Absolutely right for your personal homepage. A professional web designer would not be able to get away with this. This kind of laziness translations directly into additional support costs for the client. And each time Microsoft recommends turning off Javascript due to a 0-day exploit you are cutting off more than 1%.
I can't think of any cases where it is ok to not fail gracefully. I hope you are not talking about just using client side validation, one of the most used cases for Javascript but where you must always fail over to doing server side also. Can you give an example?
I fly regularly between England and France, and from what I have seen it is true they have opposite problems. Most girls I see in the UK I would consider fat. Being physically attractive is not so important in England though due to the high alcohol consumption. Being obese where I live in France is quite rare, however I do see quite a few that are too thin. A ridiculous amount of women chain-smoke, and most drink a lot of coffee, both of which are appetite suppressants and which may have something to do with it.
What has that got to do with this law? It isn't telling anybody what they can and cannot do, it is simply a labeling requirement giving additional information to consumers. France already has a law banning advertising towards children, and when I come back to the UK I am often shocked at the ads which basically say "your parents must buy this for you or they are bad parents". And from what I see it seems to work, English kids are are more materialistic and brand obsessed than French kids. With this law they want to inform against what they see as false advertising to women, which I happen to agree with. The photos are presented as real pictures and it is deception.
Now I haven't patented this idea, but I'm giving it free to the world as prior art. Rather than making a constant noise, causing noise pollution and irritating residents, my invention enables the person driving to cause the vehicle to emit a noise when there is a road user or pedestrian that is in potential danger. Taking my inspiration from boats, that use a 'horn' to warn oncoming traffic, we could use a miniature horn that makes a loud sound as a warning. It would be placed somewhere easily accessible to the driver, for example on or near the steering wheel. What do you think?
There is stupid, and there is gullible. The former have been mocked since the dawn of time. The phrase "village idiot" is still used today. The latter involves a betrayal of trust and could happen to most people these days, as they have been conditioned to respond to authority. Note the link between the government's (both US and UK) repetition of appealing to 'security' and 'safety', and the pranks' similar appeal. Though the jokes are tasteless and often minor vandalism, they do serve as a good public warning. Much as simply obeying traffic signs isn't enough to stop you having a car accident, blindly following rules because they appear to come from somebody in authority isn't enough to get you out of trouble if you switch off your common sense. You are responsible for your actions, and if you delegate your responsibility to somebody else you'd better make sure you know who to!
100km is fine for an urban vehicle, and all-electric appears to be the way to go. The infrastructure is already there in the form of the national grid. In Nice, France, they are starting to convert commercial vehicles to electric. The first half dozen have just hit the streets, cost 21,613 euros each and 1 euro to recharge for 100km (as opposed to 9e/100km for petrol). There is already an electric tramway here, and the buses have been running on natural gas for over a decade, but now a new infrastructure has been put in place all over the city... bicycles! Really popular, I see them all over the roads every day. Pick one up from anywhere, and just then reattach to the nearest rack the other end of your journey. Not for me but refreshing to see such enthusiasm for it.
If they can make the Leaf as cool as the Smart Car then they can make a lot of money. If it takes off then start selling extension cables on Ebay! Students will be trailing cables out their bedroom windows to charge their cars in the parking lot.
Besides all the professional tools do not support it so it wont ever be used. It wont ever be used because professional tools do not support. Its a catch-22 just like Microsoft Windows and Office. You can't ever leave the platform.
Like Microsoft said they wouldn't support ODT, throwing their weight behind OOXML instead?
Transcoding to any format shouldn't be a problem these days, ESPECIALLY one with an open spec, so there is no reason for a tool not to support Ogg.
I was just thinking the same thing. Musicians still can make money from live performances and movie producers still make a profit from the cinema even without the dvd sales. Many software authors have already adapted: some pursue an open source model for the core and then charge to customise it for businesses, others provide regular updates as an incentive, and Valve has even manage to make DRM appear acceptable with Steam. I notice a lot of product placement these days in TV programmes.
Not that I'm suggesting we do it, but if we abolished all IP tonight then tomorrow people will still be writing software and music, still reporting the news and making TV. Unfettered, new technologies and business models will spring up. Just as much money will still be made, and probably by much the same people, just differently.
and the institution that exists to keep a piece of history for the next 300 years until the building falls down.
We keep historical documents and artifacts on display in the Tower of London, and that was built nearly a thousand years ago (1078). Even the apartment I'm in is four hundred years old, and I can't see why it won't be there in another four hundred years. If you go to any museum, you can see how one mans junk eventually turns into another mans treasure.
