Who would have thought Star Trek would outlive Star Wars?
Last Trek: May 13
Last Star Wars: May 19
Good Point, but also, the original poster missed the whole quality of life argument.
Star Wars may have been hospitalized with acute hepatitis around the time Episode I was released (introducing the world to Jar Jar), and before that it may have spent years locked in its apartment only coming out to buy bottles of MD20/20 and packs of generic cigrattes, or to release video games and special edition video releases, but it seems to have been somewhat in recovery since then.
...but Star Trek has been living on a feeding tube in a persistive vegatative state for years, complete with groups of Trekkies standing outside the hospital protesting the removal of the tube and networks wanting to get the tube out for financial reasons. (There was hope that it could partially recover, with intensive therapy, before Nemisis and Enterprise, but afterwards, it was clear this was reflex and not a sign of concious brain activity).
It is theoretical science with a model of organizational and structural linking. You don't yell at physicists because they don't have a product, do you?
For acceptance, a theory has to by justified. In physics, this is done with math. In computing, it is done with modeling or test cases. I stand by my point that Xanadu's official materials are heavy on griping about tangible systems that exist in the real world, and sorely lacking due course follow through.
Compare what Xanadu has produced in 40 years to the detail of the original relational database papers or to the physical development of UI research done at Xerox labs. Its fluff by comparison.
Nelson is pissed because he had a great idea that got cicumvented by inferior ideas, but he didn't follow due course to make it something people would believe in implementing.
This is complicated by the fact that his statements of impact and value are way overblown. A purely assocative system of information storage has some great things to offer. It also would be needlessly complex to do simple tasks in that our "inferior" systems in the real world accomplish without hassle. His theories would be far more practical and appealing if they were proposed to as an additional layer of data interaction that could interact with existing systems instead of reinventing the whole computing environment. And that's not just because it would be simpler to adapt, its because purely associative systems of data storage have significant disadvantages as well as advantages. Anyone who has ever had the combined pleasure and horror of working with a purely object-oriented database can attest to that fact.
Allegedly, the name "Carnivore" came because it was based upon a commercial filter called "Omnivore", but Carnivore filtered more effectively to only get the "meat", meaning relevant information. Given the fears that the FBI has products that arbitrarily sniff email looking for people to investigate, I propse the following filter packages:
Atkins: contains the relevant material found by Carnivore, but also chooses select material not relavant to the investigation that may be of interest.
Vegetarian: skips all of the material relevant to the investigation and returns everything else
Vegan: returns only material expressly irrelevant for investigation, especially emails including lot's of l33t text and rants about porn and warez sites.
Please tell me that the owners of this site are not only hosting the site as a place for conspiracy theory... It disturbes me that one of the first article on the site references The Onion. -M@
The Onion is a satyrical news site, not a conspiracy site.
Volokh Conspiracy is a vaguely libertarian / accuracy of information / freedom of information / legal issues site that is anything but a conspiracy buff site. (If you read a few of their articles, they are more prone to debunk or attempt to debunk wild theories than espouse them).
The onion article was funny, and I presume presenting it as news was intended to be humorous to the legal and polical mined audience of the site. (It sure cracked me up in that context).
Disclaimer: I'm not trashing you. Its easy to get so sick of half-truths, crazy accusations, and misrepresentations on the net that you start looking for it without checking into the matter (sort of becoming part of the problem by being so drowned in it), but if you check your "facts", Volokh is more or less opposite to what you are proposing.
This whole thing really highlights how the courts are clueless about technology and tend to adopt rulings that make the situation worse.
If Blackberry does infringe on legitimate patents held by NTP, then NTP should be compensated, but forcing RIM to cease sales and service of an excellent product with a good-sized user base is ridiculous. Its not like NTP has a competing product Blackberry users can be moved to, nor will they. By all accounts, NTP appears to be the patent equivalent of cybersquaters extorting money for companies to get the URL for their company name. (Frankly, I think that fact ought to play some role in the decision, but I don't know enough about patent law to comment).
Plus, if Blackberry is on the wrong, the ruling hurts NTP in two ways: 1) shutting down Blackberry when NTP has no competing product hurts NTP's possibility for revenue from the settlement, and 2) its sort of like a prosecutor offering only a death penalty murder one sentence in an iffy murde trial: other courts are going to more likely to go against the ruling to avoid its ridiculous severity. In Blackberry's favor its ridiculous because it effectively serves as a terror tactic threatening to kill their business in the market, which encourages them to be extorted into settlement, even if they are in the right.
This reminds me of the DOJ Microsoft battle. The potential results of a ruling (a ruling that should have been made to encourage competition) would have crippled capabilities in the OS that users should have. The OS and documents and browsers and media files should interact tightly. Users should have media and browsing capabilities available almost out of the box (note the almost there). What should have happened is that Microsoft should have been required to publish open hooks in the OS for all of their inside capabilities, and they should have been required to put installation options for thirs party products in there along with IE and Media Player. Any other solution ends up hurting end users; so, you end up giving in to monopoly to protect users or hurting users to protect competition. It doesn't have to be that way. The courts just need to have common senes instead of proposing ridiculout solutions
I'm not well-versed in Xanadu's history save for the links I've followed here; so, I apologize if I'm just missing something...
BUT I mostly, from the links I have followed that aren't broken or full of missing images and text, I get two impressions:
First: in forty years, it they haven't come up with as much of a functional of a demo of their ideas as most cheesy web start-ups could churn out in a week or two.
I mean, their official document can't show much more than a 25 year old black and white photo of an unreadable screen and one screenshot that doesn't show anything very interesting or meaningful (which anyone on this site could have whipped up in 10 minutes with tools that came built into Windows 3.1).
Second, they seem really mad. I kept wanting to hear something profound, and all I kept hearing is how much Xanadu is not like the world wide web, and how much the world sucks because of that fact.
All of their text has that "we thought of it first and better, but now we don't really have anything dramatic to offer to change the tide; so, were just mad" tone.
