No way. My Model M keyboard died to food poisoning.
Granted, it served me well for many, many years and I preferred it over any new-fangled crap as it had an usable space bar, usable Ctrl and Alt, no @#$%^&* WinLogo keys. Hell, I used it even though it had Swedish labels all over the wrong keys (';' was 'Å', '(' was ')', etc) (and I don't believe in stickers) -- that design was simply overwhelmingly superior over anything you can buy nowadays.
Of course, if I was more careful trying to repair it, it would probably be still alive. I successfully dismantled it on several occasions to remove pieces of food, but it proved to be once too many.
It also may be a good idea to compare the criticalness level of MSIE vulnerabilities to the Firefox ones that get published.
People just don't bother with minor problems in IE -- on the other hand, there is much vested interest in digging every smallest issue in Firefox, and dragging it into the press.
Wrong. You're confusing low-level formatting (laying physical sectors onto the disk's surface) with creating a filesystem -- this is what's usually called formatting these days.
If you obey the standard PC format, you'll get 18 sectors per track, letting quite a lot of margin space. The margins are needed as the drive doesn't really care whether the new data is put in the exactly same place as the old sector was. Still, the standard is way too conservative, and many programs like fdformat let you reduce the margins. Even Microsoft's original Win95 install floppies used a 1.7MB format.
That was the physical low-level format, a rough equivalent to the level 2 ISO/OSI network layer (level 1 is twiddling the bits, level 2 defines the byte and sector boundaries in the raw bit stream).
FAT formatting (the filesystem) uses up 33 sectors (on the whole disk, not per-track), reducing the useful space to 2847 sectors, that is 1457664 bytes. And this is what you see when you check the free space on an empty floppy.
Well, they are usually (corrected) labelled as 1440KB instead of 1.44MB. They have 2 sides and 80 tracks with 18 512 byte sectors on each track.
It's real 1440KB, without cheating on the sector's headers and/or inter-sector gaps. If you format the floppy yourself, you can shave quite a bit of space from those gaps, and this was a quite popular thing to do.
So... now the bad guys enjoy the code they can read in peace, and look for security holes to their heart's content. They face just a small bunch of overworked developers and very little review.
On the other appendage, a vintage PC in my basement churns packets on its cozy shelf, with an OS that has seen continuous attention of millions of developers...
Face it, the bad guys _will_ have guns. No laws or copyrights can stop them. By obstructing the access you limit the amount of kids but do nothing against determined attackers. But if you let the NRA, er, wait, the Free Software community ensure the public will have guns... hmm, my analogy is kind of shot. You know what I mean:p
No, basic research is anything but parasitic. It's something that will give benefits in the future. Even if it doesn't have any applications right now, it's very likely to have them later. As an example, an "absolutely worthless" part of mathemathics known as numbers theory gave rise to cryptography and many other fields. It's the basic research that deserves governmental funding the most, as applied science may be able to sustain itself financially.
On the other hand, giving the money to the "poor" is simply dumping it into a hole. Charity may give you a warm fuzzy feeling, but it's nothing but consumption.
Before you call me a "communist" (hell, I'm the opposite), don't forget that having the public giving anyone favours for free is wrong. The idea of having the state encourage people to have ten kids and no job because they can get 90% of the minimal wage for nothing is just repulsive to me -- and living off welfare is a popular model of life.
Having the taxpayers fund anything that's of no benefit to the public is embezzlement. Be that Mr. Sixpack's new TV, the freebie research for a commercial pharmaceutic company, or, the worst of all, the favours friends of politicians get. No parasites, please.
The corporations have no rights to have the sole access to research that was funded by the taxpayers. Of course, this raises the question whether anyone from countries other than Netherlands should be able to get it for free (gratis) -- but, the free (as in unhindered) exchange of ideas is pretty much what the ideals of science are about.
If a corporation wants a monopoly for knowledge, no one forbids it from paying for the research.
Yeah, I wouldn't dare to touch it, too. It's nothing that you can't learn, but you would need to invest quite a bit of time -- unless you're really annoyed by a particular bug, it's simply not worth the effort.
