You think I'm a Microsoft apologist? In case you didn't notice, I insulted IE users ("target demographics") and IE itself (by pointing out that malware writers are much more familiar with IE than with Firefox.) Funny you read that as a defense of IE.
In any case, the attack demonstrates an exploitable bug in Firefox. How exploitable is it? If you have some way of knowing, please tell me. My guess is the attackers put a higher priority on launching an effective attack as soon as possible than on trying to subvert Firefox as well.
The exploit is in the IE plugin, not Adobe Reader. The criminals probably figured out some exploit of Firefox that caused it to crash on the site knowing that Firefox users instinctively open IE when Firefox fails to load a site properly.
More likely, Firefox and IE are both vulnerable to this attack, but the attackers had to pick one target, and they chose IE because of familiarity or target demographics. Executing the IE-targeted attack against Firefox has the random effect of crashing the browser.
Standards aren't important to end users, but they're critical to developers.
I'm having a hard time seeing that as an argument that Firefox changed computing. Firefox is an end-user application. Even in the darkest days of IE dominance, end users could choose from several browsers that worked decently enough. Gmail debuted in 2004, at the height of IE's dominance, so IE didn't prevent innovation and evolution in web programming, either.
Even for web developers, better compliance with standards hasn't changed things that much. Professional web designers still have to make sure everything works in IE6. They depend heavily on cross-browser libraries that hide browser incompatibilities, and they still regularly run across discrepancies, even between different highly-standards-compliant browsers. The web designers who sit near me at work test against IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, and a couple versions each of Mozilla, Opera, and Safari. Plus they make special mobile versions of lots of pages, highly optimized for iPhone but also tested against BlackBerries.
And yet I still see professionally-done pages that don't render correctly in Linux Firefox. dominos.com is unusable under Linux Firefox, for example. Whether that's a bug in the page or Firefox or Flash or Firefox's embedding of Flash, it shows that web standards haven't changed the basic rule of cross-browser rendering: if the developers are committed to testing and tweaking their code against a browser, then it will work with that browser. Otherwise, it's a crapshoot.
So, given the continuing need to make everything work under IE6, it seems like the only thing that web standards changed is that there are now four or five decent rendering engines instead of two or three. You still can't be a web designer without being a student of browser quirks. Even if you attributed the entire HTML/CSS/Javascript standardization phenomenon to Firefox, it still wouldn't qualify as one of the top ten apps that "changed computing."
Standards have nothing to do with it. Browsers are supported on the basis of market share, nothing else. In other words, there's no chance that a sizeable number of people would be left without a working browser. Maybe we'd all be stuck with IE6 (and slightly crappy IE6 renderer-clones on Linux, like we have OpenOffice and KOffice for MS Office docs) -- but what would have been radically different about that? It would suck a little bit not to have tabbed browsing and AdBlock, and a few other amenities like keyword search might be missing, but would that change the web experience so much?
Besides, according to Wikipedia's market share numbers IE had over 90% of users during 2002-2006. I managed to rely on Mozilla and Firefox during that time period, so Firefox's success was not a prerequisite for alternative browsers to work "well enough."
Agreed. Half the apps the author chose were just winners in markets created by other products. If Microsoft Office had never existed, office computing would not have skipped a beat. Everyone would have adopted something very similar, possibly superior, on the same timeline. The fact that the author favored Mozilla or even Firefox reveals that he is too impressed by winners. What did Firefox change? Would web browsers have stopped evolving and improving without Firefox? Not likely. I used an ancient version of Mozilla earlier today, in fact, and frankly, if we were still stuck on 2002-era Mozilla (with a modern Javascript implementation) the web wouldn't be much different.
For Oracle, the article says,
Oracle, founded in 1977, was able to come of age right around the time database systems became both affordable and necessary for enterprises.
In other words, right place, right time, the product itself was inevitable but Oracle came out on top.
By that standard, Usain Bolt totally changed Olympic sprinting. Without him, it would be a bunch of slow fat guys, right?
H1N1 is the most common type of human influenza. It causes a large proportional of seasonal flu illnesses. It happens to include both Spanish Flu and this new strain, as well as milder forms.
100 cases and 1 death don't give us a 1% fatality rate... we have to make sure those 100 people recover.
100 cases and 1 death don't give us a 1% fatality rate, because we have to take into account the people who got sick and didn't seek medical attention.
Anyway, where do you get those numbers? I thought the latest word was that it might not be any more fatal or infectious than normal. And since nobody has told me what the original fear of high mortality was based on (unless it was the 12 dead out of 312 confirmed cases in Mexico, a terrible statistic to base a mortality estimate on) I'm not inclined to buy into it.
That is an excellent answer and the first sane article I've read about the issue.
Still, I'm not convinced it's worth it. What's the maximum N for which we should keep N thousand students out of school for a month to save a life? We're leaving it up to somebody to answer that question for us. Who is it?
What's the point of closing schools if the virus isn't virulent enough to burn itself out? If it's about as severe and durable as the garden-variety flu strains that circulate everywhere anyway, then it will continue to circulate in Mexico indefinitely, and wherever else it establishes itself. We can't exterminate it any more than we can exterminate other moderate strains of flu.
So when we reopen the schools, borders, or whatever else people are screaming for, the swine flu will be there waiting... waiting to make us cough and hack and stay home from work... waiting to kill children, the weak, the elderly... waiting... just like the regular garden-variety flu that we get every year.