It reminds me of then I was working with Creative Internet Solutions, an excellenet web development firm started by a guy with close ties to the people who created Cold Fusion, which in turn was bought by Control Data. That actually brought in some talent and common sense, and that era of the business had the best, brightest group of people I have ever worked with. Then they got bought out by Syntegra/BT. We kept waiting for Syntegra to hype the capabilities of the organization. They never did (to this day the Synterga home page underplays web/intranet capabilities in favor of pimping directory services). But somewhere along the line, BT figured out they had thought of, and patented, hyperlinks (or really something sort of like hyperlinks, to be honest). They actually started persuing the idea that they owned the concept that drove the world wide web.
It was the most embarassing thing ever. For a short time, Syntegra could have been to hyperlinks what those twits at SCO are to Linux. Fortunately they backed away from it.
Xanadu's text has all of the spite and the "we missed our moment of opportunity" whining of the Syntegra reaction (fortunately lacking the consideration of legal action). And nothing based on giving the world something impressive and tangible to make people want to adopt their concepts.
I have the impression that, if they stopped whining about HTML, it seems like their concepts are more about file management, document object structure, and editing environments. If they tried to work with the bodies responsible for embedded document standards or produce an open source editor or file shell that demonstrated some tangible advantages of their concepts, maybe they would get somewhere.
Well, you've got my respect. Keeping an NT4 setup running that well (and supporting a remote Java app from an MS platform as well), that's an accomplishment.
I also love that you replaced OWA. The lastest version is still giving me nightmares (and its way better than 5.5 was).
I agree on needing to avoid errors, not just recover from them -- especially in you're scenario -- but in general as well. w2k/w2k3 have been legitimately more stable in my experience, but given your situation, uprgading would be crazy. What happens for you now with NT4 support getting dropped?
By the way, thanks for the sysinternals.com reference. Great site! It has things I've looked for and failed to find before. Very, very cool...
IIS4 on NT4 takes a dive and becomes completely unresponsive to attempts to restart the service, 9 out of 10 times you can still fix it in ~20 seconds or so without a reboot simply by killing both the web publishing service and the inetinfo.exe process using the 'kill.exe' command line tool
An excellent point, when the service is just crapped out and non-responsive. Kill can be a life-saver.
But I was really talking about when the process hangs in an error state or locks on a bad web page and pegs out the processor. When that happens, under NT4, you'll be lucky if you can get TaskMgr up to restart. You're not likely going to get a command window up to run kill. Sometimes, you're just stuck power cycling. THAT happened regularly managing IIS4 web sites. It almost never happens on IIS5 or greater.
NOT the biggest ID thief ever... but the biggest ID theif ever caught.
Good point, and more than that, I think he's the biggest by the number of identities stolen or the total cost to the creditors, but he may not have personally made the most money from identity theft.
60$ plus anything extra his friends choose to kick back to him isn't exactly a big profit per identity. Actually its really little when you consider how much damage he must have done to people's lives. But I guess with 10's of thousands of identities to sell, it didn't mattet to him.
Paying out 1.1 mil for what is in truth just new icon rendering lib and a folder view.dll is downright stupid, especially when there will be *no* change in actual performance or function.
You must be running a lot of copies of NT to make the upgrade cost 1.1 million. If that's the case, obviously the cost is an issue; so, you have a point, but that does not mean that the statement that 2003 Server is just some frills and UI improvements is anywhere within a couple million universes of reality.
IIS under 2003 Server (especially 2003 Web, which cleans out a lot of the crap that comes with 2003 that you don't need for a web server) generally doubles performance over 2000, and 2000 and/or.Net migration generally improves performance between 25% and 400% over IIS4 on NT4.0. (Granted the improvement over 150% or so isn't likely to occur with w2k migration unless you are migrated asp to asp+).
Furthermore, getting away from the wealth of problems with Exhange 5.5 in performance, maintenance issues, reliability, database size is hardly no change. I still think Exchange is a crappy product (with some cool features). Its basically something you get stuck running in a Microsoft environment because it integrates better with everything else you are running, but at least Exhange 2k is the first version I don't think should have been labeled "beta" or "RC" or perhaps "partial congealed vaporware".
If performance and reliability aren't issues for you, then I'd say roll the Option Pack 4, dude, but its still completely untrue that 2k and 2k3 don't offer dramatically better performance and also reliability.
There's a lot of other things that, if you're running MS systems, really make a difference. NT4, if IIS hangs, you're rebooting (and that might take 30 minutes unless you hit the power switch because the processor locks). IIS5/w2k, you can usually restart IIS with a couple clicks and the processor seldom locks from IIS. w2k auto recovers some web services. You can actually install components into the web server in 2k without having to shut the site down every time you test a version. Etc. Etc. Etc.
I am sorry that I cannot reccomend any free virus scanners. The *only* virus scanner that I ever reccomend to anyone now is TrendMicro. After working with it for a while now, I almost refuse to fix problems with McAfee and Norton.
I really, really agree. I remember the gold old days when McAfee was an excellent product and a lot closer to being actually free. Norton was always up and down, but used to be better. But for a long time, I've found them both really disappointing in both how much they miss and how many hassles and slowdowns they create.
TrendMicro products are great by comparison.
They also excel versus a lot of startups. A while back I tried a Panda anti-virus package (so I like to check different products, don't flame me for it). It was a fair/mediocre anti-virus product, not dramatically better or worse than Norton, for example.
But, I made the mistake of testing their firewall product that came with the install. I keep hoping for a software fireall that actual works without breaking everything or causing tons of hassles to use on client sites (but never have).
Anyway, my system started slowing down, hanging, and blue-screening at random. I thought I had a virus. I didn't have a virus. I had a firewall. After about 12 hours of hell, I eventually diagnosed the firewall as the source of the problems. What a piece of crap! Inspite of all of the anti-Microsoft retorhic, its pretty rare that I find anything remotely reputable that will consistenly bluescreen 2k or XP, excepting really crappy device drivers.