I feel uncomfortable anywhere near xpi, big chunks of C++ code and most Unix GUI stuff (ironically, I know win32 API well). Thus, I keep to the luser mode there -- reading the docs and at most, filing an uninformed bug. On the other hand, I find C code very easy to comprehend (for me) so when I wanted to, for example, disable the PC honker many years ago, I just did a quick grep over the kernel, commented something out and recompiled. I know, if I RTFMed I would probably find a better solution, but it was still more gracious than my yet earlier way of doing a certain crude hardware mod:p
If there is a small but annoying bug in a piece of proprietary software, there is absolutely nothing you can do. Send them a bug report? As if anyone will look at it... With OSS, you can just fix it yourself, and in 99.9% cases someone else would already be annoyed by the bug in question enough to deal with it.
Have you ever programmed in Delphi? How many of the bugs you encounter are just trivial, and you would easily fix them on the spot? Delphi is just ridden by those.
However, formulating this the way you did would make corporations think that what people are allowed to do is limited to moving the license from an inactive medium to an "active" one. By "inactive" I mean thinks like a CD that's sitting on one's shelf while you use your iPod or a book while a blind person listens to it from his text-to-speech rig.
Users have the right to use what they legally acquired.
Limitting them to "time-shift", "space-shift", "translate" and any number of specifically mentioned things would be open to abuse by the corporations. What I would say, is:
Users should be able to do anything to what they legally acquired as long as they keep it to themselves.
Of course, these are the rights pertaining to use. None of your points nor my idea mentions ways to distribute modified content. But -- the rights to comment, report, parody, etc can be considered to be apart from the "private use" facets of fair use. In my opinion, no EULA should ever be able to limit the uses you do at your own home.
Outdated ex-state-owned monopoly owning all the [local infrastructure]
Beh, it's not just the Britland that's suffering this problem.
In Poland, we have Telekomunikacja Polska SA (tp SA), although the name obviously must have came from "communism" rather than "communication". Abysmal service, and no competition -- a cable operator would have to provide his own backbone as tp sa obviously isn't going to cooperate.
Just a few tidbits:
when my workplace moved, it took a month and a half to get the damn phones connected, and a bit longer to get DSL as well. We gave them notices several times, the first time four months before.
Our business crawled to a halt during that time -- but, there is nothing we can do about this. Sue them for lost profits? Hah. All we can possibly get is getting back the bill for 30 days, and it would take a 5-10 years long lawsuit that would cost plenty.
And, the guy who does the real work for them said it's a matter of flipping a switch (as the cabling already existed), but he was not allowed to do it without clearance from the bureaucracy.
the best connection we could get were "consumer-level" 128/512kbit ADSL for 160zl/month and "business" 512kbit DSL for 250zl. The sales rep claimed it's full, symmetric DSL. As you can guess, it's in reality just 128kbit upstream, same as the consumer version, with no value added but a different price tag.
at home, I had a 3-week outage just because they had some "internal repairs". Sweet.
at work, over half a year later, we still keep getting invoices for the old line. The customer service line just gives us a poor random clerk who doesn't know anything, and can't be told to escalate. To provide us with more entertainment, the clerks are assigned on a random way nation-wide, ensuring no two calls can reach the same representative.
and oh, Poland has the most expensive phone services in Europe.
This post is pretty grim, indeed. But, as the brighter side, the rumors say there are people who live in Somalia and Sierra Leone...
No, I do not work at that company, and I try to not even touch their other machines. All I take care of is a single _Debian_ server that replaced a win2k one which kept going down every a few days. That machine has nothing but Samba and MySQL on it -- yet Windows used to break like crazy. When I installed our program on their machines, I migrated that server to Linux. And lo, it has gone down exactly once, to a _power outage_.
You can update Windows without using Windows Update. And then, you can firewall out all attempts of Windows to phone back home. At that place, all boxes had all the newest hotfixes installed.
Of course, that didn't stop them from falling over whenever someone coughed, but that's typical with Windows, hotfixed or not.
I've heard some geologists talk about the Florida being in a risk of falling into the ocean soon. Hmm... if your bombs could trigger the fault... sounds like a plan.
