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User: Omniscientist

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Comments · 263

  1. Re:Personal View on News Sites Slammed By Michael Jackson Traffic · · Score: 1

    Bravo! Bravo!

  2. Re:You Can't Fight the Internet on California Family Fights For Privacy, Relief From Cyber-Harassment · · Score: 1

    Respectfully, I don't agree. The photos show a truth: a truth about what happens when we speed at 100mph on cocaine and fly off the road. They show a truth about how incredibly fragile we are. That we are mortal.

    Unfortunately, driving 100mph on cocaine and flying off the road doesn't particularly scream "WE ARE FRAGILE".

    Rather, a better example of that is perhaps dying in a collision while going to work on a neighborhood road at 25mph. The only thing that dying from a collision caused by driving 100mph on cocaine tells us is that there is no such thing as God Mode.

  3. Re:And all the admins ask... on First Look at Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Beta · · Score: 1

    The message store in Exchange can be simplified by viewing it as being a bunch of MAPI tables.

    A read-only view of a table is provided by the IMAPITable : IUnknown interface.

    If you have an initialized IMAPIContainer, then you can get a MAPITable by calling either its contents or hierarchy table retrieval methods.

    Regardless of how you get the table, you have something you can work with in terms of querying, but as far as I know there is no outright support for straight up SQL query syntax with MAPI and Exchange. I'd recommend instead using the ExecSQL method found on the MAPITable object exposed by Redemption.

  4. Re:Sliverlight was an idiotic decision anyway on Major League Baseball Dumps Silverlight For Flash · · Score: 1

    Agreed.

    I tend to view Silverlight as the black sheep of the family of WPF UI-programming technologies; an approach that is useful for desktop application development, but an utterly inappropriate choice for web content.

  5. Re:Look for LDAP / Active Directory Integration on Internal Instant Messaging Client / Server Combo? · · Score: 1

    I'm not aware of any instant messaging client that integrates nicely with Active Directory other than Office Communicator (hell, it extends the schema), which definitely fails in the "FOSS" department.

    I believe Jabber has LDAP support, however I'm not sure if there is any sort of "corporate address book" functionality built in.

  6. Slashdot was down. on FTC Kills Dirty Online Check Processing Outfit · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Discuss.

  7. Re:What happens.... on Microsoft Ramps Up "Fix it" Support Tool · · Score: 1

    Then the problem was most likely unrelated to the integrity of the installation, since that's all Repair fixes.

  8. Re:UAC is a stupid idea on Security Hole In Windows 7 UAC · · Score: 1

    Because Microsoft does not have a proper installer interface that installs programs for you.. instead each program has it's own installer/updater Windows has no control over the process and does not know if the user has been asked or not ...

    Perhaps you meant to say that Microsoft doesn't have a package management system, because Windows definitely has a transactional installer interface that installs programs for you. Yes, it does require developers/publishers to learn how to use it, but many don't, which there is no excuse for.

    If Microsoft offered a package management system like our favorite Linux distros do, would you really trust it?

  9. Re:NOT Unsuspecting... on Microsoft Update Slips In a Firefox Extension · · Score: 1

    First of all, no one is forced to install the .NET framework. Most of the larger commercial applications, if not all of them, have no .NET dependencies, including Office.

    Second of all, why is this so horrible when installing Adobe Reader (post-Firefox install) does the same thing?

    Firefox certainly doesn't rely on .NET, but that's the whole point of a "plugin". You see, you can extend a product to support additional technologies if it has a pluggable framework. There is .NET content for the web, and the same update we're talking about (which addresses ClickOnce) also adds functionality for XBAP's.

    However, I do think that the Firefox extension should be a separate feature in the .NET 3.5 setup; one that we can switch off either during install time or afterward, like any MSI feature.

  10. Re:Could it be hijacked... on Downadup Worm — When Will the Next Shoe Drop? · · Score: 1

    I'm curious as to how they would achieve digital signature verification as (in the case of Windows) using WinVerifyTrust relies on the root certificate authority store.

    If they got around that via throwing their own CA in the store, that would only lead to an easy way to make the virus ineffective. Their might be built-in functionality in the virus itself for such operations, but I'd think that would increase the size of the binary too much.

  11. Re:Non-Windows User Here on US-CERT Says Microsoft's Advice On Downadup Worm Bogus · · Score: 1

    Yes, most semi-competent folks would probably be able to learn how to use regedit in an hour; the difficulty in changing simple settings in the HKLM or HKCU is not that high. The registry is a simple thing when it is used for this purpose. Using it is much more pleasant than having to tangle with vast amounts of scattered INI files.

    The complicated and mind-numbing area of the registry is the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hive, where all the COM information is stored. Unversed individuals will not make sense of the various types of entities stored there without some prior knowledge. This is also where the design of regedit fails, given the sheer amount of items thrown at the user (very difficult to scroll through thousands of CLSID's). This is unfortunate, as the HKCR is probably the most critical section of the registry.