Anyway, that's sort of a tangent, but the point is that there is a lot of crappy AV software out there, and you're TrendMicro recommendation is excellent.
Oh, one other thing, has anyone else notices how many anti-virus programs no longer include a memory scan? What the heck is up with that? Why even bother trying to find and clean files on disk when there could be something in memory working against you. Especially since a lot of spyware isn't fair from a virus in action or effects, and so many anti-virus programs skimp on checking for spyware and adware installations, including old, common ones that really interfere with system usage.
Hey can someone please tell me how I can find out where my windows is installed? It says here http://secunia.com/internet_explorer_command_execu tion_vulnerability_test that windows needs to be installed in c:\windows\ for their test exploit to work 'properly'
Computer specs: iBook g3 800mhz...
In that case, you're windows installation is probably along an exterior wall of your house or office. Its where you'll notice sunlight coming in during daytime hours, and be careful, it is a huge security vulnerability.
BTW: Thanks! Your comment was the first time I really picked up the irony that Microsoft Windows is named after the weakest point of physical security and the cause of most unnecessary energy loss in most buildings. I'm sort of a Microsoft guy, and I still think that's extremely funny and more than a little prescient.
Well, it's really just another example of engineers doing the job right, only to then have a PHB of some ilk tell them, "Now I want to be able to watch this from my office or my cell phone or from home, etc." Where the Engineer exclaims, "Doh!" and does it because he/she's not paid to THINK.
I agree, but it really is an industry-wide problem with anything targeted at "consumers"/home users.
Unfortunately, since everything is getting connected and we rely on technology more and more, this is becoming an issue.
Everything from Wireless Network, to pre-sp2 WinXP Windows, to almost every home Cable/DSL has some security that should be on off by default to make it usable for end users.
I agree its a marketing/customer relations issue, and not an engineering issue (usually, there are a lot of designs that really failed to take into account the ingenuity of the millions of people who like messing with stuff for the sake of it), but it is a problem.
More unfortunately, its not an easily solved problem. Its not like we can make the average home user tech and security savvy (most people can't program a VCR, let alone program IP Tables), and its not like companies are going to give up market share by seeming difficult to install to average users.
I think we need more default security. If not, identity theft, Worms killin networks, privacy violations, etc., are going to go through the roof. Obviously, even Microsoft is finally sort of realizing this (but look at the sp2 backlash). A lot of it is about making good interfaces and protocols to automate setting up security (like a lot of the Cable/DSL systems are finally picking up), but being a developer myself, I know its much easier said then done, and sometimes, with existing technology, its just plain impossible...
Yeah, Sunday's do sort of have a post-apocalyptic, "where did all the people go?" feel a lot of places.
I lived in St. Paul, Minnesota for a while (which is the capitol, afterall), and on Sunday evening, it felt like there was a martial law curfew in affect.
This is not entirely fair. The 386SX had a narrower external bus, making 386SX motherboards cheaper than 386DX ones. The original Celerons were PIIs who's cache failed testing. The Celeron A series only had half as much cache as the PII, making it cheaper to produce.
Point taken. I was a bit over-zealous. Reducing cache or having a more primative bus are valid cost savings. I do still stand by the comment that this generally becomes fairly crass marketing, especially when models like the Celeron are continued intentionally crippled after the original QC failure issues are resolved.
What's worse is how they are marketed. Celeron's were seldom marketed as a "value" chip. For a long time, they were dumped in a majority of home systems, and for long periods, you could get a slower clock-rate P4 (not to mention some great AMD chips) for close to the same price that performed better overall, because the horrible bus performance on some eras of the Celeron made a lot current software seem sluggish due to unnecesary IO bottlenecks.
I think you've got this the wrong way around. The XT had a 4.77MHz 8088 (used to save money on the motherboard). Many of the crappy clones (including the Amstrad PC1640 I owned) had 8MHz 8086 chips. Some had 8, 10 or (I think) 12MHz NEC V30 (8086 compatible's), which were even faster.
You are completely correct. I had it backwards.
Hey, I had an Amstrad too. I learned to program in real, compiled langauges for the first time on it (Turbo C and Pascal), with real IDE's and context sensitive help, which was a big deal back then after spending years typing BASIC into the command line on Apple's. By the time I replaced the Amstrad, it had 9 Megs of bad sectors on an 20 Meg drive. Thank God for Norton's...
Exactly the same thing that happened with the i860. The Itanium, while being a theoretically interesting chip, requires very clever compilers.
Thanks for the info. So, is their 64-bit drive going to be dead, or just going to be years before it settles into the industry? If they aren't pushing forward with the chip, is there any word any how Intel hopes to stay remotely competive with AMD (technically speaking, not counting what we can take as given: that they'll market the hell out of whatever they have and twist board and box manufacturers arms to make them use Intel chips even if AMD is better. Hmm...for some reason making that comment reminds me of the early P4 Rambus fiasco...)
Craigslist has the whole user community thing going for it. Meanwhile, most newspapers require registration or even subscription to view information online, and only put a paltry subset of their classifieds online, often at ridiculous add-in fees for ad placers.
In otherwords, traditional major newspapers pretty much go out of their way to chase away online business to more online-friendly sites.
Its not suprising they're losing business, and good, they've done a rotten job of adapting to the net, making an online version that is inferior, to the printed paper, when there is no reason it shouldn't/couldn't be the other way around.
Please cite specific examples or studies that support your assertion. Two western countries that do not have freedom of speech are France and Germany and yet the Internet seems to be doing just fine in both countries.
Obviously, the Internet "functions" in countries that don't have freedom of speach.
I don't think anyone was trying to say that the IP6 network in China will cease to exist because of lack of civil liberties.
The rather obvious point that all of these semantic games ignore is, while its great that they have a shiney new fast backbone in a few select areas of China, it isn't going to be the Internet that most of us experience, and that is detrimental to the people of China, just like torturing political prisoners or gunning down unarmed student protestors -- which the Western world largely does nothing about because we use China for cheap labor and don't want to piss off the Chinese government.
