There are in fact different variants of English such as British English and American English. Another example is also European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese.
There are special cases of the English language like RFC documents and legal documents where certain words like "must", "should", etc have very specific meanings. That is necessary so that the documents will have the exact same meaning to different people. In contrast poetry has no such regulations. C++ is not poetry though, and it has strict standards so that all compilers (which are written to that standard) will be able to compile it.
Having a dialect of C++ which is not really C++ and cannot be compiled by the standard compilers breaks the standard.
It's not that I'm ignorant of the history, just that I'm not commenting on the history. I'm commenting specifically on the burning of Danish embassies and the attack on Danish websites.
In your points about the history, I do agree that a violent reaction of the Middle Eastern people to the violent colonial actions of American oil interests is justified. They are responding with violence to a violent action.
That's a separate issue from the violent reaction of attacking Danes in response to the non-violent action of printing cartoons. That reaction is not justified.
The problem is not simply when violence is the reaction, but when violence is the reaction to a non-violent action.
cartoon/speech -> cartoon/speech = no problem
cartoon/speech -> violence = problem
violence -> violence = no problem
For a specific example, suppose someone takes a bunch of hostages at their workplace (or whatever), kills one hostage and make some demands. Is it okay for the Police to bring in snipers (a violent response)? Sure, they can try to reason with the hostage taker too, but that may not work.
According to the actual paper (on page 5), the level of spyware in general has not dropped.
"While the absolute number of spyware-infected executables dropped substantially between the crawls,this is due primarily to a single site whose number of infected executables declined from 1,776 in May to 503 in October. Except for that site, the amount of spyware we found did not change appreciably over the five-month period between our two crawls."
Whether the competition made mistakes or not is irrelevant to this discussion. The fact is that MS has been convicted of illegally using its monopoly position.
Yeah... that'd be a great chance for MS to work on Microsoft Photo Editor!
Even if they did, you'd have to be some kind of masochist to want to use the Microsoft Word of photo editors. "It looks like you're trying to retouch a photo!"
The way I see it, this isn't Evil, but it's not Good either; it's somewhere in the middle. If Google didn't agree to censor results, China would just do it for them and China would probably do a much more diligent job. This way, there may be holes such as the Google cached page or whatever that will allow people in China to get around the restriction which they wouldn't be able to do if China just blocked Google at the Great Firewall. China isn't going to change its political system any time soon, but the more Western culture and business that manages to get into China the more it will (slowly) change.
The President does have latitude to intercept communications if someone calls Jihads R Us. If they follow the law they are still able to intercept communications, but they have to prove that it's justified and from what I've read it's not much more than a formality. The questions is why are they ignoring the law?
"Microsoft teams identified a few hundred undocumented Windows interfaces or parameters that were used by one or more of the Microsoft Middleware components."
Small, simple files take less code to parse than large, complex files. This is the equivalent to saying "it's easier to make a spelling mistake in a 2,000 word essay than in a 100 word summary."
My guess is that parsing MS formats really isn't that difficult or long for MS's algorithms, given how quickly the average office file loads.
If you have to guess about this, then you don't know what you're talking about. Compound OLE documents have a very complex structure and if you've ever done any coding then you'll know that adding complexity does increase the chances of making mistakes.
There are some other gross inaccuracies claimed by 'experts' and 'analysts' in this piece. "It is still built on the same legacy code, it is still written without adhering to secure coding practices, it is still thrown to the masses without adequate security testing." That's an assertion without supporting evidence. It doesn't have a factual basis.
Windows is built on legacy code from 9x and even compatability code from 3.1 (in addition to the NT code) -- it's a fact. It's also a fact that code was written before the security issues that plague the internet, so they were not designed with strong network security in mind. It's obvious that the security testing done is not adequate because if it was adequate we wouldn't be reading about security issues in Windows all the time. Canstant security issues does constitute empirical evidence of poor coding.
Sure we're talking about Windows specifically, but Windows isn't the only operating system around and comparing it to other operating systems is perfectly valid. To draw a parallel, if brand X automobiles announced that their 2006 models would start including anti-lock brakes everyone would say, "Every other car manufacturer has had those for years so this is nothing to get excited about." Claiming that, "It's new for brand X!" is meaningless.
