable branches so they can get a foot in the door, but that in itself is anti-competitive in the other direction.
Also, since all the telecom companies are against net neutrality, it would surprise me if they didn't act in collusion even when 'competing.'
I disagree, having to click in the goddamn "What do you want to do with this file?" dialog every damn time is one of the reasons I hate Windows.
.hta's, .bat's, etc etc etc in addition to .exe's.
On my Mac, I can option-click any link and it will download the target to my chosen downloads folder; there is also contextual (right-click) menu that gives the option "Download link to Downloads folder" when you click a link so you don't have to be disturbed by those annoying dialogs boxes.
The real issues are 1) there is no way to stop all javascript with a keystroke in case of bombing (I would like to see this on a Mac too, actually) and 2) Windows can run files downloaded directly from the internet.
With Unix, that doesn't happen, because downloaded files (ought to) have their mode masked to zero the execute bit. Executables can be transferred inside tar or dmg files, but then there's an added step that must be gone through to run it.
And fixing issue 2) should include