Furthermore, the fact that China has implemented the world's most state of the art Internet backbone to all of, what 30-40 locations is probably intended more for propaganda value than for its usefulness. It doesn't sound like the super-backbone will extend to homes and cyber cafe's any time soon, does it? That's pretty typical -- its for political value, and certainly not for the overall populace.
The Internet they will/do have in China, will circumvent one of the fundamental strengths of the Internet, which is that you or I can look up (with some bounds, obviously, i.e., plans for nukes, kiddie-porn, etc.) almost anything on the Internet.
The cultural censorship in China is way out of line, and generally, not appreciated by the Chineese population. That is what the original poster was getting to, and its a valid point. Its also certainly playing word games with how previous posters used or ascribed freedom in their posts, but I guess that's easier than actually saying something relavant about freedom and communication.
Someone said freedom of speach is required for information and communication, which is obviously an overstatement, but freedom of speach is required for the sort of effective, open communication that encourages things like freedom, change, and democracy, which is why we have things like freedom of speach and public education in the first place.
So, back to the original point, the real Internet was most of the Western world have it would give a place of free communication and information exchange, including things like exploring or challenging cultural ideas, and it frankly sucks that China is making this technologically great backbone that will be censored and probably monitored in ways that would be completely unacceptable to anyone arguing in this thread if they suddenly had to deal with it. (Even after the Patriot Acts...)
In China's defense, sort of, I bet they are really tired of hearing the US describe itself as "the world's last super power"...:)
Jokes asside, this is a really good thing, and its long overdue.
Microsoft takes a lot of flack for all of the buffer-overrun exploits, but the fact is, it used to be standard programming practice not to check every buffer size because the danger wasn't understood; so, it was extra code and wasted processor cycles.
The trouble is a fundamental flaw in DOS/Win/PC architecture that interleaves code and data closely and doesn't throw protection errors based on overwriting allocated data space. I'm not sure if that's Microsoft's fault or Intel's or both, but its a fundamental enough problem that there hasn't been an easy solution.
So, the fact that there is finally an intrinsic solution at the processor and OS level is huge. It means that the most common source for exploits will go away, mostly or completely, without waiting for millions of lines of code to be rewritten. Its probably better for execution speed than a strictly compiler based solution.
A few points and items that people have missed, and a question:
- An important feature of the Pentium II was that it had optimizations to run both 16-bit and 32-bit code with reasonable performance (at least according to Intel's marketing at the time). The PPro ran NT great, but was slower than a Pentium running 16 bit. At the time of release, this was still an issue. The MMX thing was at initially perceived as a cool for NT based 3D gaming crowd, but lack of driver support and then the ugly, early days of DirectX sort of killed that idea.
- The P-III release was, at the time, something of a farce. There was almost no major core design improvements besides KNI, and clock-speed improvements were modest, at best. There was the whole "Internet Optimized" hype, which I've never heard justified.
The most notorious item at the time of the release of the P-III was the addition of the on-chip serial number, which really seemed at the time to be more intended to play big brother and/or to let OS vendor's crack down on piracy than to provide "security" as it was hyped. I suspect if it wasn't for public recoil, that may have been the case.
Somone asked about Celerons: Celerons, the 486SX, the 386SX, and also AMD Durons are variations of the same, somewhat despicable marketing concept of taking a processor and crippling it in some way so you can sell it for less without devaluing the rest of your chips. FSB speed, data bus bit size, floating point processor, reduced cache, and hacked down clock rates have all been used. The only time it was justified was with the 486SX where the high failure rate of 486DX chips in floating point unit and/or at higher clock speeds made the 486SX a necessary way of unloading failed chips.
Speaking of that concept, I think a bunch of crappy XT clones used the 8088 instead of the 8086 for much of the same reason: the 88 had an 8 bit bus and the 86 had a 16 bit bus. Is that correct?
One last thing, as far as what was originally going to be the P7 (by Intel's standards), they released the original P4 as a P6 generation chip to tide over until their 64-bit chip co-developed with HP came into realization. The "786" was supposed to be a 64 bit processor.
Which brings up my question: even with 64bit Windows being more or less viable, it seems like Intel's 64 bit push has lost all of its steam, and HP has supposedly dropped out. What happened?
Either you've run into the strangest.Net situations imaginable and managed to avoid the *typical* issues with a Java application, you don't know what you're talking about, or you're just plain misrepresenting.
First off, a.Net developer who required IIS to be installed on the *client* machine would be an idiot who went well out of his way to write a ridiculous application (presuming it wasn't a server-side web application, of course).
If you are talking about a.Net application that requires an IIS server somewhere on the net, then you are talking about web/client-server/web services applications, which is the right way to develop a large enterprise application and directly correlates to a J2EE or JSP application, which would also require setting a Java or Java/Web server.
If that's the case, complaining about the hassle of setting up IIS is a joke. IIS runs out of the box and you can install services and applications into it with a few clicks. Ever setup Tomcat under Apache? Then deal with literally hours of ridiculous configuration to get one JSP app or web service running? It you are comparing apples to apples (server-based apps to server based apps) as far as setup concerns go, Microsoft, for its many flaws in some areas, is certainly dozens of times better than Java.
Secondly, as far as Desktop setup goes,.Net applications don't take much or any configuration to get going on an up-to-date Windows box, and if they do, you can run the packaging/installation tools and whip up a pretty bullet proof installation tool in a few minutes. Issues with getting.Net running on a client box are nothing compared to all of the version incompatibility and circa-1982 installation hassles of the Java world.
Plus,.Net has an increbible amount of capabilities built into it that no plain-paper Java insallation will have; so, your chance of an enterprise application requiring a bunch of extra installation and configuration hassles are dramatically higher with Java.