What are we going to have to do to convince "ordinary users" to visit WindowsUpdate once in a while?"
The problem is, MicroSoft went a long way to tell people that no, they can not trust them when it comes to privacy. People from random businesses around here are pretty paranoid now -- I've talked to the CEO of a ~300 employees big company who, albeit a non-technical user himself, went on a long tirade about not letting Windows phone home.
Well, convert it to Q4 when it's done, and then perhaps touch it up to use the new engine.
I've done something like that to Doom -> Q2 maps many years ago, and it was a matter of a completely different way of describing the world. Sectors which could take any shape, be non-convex or even disjoint had to be cut into a number of convex polygons -- negating the world and making it 3D are easy steps. Compared to this, converting a set of convex polyhedrons to another one should be a matter of a simple script -- I guess someone will write one in days after the engine is released.
I was joking here, referring to the Age of Sail. However, I took a look at the page you mentioned, and was really disturbed.
<span incendiary=1 excuse="they deserve it"> Can't these jerks do some basic math? If they would even attempt to compare the amount of chemicals used for currently used spacecraft propulsion to the amount of waste caused by automobiles, airplanes, "clean" coal power plants or factories, they would get some results that are lost in underflow. </span> These people are hurting us. Contrary to what you say, there is harm in listening -- you may dismiss Microsoft's FUD from a single source, but most not-so-well-informed people will actually believe that. As Goebbels said, if you tell a lie often enough, people will take is as a truth.
I really, really detest pseudo-environmentalist who don't say a word about SUVs or goods factories but hamper something with negligible environmental that will give great benefits to the future generations.
You can't. For a given gravity field and fuel energy density, rockets have a maximum size. You need more fuel to move bigger things exponentially, eventually you can't get into orbit no matter how much bigger you make them, as making them bigger just makes things worse.
Of course. That's why you build anything big in parts and combine them on the orbit.
The dangers have been seriously overstated because 50+ years into the nuclear age, even educated people still have fucking ignorant OMIGOSH RADIATION!!!!!eleven!! attitudes
People forget that:
we get a fair amount of radiation anyway
the detrimental effects of radiation are not inherently worse than effects caused by other causes
the chemicals used to generate X amount of power cause many orders of magnitude more damage than even fission reactors
even completely skipping detrimental effects of chemicals, the amount of radioactive isotopes found in fossil fuels burned is bigger than the amount of nuclear waste produced by power plants -- and, these isotopes are sent into the air instead of being neatly contained
If you use the way of Project Orion to deliver things to the orbit (as opposed for using it for propulsion when already in the space), you still keep all of the above advantages except for 4. And once we get the Elevator running, even this argument goes down.
Slashdot Mirror
No way. My Model M keyboard died to food poisoning.
Granted, it served me well for many, many years and I preferred it over any new-fangled crap as it had an usable space bar, usable Ctrl and Alt, no @#$%^&* WinLogo keys. Hell, I used it even though it had Swedish labels all over the wrong keys (';' was 'Å', '(' was ')', etc) (and I don't believe in stickers) -- that design was simply overwhelmingly superior over anything you can buy nowadays.
Of course, if I was more careful trying to repair it, it would probably be still alive. I successfully dismantled it on several occasions to remove pieces of food, but it proved to be once too many.
It also may be a good idea to compare the criticalness level of MSIE vulnerabilities to the Firefox ones that get published.
People just don't bother with minor problems in IE -- on the other hand, there is much vested interest in digging every smallest issue in Firefox, and dragging it into the press.
Wrong. You're confusing low-level formatting (laying physical sectors onto the disk's surface) with creating a filesystem -- this is what's usually called formatting these days.
If you obey the standard PC format, you'll get 18 sectors per track, letting quite a lot of margin space. The margins are needed as the drive doesn't really care whether the new data is put in the exactly same place as the old sector was. Still, the standard is way too conservative, and many programs like fdformat let you reduce the margins. Even Microsoft's original Win95 install floppies used a 1.7MB format.
That was the physical low-level format, a rough equivalent to the level 2 ISO/OSI network layer (level 1 is twiddling the bits, level 2 defines the byte and sector boundaries in the raw bit stream).
