... a friend today got an assignment that has to be five pages, double spaced, times new roman 12 pt with 1 inch margins, and I thought that was a curious anachronism. So maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about.:)
I'm not sure I care. I had classes with lots of fancy tech, and classes with next to none where everything was done on paper. It made no particular difference to how good the class was, or what I got out of it.
Occasionally there's a good reason for it (submitting 50 pages of code by printing it out really makes no sense at all), but in my experience most of the time the technology costs a lot of money and doesn't really add anything of value. If the prof actually wants to teach and knows how to do it, the class is going to be good even if he's using stone tablets. If he considers teaching to be that thing he has to do in between research projects, it's going to suck no matter how much tech you throw at it.
They could probably get better outcomes if instead of spending the money on tech, they spent it on instructors who want to teach so the professors that don't can go do the research they actually want to do instead. Everyone is happier that way.
Every iOS 6 release has had some kind of new bug like this in it, and it's getting ridiculous. I'd like to be able to use the damn phone without worrying that the next update (needed to fix one problem) is going to cause two new ones.
Javascript is about as elegant as an oil tanker. Considerable effort has gone into tools and libraries to make working in it suck less, but it's hard to wipe away the problems inherent in the design.
The other side effect is that they never bring in the money that's expected, and so yellows get shortened to catch more people running reds. They're a good deal for the companies selling them, but don't do anything for safety.
According to an article here a couple days ago, online ads are more dangerous than porn. Considering how many flaws there are in Java, all you need to do is get some code on any website someone visits and you can root the machine. The idea that the Twitter user was doing anything inappropriate at all is just speculation.
Windows is far more secure than Java these days. There isn't a lot of active "load a webpage and your computer is owned" exploits going around, unlike for Java where it's a weekly thing.
That "bloody whitespace" is one of the reasons your average python code is more readable than your average perl code. You don't see a lot of python code that should actually be 30 lines but is crammed into one because the developer though that line breaks are some kind of precious resource.
People do not want touch PCs. It's really that simple. Microsoft is trying to move the market in a direction that it doesn't want to move, and the market tends to react negatively to that.
Metro on a desktop PC is fucking awful. It's best used like Windows 7, where you try and pretend that Metro doesn't exist. In that case, why wouldn't I just use Windows 7? It's not much better on a laptop. The UI is just not built to do real work. It's built for phones, and it works fine for that. When I'm trying to do my job, it's something to fight with as it decides that I really didn't want three windows visible at once.
"Windows 8 - almost as good as Windows 7!" isn't much of a marketing slogan.
In that case, why do I need Windows 8 at all? Windows 7 does the same thing only without the useless Metro bloat.
I love people who talk like you do, with the idea that the signature part of the entire OS is somehow something you can just avoid, or that you should.
The fact is that if you have to avoid Metro to do your work, Metro (and Windows 8 with it) suffer from a rather catastrophic design failure.
I'd surmise (since I'm nothing resembling a sandbox expert) that one of the problems is that the sandbox is built to allow a lot of those "dangerous" activities if the applet is signed and asks for permission to do them. It's not a total block.
When the code to do it is in there somewhere, apparently there's a lot of edge cases to find ways to get to it.
Oracle has a lot of stuff that uses Java, so I doubt their plan was "totally screw Java up so we can ditch it."
Clearly they need to devote serious expertise to hardening it though, or just take the easy route and kill Java in the browser entirely. That's where these problems are all coming from. It wouldn't even be that hard for them, since it's basically a dying method of doing things in the browser anyway.
Java's on a lot of machines, and hasn't been hardened that well. Windows itself used to be the favored target, but Microsoft spent a lot of money in that area and it's much harder to find exploits in Windows 7 (and 8) than it used to be in XP. Flash was a target for a while, as was Acrobat reader.
Now that it's gotten more popular, the malware makers devote more time to making sure their stuff gets around it. The quality of the product hasn't changed so much as the quality of the work being done against it has improved. It's been true of pretty much every such program that gets popular.
MSE still has the upside of not turning computers into boat anchors, unlike Symantec's crap bloatware.
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... a friend today got an assignment that has to be five pages, double spaced, times new roman 12 pt with 1 inch margins, and I thought that was a curious anachronism. So maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about. :)
I'm not sure I care. I had classes with lots of fancy tech, and classes with next to none where everything was done on paper. It made no particular difference to how good the class was, or what I got out of it.
Occasionally there's a good reason for it (submitting 50 pages of code by printing it out really makes no sense at all), but in my experience most of the time the technology costs a lot of money and doesn't really add anything of value. If the prof actually wants to teach and knows how to do it, the class is going to be good even if he's using stone tablets. If he considers teaching to be that thing he has to do in between research projects, it's going to suck no matter how much tech you throw at it.