Finally, I know its not your point, but the application performance issue is real. People say Java applications that are slow are the fault of the developers. Whatever. A reasonably well programmed.Net application will run great on a mediocre Windows box. Java applications from the biggest names in the industry (Oracle, IBM, Sun, Borland) run like crap on any Windows box -- slow and generally suprisingly buggy as well for commerical applications. In this case, the application is going to be running primarily on Windows boxes; so, the fact that Java applications tend to suck on Windows is a significant issue, and even if your specious claims about configuration being easier under Java (God! I can't believe people are actually making a case for that...I'm honestly laughing), even if configuration were harder, it would be worth it to have a usable application...
Slashdot Mirror
Star Wars may have been hospitalized with acute hepatitis around the time Episode I was released (introducing the world to Jar Jar), and before that it may have spent years locked in its apartment only coming out to buy bottles of MD20/20 and packs of generic cigrattes, or to release video games and special edition video releases, but it seems to have been somewhat in recovery since then.
The new company will be called Adobe Systems, Inc."
I think Macrosoft would be a more appropriate name.
Disposable. Sticky. Macintosh PostIt notes!
That ought to cover the major ones. Carry on with the inevitable GNOME/KDE/XFCE/X flamefest now.
...there's still an X vs. KDE contingent?!?!?
I don't agree, but I understand the GNOME vs. KDE thing, but...
Outside of people who can't upgrade their circa 1995 CPU, people who are emotionally invested in Lynx, and Microsoft marketing directors?
WOW...
It is theoretical science with a model of organizational and structural linking. You don't yell at physicists because they don't have a product, do you?
For acceptance, a theory has to by justified. In physics, this is done with math. In computing, it is done with modeling or test cases. I stand by my point that Xanadu's official materials are heavy on griping about tangible systems that exist in the real world, and sorely lacking due course follow through.
Compare what Xanadu has produced in 40 years to the detail of the original relational database papers or to the physical development of UI research done at Xerox labs. Its fluff by comparison.
Nelson is pissed because he had a great idea that got cicumvented by inferior ideas, but he didn't follow due course to make it something people would believe in implementing.
This is complicated by the fact that his statements of impact and value are way overblown. A purely assocative system of information storage has some great things to offer. It also would be needlessly complex to do simple tasks in that our "inferior" systems in the real world accomplish without hassle. His theories would be far more practical and appealing if they were proposed to as an additional layer of data interaction that could interact with existing systems instead of reinventing the whole computing environment. And that's not just because it would be simpler to adapt, its because purely associative systems of data storage have significant disadvantages as well as advantages. Anyone who has ever had the combined pleasure and horror of working with a purely object-oriented database can attest to that fact.
Allegedly, the name "Carnivore" came because it was based upon a commercial filter called "Omnivore", but Carnivore filtered more effectively to only get the "meat", meaning relevant information. Given the fears that the FBI has products that arbitrarily sniff email looking for people to investigate, I propse the following filter packages:
Atkins: contains the relevant material found by Carnivore, but also chooses select material not relavant to the investigation that may be of interest.
Vegetarian: skips all of the material relevant to the investigation and returns everything else
Vegan: returns only material expressly irrelevant for investigation, especially emails including lot's of l33t text and rants about porn and warez sites.
Please tell me that the owners of this site are not only hosting the site as a place for conspiracy theory... It disturbes me that one of the first article on the site references The Onion. -M@
The Onion is a satyrical news site, not a conspiracy site.
Volokh Conspiracy is a vaguely libertarian / accuracy of information / freedom of information / legal issues site that is anything but a conspiracy buff site. (If you read a few of their articles, they are more prone to debunk or attempt to debunk wild theories than espouse them).
The onion article was funny, and I presume presenting it as news was intended to be humorous to the legal and polical mined audience of the site. (It sure cracked me up in that context).
Disclaimer: I'm not trashing you. Its easy to get so sick of half-truths, crazy accusations, and misrepresentations on the net that you start looking for it without checking into the matter (sort of becoming part of the problem by being so drowned in it), but if you check your "facts", Volokh is more or less opposite to what you are proposing.
This whole thing really highlights how the courts are clueless about technology and tend to adopt rulings that make the situation worse.
If Blackberry does infringe on legitimate patents held by NTP, then NTP should be compensated, but forcing RIM to cease sales and service of an excellent product with a good-sized user base is ridiculous. Its not like NTP has a competing product Blackberry users can be moved to, nor will they. By all accounts, NTP appears to be the patent equivalent of cybersquaters extorting money for companies to get the URL for their company name. (Frankly, I think that fact ought to play some role in the decision, but I don't know enough about patent law to comment).
Plus, if Blackberry is on the wrong, the ruling hurts NTP in two ways: 1) shutting down Blackberry when NTP has no competing product hurts NTP's possibility for revenue from the settlement, and 2) its sort of like a prosecutor offering only a death penalty murder one sentence in an iffy murde trial: other courts are going to more likely to go against the ruling to avoid its ridiculous severity. In Blackberry's favor its ridiculous because it effectively serves as a terror tactic threatening to kill their business in the market, which encourages them to be extorted into settlement, even if they are in the right.
This reminds me of the DOJ Microsoft battle. The potential results of a ruling (a ruling that should have been made to encourage competition) would have crippled capabilities in the OS that users should have. The OS and documents and browsers and media files should interact tightly. Users should have media and browsing capabilities available almost out of the box (note the almost there). What should have happened is that Microsoft should have been required to publish open hooks in the OS for all of their inside capabilities, and they should have been required to put installation options for thirs party products in there along with IE and Media Player. Any other solution ends up hurting end users; so, you end up giving in to monopoly to protect users or hurting users to protect competition. It doesn't have to be that way. The courts just need to have common senes instead of proposing ridiculout solutions
I'm not well-versed in Xanadu's history save for the links I've followed here; so, I apologize if I'm just missing something...
BUT I mostly, from the links I have followed that aren't broken or full of missing images and text, I get two impressions:
First: in forty years, it they haven't come up with as much of a functional of a demo of their ideas as most cheesy web start-ups could churn out in a week or two.