  12. Re:Why 32-bit? on Windows 7 Beta Released To Public After Delay · · Score: 1

    Technically, you don't even have to have over 4 gigabytes of RAM to see the benefit. Having just 4 gigabytes of RAM installed with a 32-bit Windows running will leave you with only 2 - 3.5 gigabytes available (3.1 gigabytes being the average).

    I use 64-bit at work because I want to:

    • Get full use of my 4 gigabytes of RAM.
    • Ensure whatever software I'm designing works on both architectures.
  13. Re:But isn't that the idea? on Michael Meeks Says OO.o Project is "Profoundly Sick" · · Score: 1

    Microsoft understands muscle memory where it matters. For mouse users, it doesn't matter, because they're already working inefficiently.

    The whole point of redesigning the interface was for the "inefficient" mouse users. How does the fact that the keyboard shortcuts remained the same during an interface overhaul allude to an assertion of any sort of understanding on Microsoft's part?

  14. Re:Funny that the creator of Monkey Island said it on Categorizing Puzzles In Adventure Games · · Score: 1

    Regarding the "item is useless until way later" situation: that's a common theme in that genre, and can be observed in other games as well.

    An example that comes to mind is the honeycomb and wand items in King's Quest V.

    Although the immediate effect of this device is one of confusion, I always felt that it was intended to be humorous.

  15. Re:Hmm. on Chrome Complicates Mozilla/Google Love-In · · Score: 1

    And how can anyone associate the offering of competition to be evil in any shape or form, especially in regards to browsers?

    This sort of uncomfortable atmosphere leads to innovation, and helps avert any chance of eventual complacency (*cough* IE6).

  16. Background Processes on iPhone App Pricing Limits Developers · · Score: 1

    Based on what I've read and heard from my peers, I believe I am correct in saying that developers are not permitted to spawn background processes. I have not had the opportunity to develop on an iPhone, so let me know if I am incorrect in making this assertion.

    I can see the logic behind the decision; it allows Apple to achieve an immediate goal of preventing its application store from becoming a source of persistently annoying and intrusive apps. That being said, I still feel that being able to spawn other processes is something that I should be able to do when developing on any system made post 1960.

    Being required to pay a fee in order to develop on a platform is "annoying" I guess, but if there is anything that is making "it difficult for developers to create complex" applications, I'd attribute the process restriction as a more likely source.

  17. Re:"suddenly the Dungeon collapses!! -You die..." on The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time · · Score: 1

    Actually, that's an error message from Nethack, the roguelike. It was what the user would see if some serious error occurred that required an immediate exit. I know screen has the ability to have nethack error messages as a compile time option, so, don't feel like a complete idiot.

  18. Re:and the fourteenth error should be... on The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time · · Score: 1
    A favorite error of mine from VS 2003 was a message box with the two simple words:

    Catastrophic Failure

    Haven't been able to reproduce that one unfortunately..

  19. Re:The most honest Windows error message on The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time · · Score: 2, Informative

    Right, and in this case, SetLastError was called with a zero due to some operation completing successfully. The stupidity here is that Dr. Watson seemingly prepends all messages with "Error: ".

  20. I've Never Noticed on Comcast, Cox Slow BitTorrent Traffic All Day · · Score: 1

    I am a subscriber to Comcast in a metropolitan area. Whenever I've used BitTorrent, the upload/download speeds were actually very fast. Perhaps Comcast doesn't throttle traffic in all areas.

  21. Comment test on Slashdot Discussion2 In Beta · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I'm testing this thing out.

  22. Why God? on Nerds Switching from Apple to Ubuntu? · · Score: 5, Funny

    Why can't there be a Retarded or Slightly Confused mod? I have mod points but they are no good here!

  23. Re:Yes it IS native. on Google Earth v4 Released - Linux Support at Last · · Score: 1

    Ran perfectly fine out of the box for me. I'm using Gentoo AMD64.

  24. Re:Good -- or not on The Continuing American Decline in CS · · Score: 1
    If you're paying to go to graduate school in a "science" (quotes because computer science is more engineering than science, if you ask me), you're doing something wrong.

    It was always my impression that going to graduate school for a science-related field was very appropriate; what about research?

  25. Re:Wasted funding? on NASA Achieves Breakthrough Black Hole Simulation · · Score: 2, Informative
    If this experiment can ultimately lead us to see if Einstein was right about gravitational waves or not, then this is not a waste of funding. Because these waves are thought to be unchanged by any material they happen to pass through, it is thought that they may carry unaltered signals across various reaches of space. This could theoretically provide us with a way to estimate cosmological distances and help us understand how the universe was formed, what the whole of it looks like, and the ultimate fate of the universe.

    So if this experiment shows us that Einstein was right about gravitational waves, and those waves can tell us so much about the universe, I wouldn't call it a waste of money. Of course now we have to go through the trouble of actually detecting the bastards...