Remember back in Win98 when you had to upgrade to IE4 to get the cool new active desktop and new looking window controls and the web-like single-click user interface throughout Windows? Have you ever entered a URL into Windows Explorer? It will open the web page directly inside Windows Explorer. Plus, shlwapi.dll which is now a core Windows system dll is updated by Internet Explorer.
How is IE not integrated?!
Perhaps no two browsers render the same HTML the same way, but all of them can actually read what's inside the HTML file reliably because it's a text file. Even badly formed files with unclosed tags can be rendered.
If you don't like per-processor pricing, fine; but don't complain about per-processor pricing being reduced.
Reducing the per-processor pricing is great, but they shouldn't be doing it at all because it's just a price grab. If you want a more powerful server you buy more powerful, more expensive hardware. You shouldn't have to pay more for the operating system just for running it on more powerful hardware. That's be like paying more for gas because you've got an eight-cylinder engine instead of six.
If you give five slices of pizza to your friends, that's less pizza for you and it's still the same total amount of pizza. If you buy 1 copy of Windows with 1 Produce Key and share it with your friends then it's the equivalent to 6 copies of Windows or 6 whole pizzas.
As for the massive group server, everyone would still have to buy windows for their client machines anyway.
Why does one copy of Windows cost more if you have more CPUs, since it's still only one copy of Windows? That's like buying a whole pizza where the price is based on the number of slices it's cut into. A pizza cut into 6 slices would cost $6, but the same pizza cut into 10 slices would cost $10.
It really should be 1 CD & 1 Product Key = 1 price.
Slashdot Mirror
There are in fact different variants of English such as British English and American English. Another example is also European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese.
There are special cases of the English language like RFC documents and legal documents where certain words like "must", "should", etc have very specific meanings. That is necessary so that the documents will have the exact same meaning to different people. In contrast poetry has no such regulations. C++ is not poetry though, and it has strict standards so that all compilers (which are written to that standard) will be able to compile it.
Having a dialect of C++ which is not really C++ and cannot be compiled by the standard compilers breaks the standard.
It's not that I'm ignorant of the history, just that I'm not commenting on the history. I'm commenting specifically on the burning of Danish embassies and the attack on Danish websites.
In your points about the history, I do agree that a violent reaction of the Middle Eastern people to the violent colonial actions of American oil interests is justified. They are responding with violence to a violent action.
That's a separate issue from the violent reaction of attacking Danes in response to the non-violent action of printing cartoons. That reaction is not justified.
The problem is not simply when violence is the reaction, but when violence is the reaction to a non-violent action.
cartoon/speech -> cartoon/speech = no problem
cartoon/speech -> violence = problem
violence -> violence = no problem
For a specific example, suppose someone takes a bunch of hostages at their workplace (or whatever), kills one hostage and make some demands. Is it okay for the Police to bring in snipers (a violent response)? Sure, they can try to reason with the hostage taker too, but that may not work.
According to the actual paper (on page 5), the level of spyware in general has not dropped.
"While the absolute number of spyware-infected executables dropped substantially between the crawls,this is due primarily to a single site whose number of infected executables declined from 1,776 in May to 503 in October. Except for that site, the amount of spyware we found did not change appreciably over the five-month period between our two crawls."
Whether the competition made mistakes or not is irrelevant to this discussion. The fact is that MS has been convicted of illegally using its monopoly position.
Yeah... that'd be a great chance for MS to work on Microsoft Photo Editor!
Even if they did, you'd have to be some kind of masochist to want to use the Microsoft Word of photo editors. "It looks like you're trying to retouch a photo!"
The way I see it, this isn't Evil, but it's not Good either; it's somewhere in the middle. If Google didn't agree to censor results, China would just do it for them and China would probably do a much more diligent job. This way, there may be holes such as the Google cached page or whatever that will allow people in China to get around the restriction which they wouldn't be able to do if China just blocked Google at the Great Firewall. China isn't going to change its political system any time soon, but the more Western culture and business that manages to get into China the more it will (slowly) change.