I mean, their official document can't show much more than a 25 year old black and white photo of an unreadable screen and one screenshot that doesn't show anything very interesting or meaningful (which anyone on this site could have whipped up in 10 minutes with tools that came built into Windows 3.1).
Second, they seem really mad. I kept wanting to hear something profound, and all I kept hearing is how much Xanadu is not like the world wide web, and how much the world sucks because of that fact.
All of their text has that "we thought of it first and better, but now we don't really have anything dramatic to offer to change the tide; so, were just mad" tone.
It reminds me of then I was working with Creative Internet Solutions, an excellenet web development firm started by a guy with close ties to the people who created Cold Fusion, which in turn was bought by Control Data. That actually brought in some talent and common sense, and that era of the business had the best, brightest group of people I have ever worked with. Then they got bought out by Syntegra/BT. We kept waiting for Syntegra to hype the capabilities of the organization. They never did (to this day the Synterga home page underplays web/intranet capabilities in favor of pimping directory services). But somewhere along the line, BT figured out they had thought of, and patented, hyperlinks (or really something sort of like hyperlinks, to be honest). They actually started persuing the idea that they owned the concept that drove the world wide web.
It was the most embarassing thing ever. For a short time, Syntegra could have been to hyperlinks what those twits at SCO are to Linux. Fortunately they backed away from it.
Xanadu's text has all of the spite and the "we missed our moment of opportunity" whining of the Syntegra reaction (fortunately lacking the consideration of legal action). And nothing based on giving the world something impressive and tangible to make people want to adopt their concepts.
I have the impression that, if they stopped whining about HTML, it seems like their concepts are more about file management, document object structure, and editing environments. If they tried to work with the bodies responsible for embedded document standards or produce an open source editor or file shell that demonstrated some tangible advantages of their concepts, maybe they would get somewhere.
Well, you've got my respect. Keeping an NT4 setup running that well (and supporting a remote Java app from an MS platform as well), that's an accomplishment.
I also love that you replaced OWA. The lastest version is still giving me nightmares (and its way better than 5.5 was).
I agree on needing to avoid errors, not just recover from them -- especially in you're scenario -- but in general as well. w2k/w2k3 have been legitimately more stable in my experience, but given your situation, uprgading would be crazy. What happens for you now with NT4 support getting dropped?
By the way, thanks for the sysinternals.com reference. Great site! It has things I've looked for and failed to find before. Very, very cool...
IIS4 on NT4 takes a dive and becomes completely unresponsive to attempts to restart the service, 9 out of 10 times you can still fix it in ~20 seconds or so without a reboot simply by killing both the web publishing service and the inetinfo.exe process using the 'kill.exe' command line tool
An excellent point, when the service is just crapped out and non-responsive. Kill can be a life-saver.
But I was really talking about when the process hangs in an error state or locks on a bad web page and pegs out the processor. When that happens, under NT4, you'll be lucky if you can get TaskMgr up to restart. You're not likely going to get a command window up to run kill. Sometimes, you're just stuck power cycling. THAT happened regularly managing IIS4 web sites. It almost never happens on IIS5 or greater.
NOT the biggest ID thief ever... but the biggest ID theif ever caught.
Good point, and more than that, I think he's the biggest by the number of identities stolen or the total cost to the creditors, but he may not have personally made the most money from identity theft.
60$ plus anything extra his friends choose to kick back to him isn't exactly a big profit per identity. Actually its really little when you consider how much damage he must have done to people's lives. But I guess with 10's of thousands of identities to sell, it didn't mattet to him.
Paying out 1.1 mil for what is in truth just new icon rendering lib and a folder view .dll is downright stupid, especially when there will be *no* change in actual performance or function.
.Net migration generally improves performance between 25% and 400% over IIS4 on NT4.0. (Granted the improvement over 150% or so isn't likely to occur with w2k migration unless you are migrated asp to asp+).
You must be running a lot of copies of NT to make the upgrade cost 1.1 million. If that's the case, obviously the cost is an issue; so, you have a point, but that does not mean that the statement that 2003 Server is just some frills and UI improvements is anywhere within a couple million universes of reality.
IIS under 2003 Server (especially 2003 Web, which cleans out a lot of the crap that comes with 2003 that you don't need for a web server) generally doubles performance over 2000, and 2000 and/or
Furthermore, getting away from the wealth of problems with Exhange 5.5 in performance, maintenance issues, reliability, database size is hardly no change. I still think Exchange is a crappy product (with some cool features). Its basically something you get stuck running in a Microsoft environment because it integrates better with everything else you are running, but at least Exhange 2k is the first version I don't think should have been labeled "beta" or "RC" or perhaps "partial congealed vaporware".
If performance and reliability aren't issues for you, then I'd say roll the Option Pack 4, dude, but its still completely untrue that 2k and 2k3 don't offer dramatically better performance and also reliability.
There's a lot of other things that, if you're running MS systems, really make a difference. NT4, if IIS hangs, you're rebooting (and that might take 30 minutes unless you hit the power switch because the processor locks). IIS5/w2k, you can usually restart IIS with a couple clicks and the processor seldom locks from IIS. w2k auto recovers some web services. You can actually install components into the web server in 2k without having to shut the site down every time you test a version. Etc. Etc. Etc.
I am sorry that I cannot reccomend any free virus scanners. The *only* virus scanner that I ever reccomend to anyone now is TrendMicro. After working with it for a while now, I almost refuse to fix problems with McAfee and Norton.
I really, really agree. I remember the gold old days when McAfee was an excellent product and a lot closer to being actually free. Norton was always up and down, but used to be better. But for a long time, I've found them both really disappointing in both how much they miss and how many hassles and slowdowns they create.
TrendMicro products are great by comparison.
They also excel versus a lot of startups. A while back I tried a Panda anti-virus package (so I like to check different products, don't flame me for it). It was a fair/mediocre anti-virus product, not dramatically better or worse than Norton, for example.
