Okay, now we spend time generating another 500+ comments discussing how shitty IE's security is and how Firefox isn't much better. Add the other browser users (Opera, Konqueror) and we get another 300+ comments. Throw in the fact that each cross-platform browser runs better in Linux/OSX/BSD, or is emulated better (hence, more secure) through Wine and we generate another 250+ comments.
Every security announcement is met with the same level of bickering without any resolution in sight. Goggle "Internet Explorer Firefox security comparison" and you get another 1.7 million opinions.
I read the author's treatise but was rather shocked at the company swag. Who in their right mind would take security advice from a company who advertises thongs, vodka, and cocaine as symbols worth publicising?
That is not the company image that would win me points with my boss.
Boss: "That is a rather inappropriate coffee cup you have there. Please don't bring it to work." Me: "But our network security company gave it to me!" Boss: "You're fired."
Yeah, you're right - I remember saying that no one should be held accountable.
Ever heard of Price-Anderson Act Amendments? I am fully aware of the processes required for validating results in system software used in safety-related systems. I am also fully aware of the consequences of ignoring those processes.
The fact that you focused on this particular egregious example of programming error only shows that it is people like yourself who demand a completely risk-free world, devoid of pointy objects, and filled with rubber-coated clothing. In your mind, every child should be tattoed at birth with a guarantee against colds, accidents, or other unfortunate mishaps. We will spend everyone into bankruptcy to avoid having anyone get hurt.
If you read my original post on this topic you will see that I said: No, I do not believe that everyone should be left to fend for themselves without ANY regulation. If someone produces a medication and makes a claim that a patient considered reasonable, and they get more ill or die as a result, then the company should be held accountable. But you were too obsessed with making a stupid joke, weren't you?
Then again, I use a lot of open source software, so I'm already getting more than I'm paying for.
Boy, if that isn't the key fact in this whole sorry tale. I only put stuff on my production machines that I know will not crash it every day. I also keep my data away from all of my machines on a separate storage array.
People like Thompson love a zero risk world when it comes to something they believe they can control. But don't get on the freeway with these people because they are generally also the people who floss their teeth on the freeway going 70mph while riding the ass-end of your car!
Re:how many people actually _like_ windows?
on
Pepping Up Windows
·
· Score: 1
Believe me, you are preaching to the choir on apt and yum. I haven't tried Synaptic, but I will give it a shot.
The problem for my brother is that first install hurdle. Everything in the world could go right (I've even installed Linux on one of his spare workstations), but he is still stuck at not being able to shift from Windows to something - anything - else.
I think that is probably true for a large number of Windows users. I don't find that particularly troubling as I get plenty of business fixing broken Windows boxes.
If you are talking about chrun, then you obviously missed my point. Software produced just to make an older version obsolete will be around regardless of whether E&O insurace is required or not. In fact, because of the relatively modest changes between upgrades, the liability route will *guarantee* that more (not less) useless upgrades get published. It is the lowest risk route to publishing.
I would hope that Mr. Thompson considered the alternative that people often hold others accountable for their own ignorant actions. Yes, a publisher is often held accountable for the stupid actions of a reader (who would be stupid enough to drink sulphuric acid?). But is that situation an indictment of the author, or the court system that allowed an ignorant person to use the courts to make whole an action that the claimant should be responsible for?
No, I do not believe that everyone should be left to fend for themselves without ANY regulation. If someone produces a medication and makes a claim that a patient considered reasonable, and they get more ill or die as a result, then the company should be held accountable. But to make every fucking business activity subject to error and omission insurance will wreak holy hell on our economy. E&O insurace requirements will guarantee that
1) software development will slow, 2) software for process control will halt due to liability questions, 3) make lawyers and insurance companies rich,
all without one single shred of evidence that any of these effects actually made software development any *better*.
When I install software, especially for the first time, I do NOT have it on my production machine. Why do people like Thompson like doing things like this? Why should a software publisher spend heavily to debug (and still not get EVERYTHING) in a manner that *assures* the E&O insurer that it will not delete Mr. Thompson's latest mp3?
Re:how many people actually _like_ windows?
on
Pepping Up Windows
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
These days I find that different Windows apps are beginning to look nothing alike.
It is funny that you had that observation because I was thinking the same thing when I was writing my post. I noticed that my brother and his circle of friends will often *avoid* apps that do not have the same theme/look as other Windows apps. They are completely locked in to the way Microsoft presents options to them.
If Vista breaks too much with the original thematic concept from the Win9X desktop (by brother and his friends opt for the Windows "Classic" theme), then he might refuse to upgrade.