They could probably get better outcomes if instead of spending the money on tech, they spent it on instructors who want to teach so the professors that don't can go do the research they actually want to do instead. Everyone is happier that way.
Every iOS 6 release has had some kind of new bug like this in it, and it's getting ridiculous. I'd like to be able to use the damn phone without worrying that the next update (needed to fix one problem) is going to cause two new ones.
Javascript is about as elegant as an oil tanker. Considerable effort has gone into tools and libraries to make working in it suck less, but it's hard to wipe away the problems inherent in the design.
The only differences between economists and fortune tellers are the uniform and the pay scale.
Also, this poster is perfectly accurate: http://www.despair.com/economics.html
Unlocking your phone is also against the law, maybe we need a trillion dollar fine to discourage it?
Red light cameras discourage running *yellows*, out of the fear of running reds and getting a ticket. They dramatically increase accident rates: http://www.therecord.com/news/local/article/825583--red-alert-lucrative-cameras-spark-crashes-injuries
The other side effect is that they never bring in the money that's expected, and so yellows get shortened to catch more people running reds. They're a good deal for the companies selling them, but don't do anything for safety.
According to an article here a couple days ago, online ads are more dangerous than porn. Considering how many flaws there are in Java, all you need to do is get some code on any website someone visits and you can root the machine. The idea that the Twitter user was doing anything inappropriate at all is just speculation.
"Old" as in from two days ago?
Or maybe it's another unpatched Java flaw being used. Those are a dime a dozen.
Someone inside Twitter's network had Java enabled, and got attacked. Hackers are now inside Twitter and can start poking around.
Windows is far more secure than Java these days. There isn't a lot of active "load a webpage and your computer is owned" exploits going around, unlike for Java where it's a weekly thing.
Yeah, and overnight all the PCs in the world vanished like magic!
Probably to make sure the creators of FlashBlock still have something to do.
There was an open beta on the weekend where discussing feedback was allowed and wide open. They even had a public forum for it: http://answers.ea.com/t5/Feedback/bd-p/Feedback
In fact DRM complaints were probably #2 on the complaint list... a mile behind the city sizes being absurdly tiny, which was the #1 complaint.
The weekend beta was open, and the feedback forums are public: http://answers.ea.com/t5/Feedback/bd-p/Feedback
Such feedback was explicitly allowed during the weekend beta. Game videos/screenshots were the only thing restricted.
Woosh...
That "bloody whitespace" is one of the reasons your average python code is more readable than your average perl code. You don't see a lot of python code that should actually be 30 lines but is crammed into one because the developer though that line breaks are some kind of precious resource.
People do not want touch PCs. It's really that simple. Microsoft is trying to move the market in a direction that it doesn't want to move, and the market tends to react negatively to that.
Metro on a desktop PC is fucking awful. It's best used like Windows 7, where you try and pretend that Metro doesn't exist. In that case, why wouldn't I just use Windows 7? It's not much better on a laptop. The UI is just not built to do real work. It's built for phones, and it works fine for that. When I'm trying to do my job, it's something to fight with as it decides that I really didn't want three windows visible at once.
"Windows 8 - almost as good as Windows 7!" isn't much of a marketing slogan.
In that case, why do I need Windows 8 at all? Windows 7 does the same thing only without the useless Metro bloat.
I love people who talk like you do, with the idea that the signature part of the entire OS is somehow something you can just avoid, or that you should.
The fact is that if you have to avoid Metro to do your work, Metro (and Windows 8 with it) suffer from a rather catastrophic design failure.
I'd surmise (since I'm nothing resembling a sandbox expert) that one of the problems is that the sandbox is built to allow a lot of those "dangerous" activities if the applet is signed and asks for permission to do them. It's not a total block.
When the code to do it is in there somewhere, apparently there's a lot of edge cases to find ways to get to it.
Oracle has a lot of stuff that uses Java, so I doubt their plan was "totally screw Java up so we can ditch it."
Clearly they need to devote serious expertise to hardening it though, or just take the easy route and kill Java in the browser entirely. That's where these problems are all coming from. It wouldn't even be that hard for them, since it's basically a dying method of doing things in the browser anyway.
Java's on a lot of machines, and hasn't been hardened that well. Windows itself used to be the favored target, but Microsoft spent a lot of money in that area and it's much harder to find exploits in Windows 7 (and 8) than it used to be in XP. Flash was a target for a while, as was Acrobat reader.
Well, I do care if some random jackass wants to see my balls.
I also have a problem with wasting time and huge amounts of taxpayer dollars on security theatre.
What's the rational reason for paying a fortune on security devices that don't improve security?
Now that it's gotten more popular, the malware makers devote more time to making sure their stuff gets around it. The quality of the product hasn't changed so much as the quality of the work being done against it has improved. It's been true of pretty much every such program that gets popular.
MSE still has the upside of not turning computers into boat anchors, unlike Symantec's crap bloatware.