But, I made the mistake of testing their firewall product that came with the install. I keep hoping for a software fireall that actual works without breaking everything or causing tons of hassles to use on client sites (but never have).
Anyway, my system started slowing down, hanging, and blue-screening at random. I thought I had a virus. I didn't have a virus. I had a firewall. After about 12 hours of hell, I eventually diagnosed the firewall as the source of the problems. What a piece of crap! Inspite of all of the anti-Microsoft retorhic, its pretty rare that I find anything remotely reputable that will consistenly bluescreen 2k or XP, excepting really crappy device drivers.
Anyway, that's sort of a tangent, but the point is that there is a lot of crappy AV software out there, and you're TrendMicro recommendation is excellent.
Oh, one other thing, has anyone else notices how many anti-virus programs no longer include a memory scan? What the heck is up with that? Why even bother trying to find and clean files on disk when there could be something in memory working against you. Especially since a lot of spyware isn't fair from a virus in action or effects, and so many anti-virus programs skimp on checking for spyware and adware installations, including old, common ones that really interfere with system usage.
Hey can someone please tell me how I can find out where my windows is installed? It says here http://secunia.com/internet_explorer_command_execu tion_vulnerability_test that windows needs to be installed in c:\windows\ for their test exploit to work 'properly'
Computer specs: iBook g3 800mhz...
In that case, you're windows installation is probably along an exterior wall of your house or office. Its where you'll notice sunlight coming in during daytime hours, and be careful, it is a huge security vulnerability.
BTW: Thanks! Your comment was the first time I really picked up the irony that Microsoft Windows is named after the weakest point of physical security and the cause of most unnecessary energy loss in most buildings. I'm sort of a Microsoft guy, and I still think that's extremely funny and more than a little prescient.
Well, it's really just another example of engineers doing the job right, only to then have a PHB of some ilk tell them, "Now I want to be able to watch this from my office or my cell phone or from home, etc." Where the Engineer exclaims, "Doh!" and does it because he/she's not paid to THINK.
I agree, but it really is an industry-wide problem with anything targeted at "consumers"/home users.
Unfortunately, since everything is getting connected and we rely on technology more and more, this is becoming an issue.
Everything from Wireless Network, to pre-sp2 WinXP Windows, to almost every home Cable/DSL has some security that should be on off by default to make it usable for end users.
I agree its a marketing/customer relations issue, and not an engineering issue (usually, there are a lot of designs that really failed to take into account the ingenuity of the millions of people who like messing with stuff for the sake of it), but it is a problem.
More unfortunately, its not an easily solved problem. Its not like we can make the average home user tech and security savvy (most people can't program a VCR, let alone program IP Tables), and its not like companies are going to give up market share by seeming difficult to install to average users.
I think we need more default security. If not, identity theft, Worms killin networks, privacy violations, etc., are going to go through the roof. Obviously, even Microsoft is finally sort of realizing this (but look at the sp2 backlash). A lot of it is about making good interfaces and protocols to automate setting up security (like a lot of the Cable/DSL systems are finally picking up), but being a developer myself, I know its much easier said then done, and sometimes, with existing technology, its just plain impossible...
Yeah, Sunday's do sort of have a post-apocalyptic, "where did all the people go?" feel a lot of places.
I lived in St. Paul, Minnesota for a while (which is the capitol, afterall), and on Sunday evening, it felt like there was a martial law curfew in affect.
What's worse is how they are marketed. Celeron's were seldom marketed as a "value" chip. For a long time, they were dumped in a majority of home systems, and for long periods, you could get a slower clock-rate P4 (not to mention some great AMD chips) for close to the same price that performed better overall, because the horrible bus performance on some eras of the Celeron made a lot current software seem sluggish due to unnecesary IO bottlenecks.
You are completely correct. I had it backwards.
Hey, I had an Amstrad too. I learned to program in real, compiled langauges for the first time on it (Turbo C and Pascal), with real IDE's and context sensitive help, which was a big deal back then after spending years typing BASIC into the command line on Apple's. By the time I replaced the Amstrad, it had 9 Megs of bad sectors on an 20 Meg drive. Thank God for Norton's...
Thanks for the info. So, is their 64-bit drive going to be dead, or just going to be years before it settles into the industry? If they aren't pushing forward with the chip, is there any word any how Intel hopes to stay remotely competive with AMD (technically speaking, not counting what we can take as given: that they'll market the hell out of whatever they have and twist board and box manufacturers arms to make them use Intel chips even if AMD is better. Hmm...for some reason making that comment reminds me of the early P4 Rambus fiasco...)
Craigslist has the whole user community thing going for it. Meanwhile, most newspapers require registration or even subscription to view information online, and only put a paltry subset of their classifieds online, often at ridiculous add-in fees for ad placers.
In otherwords, traditional major newspapers pretty much go out of their way to chase away online business to more online-friendly sites.
Its not suprising they're losing business, and good, they've done a rotten job of adapting to the net, making an online version that is inferior, to the printed paper, when there is no reason it shouldn't/couldn't be the other way around.
I don't think anyone was trying to say that the IP6 network in China will cease to exist because of lack of civil liberties.
The rather obvious point that all of these semantic games ignore is, while its great that they have a shiney new fast backbone in a few select areas of China, it isn't going to be the Internet that most of us experience, and that is detrimental to the people of China, just like torturing political prisoners or gunning down unarmed student protestors -- which the Western world largely does nothing about because we use China for cheap labor and don't want to piss off the Chinese government.
Furthermore, the fact that China has implemented the world's most state of the art Internet backbone to all of, what 30-40 locations is probably intended more for propaganda value than for its usefulness. It doesn't sound like the super-backbone will extend to homes and cyber cafe's any time soon, does it? That's pretty typical -- its for political value, and certainly not for the overall populace.
The Internet they will/do have in China, will circumvent one of the fundamental strengths of the Internet, which is that you or I can look up (with some bounds, obviously, i.e., plans for nukes, kiddie-porn, etc.) almost anything on the Internet.