FAT formatting (the filesystem) uses up 33 sectors (on the whole disk, not per-track), reducing the useful space to 2847 sectors, that is 1457664 bytes. And this is what you see when you check the free space on an empty floppy.
Well, they are usually (corrected) labelled as 1440KB instead of 1.44MB. They have 2 sides and 80 tracks with 18 512 byte sectors on each track.
It's real 1440KB, without cheating on the sector's headers and/or inter-sector gaps. If you format the floppy yourself, you can shave quite a bit of space from those gaps, and this was a quite popular thing to do.
No, the gibi crap is a new invention, going against established practice. And, it sounds awful.
So... now the bad guys enjoy the code they can read in peace, and look for security holes to their heart's content. They face just a small bunch of overworked developers and very little review.
:p
On the other appendage, a vintage PC in my basement churns packets on its cozy shelf, with an OS that has seen continuous attention of millions of developers...
Face it, the bad guys _will_ have guns. No laws or copyrights can stop them. By obstructing the access you limit the amount of kids but do nothing against determined attackers. But if you let the NRA, er, wait, the Free Software community ensure the public will have guns... hmm, my analogy is kind of shot. You know what I mean
No, basic research is anything but parasitic. It's something that will give benefits in the future. Even if it doesn't have any applications right now, it's very likely to have them later. As an example, an "absolutely worthless" part of mathemathics known as numbers theory gave rise to cryptography and many other fields. It's the basic research that deserves governmental funding the most, as applied science may be able to sustain itself financially.
On the other hand, giving the money to the "poor" is simply dumping it into a hole. Charity may give you a warm fuzzy feeling, but it's nothing but consumption.
Before you call me a "communist" (hell, I'm the opposite), don't forget that having the public giving anyone favours for free is wrong. The idea of having the state encourage people to have ten kids and no job because they can get 90% of the minimal wage for nothing is just repulsive to me -- and living off welfare is a popular model of life.
Having the taxpayers fund anything that's of no benefit to the public is embezzlement. Be that Mr. Sixpack's new TV, the freebie research for a commercial pharmaceutic company, or, the worst of all, the favours friends of politicians get. No parasites, please.
The corporations have no rights to have the sole access to research that was funded by the taxpayers.
Of course, this raises the question whether anyone from countries other than Netherlands should be able to get it for free (gratis) -- but, the free (as in unhindered) exchange of ideas is pretty much what the ideals of science are about.
If a corporation wants a monopoly for knowledge, no one forbids it from paying for the research.
Yeah, I wouldn't dare to touch it, too. It's nothing that you can't learn, but you would need to invest quite a bit of time -- unless you're really annoyed by a particular bug, it's simply not worth the effort.
:p
I feel uncomfortable anywhere near xpi, big chunks of C++ code and most Unix GUI stuff (ironically, I know win32 API well). Thus, I keep to the luser mode there -- reading the docs and at most, filing an uninformed bug. On the other hand, I find C code very easy to comprehend (for me) so when I wanted to, for example, disable the PC honker many years ago, I just did a quick grep over the kernel, commented something out and recompiled. I know, if I RTFMed I would probably find a better solution, but it was still more gracious than my yet earlier way of doing a certain crude hardware mod
If there is a small but annoying bug in a piece of proprietary software, there is absolutely nothing you can do. Send them a bug report? As if anyone will look at it... With OSS, you can just fix it yourself, and in 99.9% cases someone else would already be annoyed by the bug in question enough to deal with it.
Have you ever programmed in Delphi? How many of the bugs you encounter are just trivial, and you would easily fix them on the spot? Delphi is just ridden by those.
Sure, it does. Check out a screenshot with a special twist here.
Good point.
However, formulating this the way you did would make corporations think that what people are allowed to do is limited to moving the license from an inactive medium to an "active" one. By "inactive" I mean thinks like a CD that's sitting on one's shelf while you use your iPod or a book while a blind person listens to it from his text-to-speech rig.
Beh, it's not just the Britland that's suffering this problem. In Poland, we have Telekomunikacja Polska SA (tp SA), although the name obviously must have came from "communism" rather than "communication". Abysmal service, and no competition -- a cable operator would have to provide his own backbone as tp sa obviously isn't going to cooperate.