Re:how many people actually _like_ windows?
on
Pepping Up Windows
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I would guess that familiarity is one of the keys. My brother likes Windows because he can always count on an app looking somewhat like all the other Windows apps. That may or may not be true, but the impression is what counts for him. He also likes how everything installs relatively easily. All he has to do is download a program, click on the icon, and it is installed. He tried the copy of SuSE I gave him but was overwhelmed when he started getting messages about broken dependencies. I am not bothered by them, but he found the whole experience frustrating.
I know there is yum and apt, but my brother (and I assume this is true for people like him as well) has been using Windows for so many years that moving to another platform is equivalent to losing a pet animal: It is something he is just unprepared to consider.
My Brother, The Windows Fanboy
on
Pepping Up Windows
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
My older brother is a 100% MS man. He spend about half of our visits together telling me how I have wasted the last 10 years working with Linux. On one of his last visits he saw me switching virtual windows in X and thought that looked like a cool app. I searched the web and Virtuawin. When he came over I installed it on his laptop and he has reported that his productivity has increased. I don't know what he is using for a metric, but he likes the idea of switching windows to applications that aren't buried behind muliple instances of IE.
I guess there are still some ways that *NIX can influence Microsoft, but at this point everyone is using and recycling each other ideas. Few companies are actually building new and interesting interfaces.
The government should only form alliances with industry where there are no other obvious partners. While Google may have a lead on search technology, opening up the partnership process to include Microsoft and Yahoo! would benefit the government more than sole sourcing.
Competition for government partnerships is always better than just selecting the current industry lead. The US government did that with office suites and is now paying a hefty price for that decision.
If they are mostly authors whose books get published at 50,000 copies, then they have every reason to prefer the current system with gate keepers. It prevents competition.
I'd guess this is the real motivation. The Screen Actors Guild and other groups like to shit on their members whenever they have the audacity to stray too far from the Reservation.
Since their suit was announced, I have wondered why the Author's Guild would object to MORE access to their works by offering snippets to Google Print. Obviously there is much to be lost by publishers who, like the RIAA, act as gatekeepers on published works. If the Author's Guild really likes the current system, then why do so few works circulate more than 5,000 copies? Wouldn't their members be better served with wider distribution?
The Author's Guild looks like just another out-of-touch union that is trying to straddle the fence on this issue so as to not piss off their benefactors in publishing. Perhaps they are secretly hoping their suit will fail.
How long until there is a category for embedded DRM as described in this article?
It will probably start out with a few devices with DRM, but slowly everyone of the storage vendors will have a DRM solution. It will only be a matter of time, really.
For him it's worth it. This is OBVIOUSLY not a mass market device. It's for those who have dismissed PDA's as being "interesting" but underpowered and with a sparse selection of software.
I agree with everything you have written here, but I was commenting on how the GP got to +5 "Interesting" (with a few personal oberservations along the way). The mod system on this forum sucks, but it works better than most other forums, so what can you do?;)
So again, how was the parent posters comment in the slightest "insightful"? He merely points out the obvious, this is a niche product and alternatives exist for those that don't meet it's customer profile.
Which goes back to your point about mass market devices: the average/. poster is a mass market device consumer. Any comment from one of the members is mirrored back to them by the tribe. You or I could find a use for this device (although I would have a difficult time justifying $2K for it), but the vast majority of consumers, as reflected in the/. crowd, want a general-purpose device that has tons of bells and whistles.
I not only concede that your bro-in-law could benefit from this device, but I can think of a whole host of people who need to have a scaled down, but robust, micro-microcomptuer in the field with them to perform their work. Surveyors, civil engineers, and geoscientists could also use this device. The only problem is that once you start moving into that group of professionals, computing power requirements do start to impact the price-for-performance metric. If you are talking about logging data from an instrument in the field, or taking field notes to record observations, then a PDA works great - I use one all the time. But to move into the realm of a hand-held PC, I would need to either get more robust performance for the price tag (nearly 4X a PDA), or get a laptop.
For people who can connect easily (via Bluetooth or other WiFi) to external storage or computing centers, like physicians in a hospitial or clinic, this device could be extremely useful.
Err, duh. If one wants a "real" laptop, then one would buy a "real" laptop.
Right, but I don't think that is why the mods put it up to +5 "Insightful".
This is obviously for those who are more sensitive to size and portability than $$ or outright power.
Sure, but why make a tradeoff if the features do not justify the ~$2K pricetag? The only advantage this unit has over a PDA costing a quarter of the price is the screen size.