The cultural censorship in China is way out of line, and generally, not appreciated by the Chineese population. That is what the original poster was getting to, and its a valid point. Its also certainly playing word games with how previous posters used or ascribed freedom in their posts, but I guess that's easier than actually saying something relavant about freedom and communication.
Someone said freedom of speach is required for information and communication, which is obviously an overstatement, but freedom of speach is required for the sort of effective, open communication that encourages things like freedom, change, and democracy, which is why we have things like freedom of speach and public education in the first place.
So, back to the original point, the real Internet was most of the Western world have it would give a place of free communication and information exchange, including things like exploring or challenging cultural ideas, and it frankly sucks that China is making this technologically great backbone that will be censored and probably monitored in ways that would be completely unacceptable to anyone arguing in this thread if they suddenly had to deal with it. (Even after the Patriot Acts...)
In China's defense, sort of, I bet they are really tired of hearing the US describe itself as "the world's last super power"...
Jokes asside, this is a really good thing, and its long overdue.
Microsoft takes a lot of flack for all of the buffer-overrun exploits, but the fact is, it used to be standard programming practice not to check every buffer size because the danger wasn't understood; so, it was extra code and wasted processor cycles.
The trouble is a fundamental flaw in DOS/Win/PC architecture that interleaves code and data closely and doesn't throw protection errors based on overwriting allocated data space. I'm not sure if that's Microsoft's fault or Intel's or both, but its a fundamental enough problem that there hasn't been an easy solution.
So, the fact that there is finally an intrinsic solution at the processor and OS level is huge. It means that the most common source for exploits will go away, mostly or completely, without waiting for millions of lines of code to be rewritten. Its probably better for execution speed than a strictly compiler based solution.
So...bravo! Its about time...
A few points and items that people have missed, and a question: - An important feature of the Pentium II was that it had optimizations to run both 16-bit and 32-bit code with reasonable performance (at least according to Intel's marketing at the time). The PPro ran NT great, but was slower than a Pentium running 16 bit. At the time of release, this was still an issue. The MMX thing was at initially perceived as a cool for NT based 3D gaming crowd, but lack of driver support and then the ugly, early days of DirectX sort of killed that idea. - The P-III release was, at the time, something of a farce. There was almost no major core design improvements besides KNI, and clock-speed improvements were modest, at best. There was the whole "Internet Optimized" hype, which I've never heard justified. The most notorious item at the time of the release of the P-III was the addition of the on-chip serial number, which really seemed at the time to be more intended to play big brother and/or to let OS vendor's crack down on piracy than to provide "security" as it was hyped. I suspect if it wasn't for public recoil, that may have been the case. Somone asked about Celerons: Celerons, the 486SX, the 386SX, and also AMD Durons are variations of the same, somewhat despicable marketing concept of taking a processor and crippling it in some way so you can sell it for less without devaluing the rest of your chips. FSB speed, data bus bit size, floating point processor, reduced cache, and hacked down clock rates have all been used. The only time it was justified was with the 486SX where the high failure rate of 486DX chips in floating point unit and/or at higher clock speeds made the 486SX a necessary way of unloading failed chips. Speaking of that concept, I think a bunch of crappy XT clones used the 8088 instead of the 8086 for much of the same reason: the 88 had an 8 bit bus and the 86 had a 16 bit bus. Is that correct? One last thing, as far as what was originally going to be the P7 (by Intel's standards), they released the original P4 as a P6 generation chip to tide over until their 64-bit chip co-developed with HP came into realization. The "786" was supposed to be a 64 bit processor. Which brings up my question: even with 64bit Windows being more or less viable, it seems like Intel's 64 bit push has lost all of its steam, and HP has supposedly dropped out. What happened?
What?!
.Net situations imaginable and managed to avoid the *typical* issues with a Java application, you don't know what you're talking about, or you're just plain misrepresenting.
.Net developer who required IIS to be installed on the *client* machine would be an idiot who went well out of his way to write a ridiculous application (presuming it wasn't a server-side web application, of course).
.Net application that requires an IIS server somewhere on the net, then you are talking about web/client-server/web services applications, which is the right way to develop a large enterprise application and directly correlates to a J2EE or JSP application, which would also require setting a Java or Java/Web server.
.Net applications don't take much or any configuration to get going on an up-to-date Windows box, and if they do, you can run the packaging/installation tools and whip up a pretty bullet proof installation tool in a few minutes. Issues with getting .Net running on a client box are nothing compared to all of the version incompatibility and circa-1982 installation hassles of the Java world.
.Net has an increbible amount of capabilities built into it that no plain-paper Java insallation will have; so, your chance of an enterprise application requiring a bunch of extra installation and configuration hassles are dramatically higher with Java.
.Net application will run great on a mediocre Windows box. Java applications from the biggest names in the industry (Oracle, IBM, Sun, Borland) run like crap on any Windows box -- slow and generally suprisingly buggy as well for commerical applications. In this case, the application is going to be running primarily on Windows boxes; so, the fact that Java applications tend to suck on Windows is a significant issue, and even if your specious claims about configuration being easier under Java (God! I can't believe people are actually making a case for that...I'm honestly laughing), even if configuration were harder, it would be worth it to have a usable application...
Either you've run into the strangest
First off, a
If you are talking about a
If that's the case, complaining about the hassle of setting up IIS is a joke. IIS runs out of the box and you can install services and applications into it with a few clicks. Ever setup Tomcat under Apache? Then deal with literally hours of ridiculous configuration to get one JSP app or web service running? It you are comparing apples to apples (server-based apps to server based apps) as far as setup concerns go, Microsoft, for its many flaws in some areas, is certainly dozens of times better than Java.
Secondly, as far as Desktop setup goes,
Plus,
Finally, I know its not your point, but the application performance issue is real. People say Java applications that are slow are the fault of the developers. Whatever. A reasonably well programmed