Just a few tidbits:
Our business crawled to a halt during that time -- but, there is nothing we can do about this. Sue them for lost profits? Hah. All we can possibly get is getting back the bill for 30 days, and it would take a 5-10 years long lawsuit that would cost plenty.
And, the guy who does the real work for them said it's a matter of flipping a switch (as the cabling already existed), but he was not allowed to do it without clearance from the bureaucracy.
This post is pretty grim, indeed. But, as the brighter side, the rumors say there are people who live in Somalia and Sierra Leone...
It's all about people being used to Windows.
To fix this problem, they need to learn about better OSes right in the school. Oh, wait... UK?
No, I do not work at that company, and I try to not even touch their other machines. All I take care of is a single _Debian_ server that replaced a win2k one which kept going down every a few days. That machine has nothing but Samba and MySQL on it -- yet Windows used to break like crazy.
When I installed our program on their machines, I migrated that server to Linux. And lo, it has gone down exactly once, to a _power outage_.
You can update Windows without using Windows Update. And then, you can firewall out all attempts of Windows to phone back home. At that place, all boxes had all the newest hotfixes installed.
Of course, that didn't stop them from falling over whenever someone coughed, but that's typical with Windows, hotfixed or not.
I've heard some geologists talk about the Florida being in a risk of falling into the ocean soon. Hmm... if your bombs could trigger the fault... sounds like a plan.
The important problem is: does canned pork float?
What are we going to have to do to convince "ordinary users" to visit WindowsUpdate once in a while?"
The problem is, MicroSoft went a long way to tell people that no, they can not trust them when it comes to privacy. People from random businesses around here are pretty paranoid now -- I've talked to the CEO of a ~300 employees big company who, albeit a non-technical user himself, went on a long tirade about not letting Windows phone home.
Well, convert it to Q4 when it's done, and then perhaps touch it up to use the new engine.
I've done something like that to Doom -> Q2 maps many years ago, and it was a matter of a completely different way of describing the world. Sectors which could take any shape, be non-convex or even disjoint had to be cut into a number of convex polygons -- negating the world and making it 3D are easy steps. Compared to this, converting a set of convex polyhedrons to another one should be a matter of a simple script -- I guess someone will write one in days after the engine is released.
I was joking here, referring to the Age of Sail. However, I took a look at the page you mentioned, and was really disturbed.
<span incendiary=1 excuse="they deserve it">
Can't these jerks do some basic math? If they would even attempt to compare the amount of chemicals used for currently used spacecraft propulsion to the amount of waste caused by automobiles, airplanes, "clean" coal power plants or factories, they would get some results that are lost in underflow.
</span>
These people are hurting us. Contrary to what you say, there is harm in listening -- you may dismiss Microsoft's FUD from a single source, but most not-so-well-informed people will actually believe that. As Goebbels said, if you tell a lie often enough, people will take is as a truth.
I really, really detest pseudo-environmentalist who don't say a word about SUVs or goods factories but hamper something with negligible environmental that will give great benefits to the future generations.
Of course. That's why you build anything big in parts and combine them on the orbit.
The dangers have been seriously overstated because 50+ years into the nuclear age, even educated people still have fucking ignorant OMIGOSH RADIATION!!!!!eleven!! attitudes
People forget that:
- we get a fair amount of radiation anyway
- the detrimental effects of radiation are not inherently worse than effects caused by other causes
- the chemicals used to generate X amount of power cause many orders of magnitude more damage than even fission reactors
- even completely skipping detrimental effects of chemicals, the amount of radioactive isotopes found in fossil fuels burned is bigger than the amount of nuclear waste produced by power plants -- and, these isotopes are sent into the air instead of being neatly contained
If you use the way of Project Orion to deliver things to the orbit (as opposed for using it for propulsion when already in the space), you still keep all of the above advantages except for 4. And once we get the Elevator running, even this argument goes down.Uhm, in the space?
And what if you launch using the classical environmentally-damaging chemical rockets, and then turn on the nuclear engines once in Earth's orbit?