For me, VGA resolution on a 4 inch screen does not justify $1.5 in additional cost.
If you aren't willing to make that tradeoff, fine, this obviously isn't for you.
Judging from the comments posted so far, it appears that it isn't for many people.
"We wanted to choose the format that has the highest probability of this market taking off," said Stephen Balogh, director of optical media standards and technologies at Intel.
When did probability amount to anything in marketing computer components. Either Microsoft and Intel supported them or they didn't. Those that weren't supported didn't do as well intitially.
Marketing has always won out over technical merit - period.
All those Middle-eastern Muslim extremists have to do to evade profiling is stop being middle-eastern,
That statement assume two things:
1) All muslims who have terrorist leanings are from the Middle East, and 2) That extremists are incapable of recruiting white muslims from the US or UK.
As proof of how *fucking* stupid your comment is, Indonesia and the Philippines support item one, and the shoe bomber Richard Reid (English mother, Jamaican father - not from the Middle East) supports item two.
I hope you aren't in law enforcement. By employing someone like yourself (who has been cursed with a limited intellectual capacity) in the hunt for terrorists, we are surely doomed.
Profiling is a dirty word because people let the liberals make it so..
No, profiling is a dirty word because it is an asinine way to investigate criminal activity. Only an idiot would follow a profile once it has been established, and the ability of determined criminals to evade the profile is relatively simple. In this particular example, a terrorist now knows to make eye contact with the station police, stand in and blend with a crowd (don't go to the wall and drop your pack to search its contents), and act just like everyone else on the train platform. What exactly did the police gain from their profile other than an innocent man's DNA and fingerprints?
The reason profiling has such a bad history in the US is that too often minorities were charged and convicted of crimes based soley on the color of their skin and the perception of the white majority about what to expect from colored people. As noted above, the net result of that behavior is to convict the innocent and let the guilty go free.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, now we spend time generating another 500+ comments discussing how shitty IE's security is and how Firefox isn't much better. Add the other browser users (Opera, Konqueror) and we get another 300+ comments. Throw in the fact that each cross-platform browser runs better in Linux/OSX/BSD, or is emulated better (hence, more secure) through Wine and we generate another 250+ comments.
Every security announcement is met with the same level of bickering without any resolution in sight. Goggle "Internet Explorer Firefox security comparison" and you get another 1.7 million opinions.
Will it ever end?
I read the author's treatise but was rather shocked at the company swag. Who in their right mind would take security advice from a company who advertises thongs, vodka, and cocaine as symbols worth publicising?
That is not the company image that would win me points with my boss.
Boss: "That is a rather inappropriate coffee cup you have there. Please don't bring it to work."
Me: "But our network security company gave it to me!"
Boss: "You're fired."
I guess I'm just showing my age.
And yes, my boss does talk in HTML.
Yeah, you're right - I remember saying that no one should be held accountable.
Ever heard of Price-Anderson Act Amendments? I am fully aware of the processes required for validating results in system software used in safety-related systems. I am also fully aware of the consequences of ignoring those processes.
The fact that you focused on this particular egregious example of programming error only shows that it is people like yourself who demand a completely risk-free world, devoid of pointy objects, and filled with rubber-coated clothing. In your mind, every child should be tattoed at birth with a guarantee against colds, accidents, or other unfortunate mishaps. We will spend everyone into bankruptcy to avoid having anyone get hurt.
If you read my original post on this topic you will see that I said: No, I do not believe that everyone should be left to fend for themselves without ANY regulation. If someone produces a medication and makes a claim that a patient considered reasonable, and they get more ill or die as a result, then the company should be held accountable. But you were too obsessed with making a stupid joke, weren't you?
Then again, I use a lot of open source software, so I'm already getting more than I'm paying for.
Boy, if that isn't the key fact in this whole sorry tale. I only put stuff on my production machines that I know will not crash it every day. I also keep my data away from all of my machines on a separate storage array.
People like Thompson love a zero risk world when it comes to something they believe they can control. But don't get on the freeway with these people because they are generally also the people who floss their teeth on the freeway going 70mph while riding the ass-end of your car!
Believe me, you are preaching to the choir on apt and yum. I haven't tried Synaptic, but I will give it a shot.
The problem for my brother is that first install hurdle. Everything in the world could go right (I've even installed Linux on one of his spare workstations), but he is still stuck at not being able to shift from Windows to something - anything - else.