Do you really think your great-great grandchildren want to see your lolcat material?
I find the my family photos from the late 1800s quite interesting. I presume my ancestors will get a giggle from my primitive 21st century clothing (according to the movies they will all be wearing identical silver jump-suits) and satisfying their curiosity is enough reason for me to contribute a few photos to the family album. You say 'lolcat' but you can't predict which things seem trivial today but will cease to exist in the future. It wasn't that long ago that women's bathing costumes had to cover them down to the ankles.
Daily Kos? On Slashdot? That and Huffington Post is why every self-respecting person abandoned Digg long before the end of the last election. Please don't pollute/. too.
Indeed, this is why due process is important. If Circuit City hands the drive directly over to the police then the evidence is worthless. It would be easy for an ex-girlfriend/wife/employee to bribe the low paid employees of CC to plant such pictures and hand over the drive, and it is inevitable it will be done due to virtually no risk of getting caught.
If CC has a policy of handing back the drive and simply reporting the crime to the police, who then get a warrant and seize the computer, then there is a risk that the pictures will be found by the owner between the computer being returned and it being seized. This means the whole thing could rebound back on CC and the culprit will be found in the subsequent witch hunt. This increased risk of being caught will reduce the chance of the crime being committed.
Two weeks is plenty of time to consider whether the linked vulnerabilities is worth looking at, especially as on their site they claim they have "a weekly update schedule where a new version is released every week". Such an extensive list certainly merits dialogue with the person polite enough to point them out. Issue #6 indicates the admin server is running as root, a big no-no. It certainly contradicts point one of their own claims. Pointing out a security flaw in software isn't an offense as far as I know, so I don't know how they can sue. Trying to pin things on Milw0rm is a complete distraction. The real issues are: * LXLabs failed to respond to serious vulnerabilities, many of which indicate an amateur level of programming * the vulnerabilities directly contradict the claims made on their web site, many clients basing their purchase on these claims * LXLabs did not tell their clients, including Vaserve, about the vulnerabilities and so they did not have the option to disable the modules containing vulnerabilities until a patch was released * such a destructive attack indicates a personal vendetta against either LXLabs or Vaserve - which party was it intended to damage and discredit? * if the perpetrator of the attacks has not covered his tracks, he is going to be in a lot of trouble * never trust a product with "Hype" in the title:-)
There is certainly some truth to what you say, though I may disagree with some of your interpretations. Though I have been away from RiscOS for a number of years, so cannot comment on the current state, I always found the APIs a pleasure to use. The ability to add or patch 'modules' was great. I interned at Acorn for my Masters and worked directly on the kernel (the http module amongst other things) and found the source well written and commented. There was certainly some ARM assembler (not quite the same as machine code) but I don't remember it being 'most' of RiscOS. I bow to your more recent knowledge though, you seem to have investigated quite thoroughly.
I've written RiscOS apps in ARM, C and BASIC, and it is the most pleasurable computer experience I have ever had. Even BASIC apps ran full speed, and GUI apps were a doddle to write. From a user perspective it was the most productive windowing system for its time. It did have limitations, however, and was very targeted at Acorn's own hardware.
I disagree that it misses preemptive multi-tasking and threads. It was a design decision to go with co-operative multi-taking, much like Linus decided to go with a monolithic kernel instead of a micro-kernel. And in much the same way as one was supposed to be theoretically better than the other but one "just worked", RiscOS was the fastest most responsive OS on the market. One software manufacturer forced their clients to buy Acorn computers just to run their software as no other OS was responsive enough to run it (Sibelius). It requires a different way of thinking, much like writing a Twisted module instead of an Apache one, but for all the theory of a rogue app slowing or taking down the OS in practice it never happened.
Though from a performance perspective RiscOS would be perfect for a netbook, and would be more responsive than most other OS, it doesn't make sense from a commercial perspective over Linux due to the vast wealth of available software easily ported. It is an easy choice for users between a slight performance increase, and Ubuntu with thousands of free apps installable in a single mouse click for free.
Why would you want to hobble an ARM processor by trying to run x86 cruft on it? A 1GHz ARM processor will blow away an equivalent x86 when running apps natively. If I was running desktop apps on a netbook I wouldn't even want something as heavy as OpenOffice, let alone a monolith like MS Office, I would want something like Abiword but with the OO import/export filters. As bert64 says, there is a wealth of Linux apps, and with Ubuntu netbook-friendly version coming you can bet their repository will fill quickly with ARM versions of all the apps.