That's Microsoft innovation in action! ;)
The President does have latitude to intercept communications if someone calls Jihads R Us. If they follow the law they are still able to intercept communications, but they have to prove that it's justified and from what I've read it's not much more than a formality. The questions is why are they ignoring the law?
It's obvious that what the Bush administration did is against the law, so why are so many people are too apathetic to do anything about it?
Am I the only one that thinks all marketers should be locked in a dark dungeon?
Dude, those dungeons are already reserved for lawyers.. we'll have to build more for marketers later...
I'm a Mac user too, and I dislike brushed metal so much (if I wanted big and clunky widgets I'd switch back to Windows) that I installed Iridium. http://www.sagefire.org/C1827030151/E2005081220104 6/index.html
Undocumented APIs that the DOJ forced MS to document: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/dnapiover/html/api-overview.asp
"Microsoft teams identified a few hundred undocumented Windows interfaces or parameters that were used by one or more of the Microsoft Middleware components."
Small, simple files take less code to parse than large, complex files. This is the equivalent to saying "it's easier to make a spelling mistake in a 2,000 word essay than in a 100 word summary."
My guess is that parsing MS formats really isn't that difficult or long for MS's algorithms, given how quickly the average office file loads.
If you have to guess about this, then you don't know what you're talking about. Compound OLE documents have a very complex structure and if you've ever done any coding then you'll know that adding complexity does increase the chances of making mistakes.
There are some other gross inaccuracies claimed by 'experts' and 'analysts' in this piece. "It is still built on the same legacy code, it is still written without adhering to secure coding practices, it is still thrown to the masses without adequate security testing." That's an assertion without supporting evidence. It doesn't have a factual basis.
Windows is built on legacy code from 9x and even compatability code from 3.1 (in addition to the NT code) -- it's a fact. It's also a fact that code was written before the security issues that plague the internet, so they were not designed with strong network security in mind. It's obvious that the security testing done is not adequate because if it was adequate we wouldn't be reading about security issues in Windows all the time. Canstant security issues does constitute empirical evidence of poor coding.
And who rushes out to get brand new laptops as soon as they're released? Not people who live paycheque to paycheque..
Sure we're talking about Windows specifically, but Windows isn't the only operating system around and comparing it to other operating systems is perfectly valid. To draw a parallel, if brand X automobiles announced that their 2006 models would start including anti-lock brakes everyone would say, "Every other car manufacturer has had those for years so this is nothing to get excited about." Claiming that, "It's new for brand X!" is meaningless.
Remember back in Win98 when you had to upgrade to IE4 to get the cool new active desktop and new looking window controls and the web-like single-click user interface throughout Windows? Have you ever entered a URL into Windows Explorer? It will open the web page directly inside Windows Explorer. Plus, shlwapi.dll which is now a core Windows system dll is updated by Internet Explorer. How is IE not integrated?!
Perhaps no two browsers render the same HTML the same way, but all of them can actually read what's inside the HTML file reliably because it's a text file. Even badly formed files with unclosed tags can be rendered.
Red tape kills. Ban Red Tape(tm)!
I like your ideas -- let's schedule some meetings to discuss how to implement them!
Users installing software is different than software installing itself without asking by using security holes.
You'd notice the moment someone posted a link on /. :P
If you don't like per-processor pricing, fine; but don't complain about per-processor pricing being reduced.
Reducing the per-processor pricing is great, but they shouldn't be doing it at all because it's just a price grab. If you want a more powerful server you buy more powerful, more expensive hardware. You shouldn't have to pay more for the operating system just for running it on more powerful hardware. That's be like paying more for gas because you've got an eight-cylinder engine instead of six.
If you give five slices of pizza to your friends, that's less pizza for you and it's still the same total amount of pizza. If you buy 1 copy of Windows with 1 Produce Key and share it with your friends then it's the equivalent to 6 copies of Windows or 6 whole pizzas. As for the massive group server, everyone would still have to buy windows for their client machines anyway.
Why does one copy of Windows cost more if you have more CPUs, since it's still only one copy of Windows? That's like buying a whole pizza where the price is based on the number of slices it's cut into. A pizza cut into 6 slices would cost $6, but the same pizza cut into 10 slices would cost $10.
It really should be 1 CD & 1 Product Key = 1 price.