I think that is probably true for a large number of Windows users. I don't find that particularly troubling as I get plenty of business fixing broken Windows boxes.
If you are talking about chrun, then you obviously missed my point. Software produced just to make an older version obsolete will be around regardless of whether E&O insurace is required or not. In fact, because of the relatively modest changes between upgrades, the liability route will *guarantee* that more (not less) useless upgrades get published. It is the lowest risk route to publishing.
I would hope that Mr. Thompson considered the alternative that people often hold others accountable for their own ignorant actions. Yes, a publisher is often held accountable for the stupid actions of a reader (who would be stupid enough to drink sulphuric acid?). But is that situation an indictment of the author, or the court system that allowed an ignorant person to use the courts to make whole an action that the claimant should be responsible for?
No, I do not believe that everyone should be left to fend for themselves without ANY regulation. If someone produces a medication and makes a claim that a patient considered reasonable, and they get more ill or die as a result, then the company should be held accountable. But to make every fucking business activity subject to error and omission insurance will wreak holy hell on our economy. E&O insurace requirements will guarantee that
1) software development will slow,
2) software for process control will halt due to liability questions,
3) make lawyers and insurance companies rich,
all without one single shred of evidence that any of these effects actually made software development any *better*.
When I install software, especially for the first time, I do NOT have it on my production machine. Why do people like Thompson like doing things like this? Why should a software publisher spend heavily to debug (and still not get EVERYTHING) in a manner that *assures* the E&O insurer that it will not delete Mr. Thompson's latest mp3?
These days I find that different Windows apps are beginning to look nothing alike.
It is funny that you had that observation because I was thinking the same thing when I was writing my post. I noticed that my brother and his circle of friends will often *avoid* apps that do not have the same theme/look as other Windows apps. They are completely locked in to the way Microsoft presents options to them.
If Vista breaks too much with the original thematic concept from the Win9X desktop (by brother and his friends opt for the Windows "Classic" theme), then he might refuse to upgrade.
I would guess that familiarity is one of the keys. My brother likes Windows because he can always count on an app looking somewhat like all the other Windows apps. That may or may not be true, but the impression is what counts for him. He also likes how everything installs relatively easily. All he has to do is download a program, click on the icon, and it is installed. He tried the copy of SuSE I gave him but was overwhelmed when he started getting messages about broken dependencies. I am not bothered by them, but he found the whole experience frustrating.
I know there is yum and apt, but my brother (and I assume this is true for people like him as well) has been using Windows for so many years that moving to another platform is equivalent to losing a pet animal: It is something he is just unprepared to consider.
My older brother is a 100% MS man. He spend about half of our visits together telling me how I have wasted the last 10 years working with Linux. On one of his last visits he saw me switching virtual windows in X and thought that looked like a cool app. I searched the web and Virtuawin. When he came over I installed it on his laptop and he has reported that his productivity has increased. I don't know what he is using for a metric, but he likes the idea of switching windows to applications that aren't buried behind muliple instances of IE.
I guess there are still some ways that *NIX can influence Microsoft, but at this point everyone is using and recycling each other ideas. Few companies are actually building new and interesting interfaces.
The government should only form alliances with industry where there are no other obvious partners. While Google may have a lead on search technology, opening up the partnership process to include Microsoft and Yahoo! would benefit the government more than sole sourcing.
Competition for government partnerships is always better than just selecting the current industry lead. The US government did that with office suites and is now paying a hefty price for that decision.
If they are mostly authors whose books get published at 50,000 copies, then they have every reason to prefer the current system with gate keepers. It prevents competition.
I'd guess this is the real motivation. The Screen Actors Guild and other groups like to shit on their members whenever they have the audacity to stray too far from the Reservation.
Since their suit was announced, I have wondered why the Author's Guild would object to MORE access to their works by offering snippets to Google Print. Obviously there is much to be lost by publishers who, like the RIAA, act as gatekeepers on published works. If the Author's Guild really likes the current system, then why do so few works circulate more than 5,000 copies? Wouldn't their members be better served with wider distribution?
The Author's Guild looks like just another out-of-touch union that is trying to straddle the fence on this issue so as to not piss off their benefactors in publishing. Perhaps they are secretly hoping their suit will fail.
Wow, I addressed that article yesterday, and it almost seems we have another case of did not RTFA.
So if I don't post exactly the same way you would then you assume I haven't read the article?
So much for being objective. Have you considered the fact that people may look at the same topic as you and come to a completely different conclusion?
I guess the utility of this card is based on how demanding your game is. Looks like it gets "hammered" quite a bit by the GeForce card.