I think the golden age ended when Tony Blair rolled tanks into Heathrow airport in 2003. Combine the detention without trial laws, eborders effectively making all English citizens prisoners in their own country, RIPA (even that is a watered down version of what the government wanted to be a key escrow scheme), data retention laws for ISPs, pressure on ISPs to adopt IWF censorship, copyright laws run wild thanks to the States (eg garage owners sued for mechanics playing music in the back room where customers might be able to hear it), speed cameras being turned from safety devices to profit-making machines, add this to the surveillance cameras, London road cameras tracking every car license plates, the genetic database being built up, the biometric ID cards coming, then throw in the inevitable banking laws that will come in under the auspices of anti laundering and tax evasion but will just give banks the ability to snoop into your personal life...
Life in the 90s was good. Post-9/11 things went downhill.
Why not do it? Laying extra wire is practically free when renovating an apartment. I've actually run Cat 5e into every spot and wall light into the apartment also. I originally wanted to build something like the vos pad, with each any every spot having 24-bit colour via rgb lux leds. However strong enough LED spots are still very expensive, and then I would have to write and maintain the custom software to control them.
I've invested in relays and dimmers from National Control Devices and have run Cat 5e all over my apartment, even into my light switches and where I expect to put sensors in the future. It's hard-wired, hence secure and safe from interference, and speaks via simple ASCII to a serial port which available on nearly any embedded controller. The great thing about serial is that you can add a dirt cheap serial-usb or serial-ethernet interface.
I'm not really interested in a proprietary interface like Zigbee. What is needed is a HA API. That way you can write a driver for all the proprietary protocols such as this, as well as things like ProXR, Dallas 1-wire, DMX, and many more.
Some ideas for a back-end to the API can be taken from the aging Perl app Mister House. What would then be a REALLY nice addition is a MythTV module front-end so you can control the whole house via your television.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely right for your personal homepage. A professional web designer would not be able to get away with this. This kind of laziness translations directly into additional support costs for the client. And each time Microsoft recommends turning off Javascript due to a 0-day exploit you are cutting off more than 1%.
I can't think of any cases where it is ok to not fail gracefully. I hope you are not talking about just using client side validation, one of the most used cases for Javascript but where you must always fail over to doing server side also. Can you give an example?
Phillip.
I fly regularly between England and France, and from what I have seen it is true they have opposite problems. Most girls I see in the UK I would consider fat. Being physically attractive is not so important in England though due to the high alcohol consumption. Being obese where I live in France is quite rare, however I do see quite a few that are too thin. A ridiculous amount of women chain-smoke, and most drink a lot of coffee, both of which are appetite suppressants and which may have something to do with it.
Phillip.
What has that got to do with this law? It isn't telling anybody what they can and cannot do, it is simply a labeling requirement giving additional information to consumers. France already has a law banning advertising towards children, and when I come back to the UK I am often shocked at the ads which basically say "your parents must buy this for you or they are bad parents". And from what I see it seems to work, English kids are are more materialistic and brand obsessed than French kids. With this law they want to inform against what they see as false advertising to women, which I happen to agree with. The photos are presented as real pictures and it is deception.
Phillip.
Now I haven't patented this idea, but I'm giving it free to the world as prior art. Rather than making a constant noise, causing noise pollution and irritating residents, my invention enables the person driving to cause the vehicle to emit a noise when there is a road user or pedestrian that is in potential danger. Taking my inspiration from boats, that use a 'horn' to warn oncoming traffic, we could use a miniature horn that makes a loud sound as a warning. It would be placed somewhere easily accessible to the driver, for example on or near the steering wheel. What do you think?
Phillip.
There is stupid, and there is gullible. The former have been mocked since the dawn of time. The phrase "village idiot" is still used today. The latter involves a betrayal of trust and could happen to most people these days, as they have been conditioned to respond to authority. Note the link between the government's (both US and UK) repetition of appealing to 'security' and 'safety', and the pranks' similar appeal. Though the jokes are tasteless and often minor vandalism, they do serve as a good public warning. Much as simply obeying traffic signs isn't enough to stop you having a car accident, blindly following rules because they appear to come from somebody in authority isn't enough to get you out of trouble if you switch off your common sense. You are responsible for your actions, and if you delegate your responsibility to somebody else you'd better make sure you know who to!
Phillip.
100km is fine for an urban vehicle, and all-electric appears to be the way to go. The infrastructure is already there in the form of the national grid. In Nice, France, they are starting to convert commercial vehicles to electric. The first half dozen have just hit the streets, cost 21,613 euros each and 1 euro to recharge for 100km (as opposed to 9e/100km for petrol). There is already an electric tramway here, and the buses have been running on natural gas for over a decade, but now a new infrastructure has been put in place all over the city... bicycles! Really popular, I see them all over the roads every day. Pick one up from anywhere, and just then reattach to the nearest rack the other end of your journey. Not for me but refreshing to see such enthusiasm for it.