Silence can be expensive.
Why use a 100gb device to haul your files around? You can mod an iPod Nano [uncyclopedia.org] to 200GB.
Holy crap! that was good.
You had me all set for some elegant looking finished product. This is more like Frankenstein's monster!
How long until there is a category for embedded DRM as described in this article?
It will probably start out with a few devices with DRM, but slowly everyone of the storage vendors will have a DRM solution. It will only be a matter of time, really.
That said, the Seagate 100GB unit looks sweet.
If you can shut it down its not true P2P, this is why Gnutella and Gnutella2 are superior.
For him it's worth it. This is OBVIOUSLY not a mass market device. It's for those who have dismissed PDA's as being "interesting" but underpowered and with a sparse selection of software.
;)
/. poster is a mass market device consumer. Any comment from one of the members is mirrored back to them by the tribe. You or I could find a use for this device (although I would have a difficult time justifying $2K for it), but the vast majority of consumers, as reflected in the /. crowd, want a general-purpose device that has tons of bells and whistles.
I agree with everything you have written here, but I was commenting on how the GP got to +5 "Interesting" (with a few personal oberservations along the way). The mod system on this forum sucks, but it works better than most other forums, so what can you do?
So again, how was the parent posters comment in the slightest "insightful"? He merely points out the obvious, this is a niche product and alternatives exist for those that don't meet it's customer profile.
Which goes back to your point about mass market devices: the average
I not only concede that your bro-in-law could benefit from this device, but I can think of a whole host of people who need to have a scaled down, but robust, micro-microcomptuer in the field with them to perform their work. Surveyors, civil engineers, and geoscientists could also use this device. The only problem is that once you start moving into that group of professionals, computing power requirements do start to impact the price-for-performance metric. If you are talking about logging data from an instrument in the field, or taking field notes to record observations, then a PDA works great - I use one all the time. But to move into the realm of a hand-held PC, I would need to either get more robust performance for the price tag (nearly 4X a PDA), or get a laptop.
For people who can connect easily (via Bluetooth or other WiFi) to external storage or computing centers, like physicians in a hospitial or clinic, this device could be extremely useful.
Yeah, I would say that $1.5 is a terrific price! What was I complaining about?
Err, duh. If one wants a "real" laptop, then one would buy a "real" laptop.
Right, but I don't think that is why the mods put it up to +5 "Insightful".
This is obviously for those who are more sensitive to size and portability than $$ or outright power.
Sure, but why make a tradeoff if the features do not justify the ~$2K pricetag? The only advantage this unit has over a PDA costing a quarter of the price is the screen size.
For me, VGA resolution on a 4 inch screen does not justify $1.5 in additional cost.
If you aren't willing to make that tradeoff, fine, this obviously isn't for you.
Judging from the comments posted so far, it appears that it isn't for many people.
"We wanted to choose the format that has the highest probability of this market taking off," said Stephen Balogh, director of optical media standards and technologies at Intel.
When did probability amount to anything in marketing computer components. Either Microsoft and Intel supported them or they didn't. Those that weren't supported didn't do as well intitially.
Marketing has always won out over technical merit - period.
what we need is sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads
RABID sharks with fricken' laser beams on their heads...
All those Middle-eastern Muslim extremists have to do to evade profiling is stop being middle-eastern,
That statement assume two things:
1) All muslims who have terrorist leanings are from the Middle East, and
2) That extremists are incapable of recruiting white muslims from the US or UK.
As proof of how *fucking* stupid your comment is, Indonesia and the Philippines support item one, and the shoe bomber Richard Reid (English mother, Jamaican father - not from the Middle East) supports item two.
I hope you aren't in law enforcement. By employing someone like yourself (who has been cursed with a limited intellectual capacity) in the hunt for terrorists, we are surely doomed.
Profiling is a dirty word because people let the liberals make it so..
No, profiling is a dirty word because it is an asinine way to investigate criminal activity. Only an idiot would follow a profile once it has been established, and the ability of determined criminals to evade the profile is relatively simple. In this particular example, a terrorist now knows to make eye contact with the station police, stand in and blend with a crowd (don't go to the wall and drop your pack to search its contents), and act just like everyone else on the train platform. What exactly did the police gain from their profile other than an innocent man's DNA and fingerprints?
The reason profiling has such a bad history in the US is that too often minorities were charged and convicted of crimes based soley on the color of their skin and the perception of the white majority about what to expect from colored people. As noted above, the net result of that behavior is to convict the innocent and let the guilty go free.