If they can make the Leaf as cool as the Smart Car then they can make a lot of money. If it takes off then start selling extension cables on Ebay! Students will be trailing cables out their bedroom windows to charge their cars in the parking lot.
Phillip.
Isn't it the other way around, with Porsche buying VW? This means they will also own Bentley, another top of the range luxury brand.
Phillip.
I ever caught you keying ANY car, I'd break your fucking legs. People who key cars are UNIVERSALLY cowards.
There, fixed that for you.
Phillip.
Besides all the professional tools do not support it so it wont ever be used. It wont ever be used because professional tools do not support. Its a catch-22 just like Microsoft Windows and Office. You can't ever leave the platform.
Like Microsoft said they wouldn't support ODT, throwing their weight behind OOXML instead?
Transcoding to any format shouldn't be a problem these days, ESPECIALLY one with an open spec, so there is no reason for a tool not to support Ogg.
Phillip.
Yes it's crap like this that has stopped me from reading The Register. Sad fall from investigative journalists to the IT equivalent of the Daily Star.
Phillip.
I was just thinking the same thing. Musicians still can make money from live performances and movie producers still make a profit from the cinema even without the dvd sales. Many software authors have already adapted: some pursue an open source model for the core and then charge to customise it for businesses, others provide regular updates as an incentive, and Valve has even manage to make DRM appear acceptable with Steam. I notice a lot of product placement these days in TV programmes.
Not that I'm suggesting we do it, but if we abolished all IP tonight then tomorrow people will still be writing software and music, still reporting the news and making TV. Unfettered, new technologies and business models will spring up. Just as much money will still be made, and probably by much the same people, just differently.
Phillip.
and the institution that exists to keep a piece of history for the next 300 years until the building falls down.
We keep historical documents and artifacts on display in the Tower of London, and that was built nearly a thousand years ago (1078). Even the apartment I'm in is four hundred years old, and I can't see why it won't be there in another four hundred years. If you go to any museum, you can see how one mans junk eventually turns into another mans treasure.
Do you really think your great-great grandchildren want to see your lolcat material?
I find the my family photos from the late 1800s quite interesting. I presume my ancestors will get a giggle from my primitive 21st century clothing (according to the movies they will all be wearing identical silver jump-suits) and satisfying their curiosity is enough reason for me to contribute a few photos to the family album. You say 'lolcat' but you can't predict which things seem trivial today but will cease to exist in the future. It wasn't that long ago that women's bathing costumes had to cover them down to the ankles.
Phillip.
There is a very simple test: has he categorised it into different folders?
Phillip.
Daily Kos? On Slashdot? That and Huffington Post is why every self-respecting person abandoned Digg long before the end of the last election. Please don't pollute /. too.
Phillip.
Indeed, this is why due process is important. If Circuit City hands the drive directly over to the police then the evidence is worthless. It would be easy for an ex-girlfriend/wife/employee to bribe the low paid employees of CC to plant such pictures and hand over the drive, and it is inevitable it will be done due to virtually no risk of getting caught.
If CC has a policy of handing back the drive and simply reporting the crime to the police, who then get a warrant and seize the computer, then there is a risk that the pictures will be found by the owner between the computer being returned and it being seized. This means the whole thing could rebound back on CC and the culprit will be found in the subsequent witch hunt. This increased risk of being caught will reduce the chance of the crime being committed.
Phillip.
There is only so much due diligence you can do if their claims are not true.
Phillip.
Two weeks is plenty of time to consider whether the linked vulnerabilities is worth looking at, especially as on their site they claim they have "a weekly update schedule where a new version is released every week". Such an extensive list certainly merits dialogue with the person polite enough to point them out. Issue #6 indicates the admin server is running as root, a big no-no. It certainly contradicts point one of their own claims. Pointing out a security flaw in software isn't an offense as far as I know, so I don't know how they can sue. Trying to pin things on Milw0rm is a complete distraction. The real issues are: :-)
* LXLabs failed to respond to serious vulnerabilities, many of which indicate an amateur level of programming
* the vulnerabilities directly contradict the claims made on their web site, many clients basing their purchase on these claims
* LXLabs did not tell their clients, including Vaserve, about the vulnerabilities and so they did not have the option to disable the modules containing vulnerabilities until a patch was released
* such a destructive attack indicates a personal vendetta against either LXLabs or Vaserve - which party was it intended to damage and discredit?
* if the perpetrator of the attacks has not covered his tracks, he is going to be in a lot of trouble
* never trust a product with "Hype" in the title
Phillip.
There is certainly some truth to what you say, though I may disagree with some of your interpretations. Though I have been away from RiscOS for a number of years, so cannot comment on the current state, I always found the APIs a pleasure to use. The ability to add or patch 'modules' was great. I interned at Acorn for my Masters and worked directly on the kernel (the http module amongst other things) and found the source well written and commented. There was certainly some ARM assembler (not quite the same as machine code) but I don't remember it being 'most' of RiscOS. I bow to your more recent knowledge though, you seem to have investigated quite thoroughly.
I've written RiscOS apps in ARM, C and BASIC, and it is the most pleasurable computer experience I have ever had. Even BASIC apps ran full speed, and GUI apps were a doddle to write. From a user perspective it was the most productive windowing system for its time. It did have limitations, however, and was very targeted at Acorn's own hardware.
I disagree that it misses preemptive multi-tasking and threads. It was a design decision to go with co-operative multi-taking, much like Linus decided to go with a monolithic kernel instead of a micro-kernel. And in much the same way as one was supposed to be theoretically better than the other but one "just worked", RiscOS was the fastest most responsive OS on the market. One software manufacturer forced their clients to buy Acorn computers just to run their software as no other OS was responsive enough to run it (Sibelius). It requires a different way of thinking, much like writing a Twisted module instead of an Apache one, but for all the theory of a rogue app slowing or taking down the OS in practice it never happened.
Though from a performance perspective RiscOS would be perfect for a netbook, and would be more responsive than most other OS, it doesn't make sense from a commercial perspective over Linux due to the vast wealth of available software easily ported. It is an easy choice for users between a slight performance increase, and Ubuntu with thousands of free apps installable in a single mouse click for free.
Phillip.
We've already covered what to do with the bathwater in the grey water recycling comments of this article. As for the gold bars, you could give them to AOL.
Phillip.
I was thinking buy a batch lot of old 2400 baud modems, or some Minitel terminals, and run a bulletin board from the basement.
Phillip.
Why would you want to hobble an ARM processor by trying to run x86 cruft on it? A 1GHz ARM processor will blow away an equivalent x86 when running apps natively. If I was running desktop apps on a netbook I wouldn't even want something as heavy as OpenOffice, let alone a monolith like MS Office, I would want something like Abiword but with the OO import/export filters. As bert64 says, there is a wealth of Linux apps, and with Ubuntu netbook-friendly version coming you can bet their repository will fill quickly with ARM versions of all the apps.
Phillip.
ARM + chipset runs at 0.5 watts, according to this CNET article from last June.
Phillip.
I think the golden age ended when Tony Blair rolled tanks into Heathrow airport in 2003. Combine the detention without trial laws, eborders effectively making all English citizens prisoners in their own country, RIPA (even that is a watered down version of what the government wanted to be a key escrow scheme), data retention laws for ISPs, pressure on ISPs to adopt IWF censorship, copyright laws run wild thanks to the States (eg garage owners sued for mechanics playing music in the back room where customers might be able to hear it), speed cameras being turned from safety devices to profit-making machines, add this to the surveillance cameras, London road cameras tracking every car license plates, the genetic database being built up, the biometric ID cards coming, then throw in the inevitable banking laws that will come in under the auspices of anti laundering and tax evasion but will just give banks the ability to snoop into your personal life...
Life in the 90s was good. Post-9/11 things went downhill.
Phillip.
Why not do it? Laying extra wire is practically free when renovating an apartment. I've actually run Cat 5e into every spot and wall light into the apartment also. I originally wanted to build something like the vos pad, with each any every spot having 24-bit colour via rgb lux leds. However strong enough LED spots are still very expensive, and then I would have to write and maintain the custom software to control them.
Phillip.
I've invested in relays and dimmers from National Control Devices and have run Cat 5e all over my apartment, even into my light switches and where I expect to put sensors in the future. It's hard-wired, hence secure and safe from interference, and speaks via simple ASCII to a serial port which available on nearly any embedded controller. The great thing about serial is that you can add a dirt cheap serial-usb or serial-ethernet interface.
I'm not really interested in a proprietary interface like Zigbee. What is needed is a HA API. That way you can write a driver for all the proprietary protocols such as this, as well as things like ProXR, Dallas 1-wire, DMX, and many more.
Some ideas for a back-end to the API can be taken from the aging Perl app Mister House. What would then be a REALLY nice addition is a MythTV module front-end so you can control the whole house via your television.
Phillip.