(I'm not a biologist, I'm just baiting a real biologist to correct or clarify anything I got wrong. Please and TIA.)
Hell, we seem to be obsessed by them. We romanticize them. We justify using crappy obsolete technology by the fact that it caters to old-school techniques. We seem to think that if it weren't for the old-school techniques, there wouldn't be any opportunity to improve our software using hard work and ingenuity.
"Our software sucks because we use Python, which doesn't offer any scope for hard work and ingenuity. Man, if we wrote in assembler or Perl, we could rock out with some wicked cool code and give our software the hard, nasty edge we need to kick ass!"
No, no, the opportunities for hard work and ingenuity are sitting right in front of us while we daydream about how awesome we would be if the world hadn't gone all soft and candy-assed on us.
In our geographical market most of the households do in fact reply to junk mail and so forth.
What your GP said:
I've run opt-in marketing campaigns, and have converted multiple employers from opt-out to opt-in. Before the switch, every mailout would result in an inbox full of complaints and threats.
Connection?
Mike Tyson thought she wanted it, too. Keep your unsolicited junk out of my slot.
A 'movie meal' (large drink with popcorn or nachos) is $15.
If movie tickets cost $12 or $15 where you live, then $15 for a meal out is a bargain. (Eating movie nachos for dinner sucks, but that's your mistake.)
But I'm also glad that I didn't have a stake in it - It had to be an unsettling investment for those who did. It's got to feel good to have participated, but it was obviously a gamble from the beginning. Watchmen is definitely aimed at a niche market.
On the contrary, it was probably a pretty predictable quantity compared to other movies. Not that any new release is predictable, but this one wasn't anything like 300 or Sin City where they were hoping to pull in people who knew nothing about the source material, or like Persepolis where it was unknown whether the enthusiasm for the books would last through the release of the movie (and where there was probably a lot of doubt that fans of the books would even bother to see the movie.) It was a so-so movie based on a popular and prestigious graphic novel. They knew the size of the niche. They knew that the readership of the graphic novel would contain more movie fans than the general population, and, having test-screened the movie, they knew it wouldn't break out to a broader audience or inspire massive rewatching.
Assuming that the broadcast and rental rights were sold before the film screened, the DVD sales are probably the riskiest part -- how many people want to see it again? Will fans of the graphic novel want to buy a movie that failed to do the source material justice (inevitably and maybe blamelessly, but still)?
That's the perfect state for when there's a clear path ahead. The conscious mind has a role in creative problem-solving, but sometimes it doesn't know when to get out of the way and let your instincts handle the trivial problems in the marvellously efficient way they have.
If you don't like waiting for the internet to settle down at night, I find it helps to wrap some old towels around the tubes. That muffles the sound of the bits flowing through. American bits are pretty loud no matter what you do, unfortunately.
You can churn out quite a bit of good code but one error and your night is gone.
Funny, this was my experience with alcohol also. It was wonderfully disinhibiting, and I wrote a lot of pretty decent code without obsessing over fine points of style like I normally would. However, after three or four I was absolutely helpless at fixing anything I had screwed up except minor typos. I couldn't even get my C++ code to compile unless the compiler reported an error at exactly the right line number, because I literally could not read the template error messages from g++ (and believe it or not, I normally can.) Eventually I figured out just to give up and go to bed (or keep coding without compiling) at the first sign of trouble. And eventually I realized drinking and coding late into the night was not the right way to deal with that crappy job, and eventually I quit and got a new one.
I think the idea is to regulate places where the fraudsters, bluffers, and snake-oil salesman might resurface when their old haunting grounds are regulated. The current size of a sector doesn't rule it out. Venture capital seems pretty simple (invest in a company, make money if it succeeds) but mortgage lending is pretty simple, too (lend to a homebuyer, make money if he pays you back). If mortgage lending can be complexified until blatant frauds and wishful thinking can hide behind the sophistication, then perhaps venture capital could be turned into the next hot source of unlimited, guaranteed, completely illusory returns. And it would have plenty of political protection: it could cloak itself in the American dream of entrepreneurship like mortgage-backed abominations cloaked themselves in the American dream of home ownership.
That's not to say I think VCs should be regulated like hedge funds; in fact, I don't. I just wanted to explain why someone in DC, looking back at the mortgage mess and trying to imagine where the fatal combination of complexity, wishful thinking and fraud will come from, might think it's a good idea to regulate venture capitalists.
Marriage? How about dating? Sometimes you buy her dinner, sometimes you get laid. If one stops happening, the other stops too.
This quote really cracks me up, though:
He told BBC News that the direct link between success in hunting and reproduction highlighted by this study could "help in our thinking about humans".
If he had never previously recognized these patterns in humans, it's a safe bet he hasn't been putting them into practice. The poor guy must be really devoted to his research. Or his chimps.
Yeah, people are quick to push back when the customer asks for something impossible or boring, but not when the customer requests something that is so FUN to geek out about. The fans will go first! Virtualization is the answer! SSDs, so much to argue about there! All so true, all so premature. It's true that the question says, "How do I provide a workstation that lasts 15 years?" but from a customer's point of view, a "workstation" is a working system they can use. You don't use hardware without software, so you can't talk about a workstation lasting 15 years until you know what kind of software you'll be running in 15 years. His father is NOT just asking for hardware that will last that long, or if he is, his question is based on incorrect assumptions that his son needs to discuss with him.
how old is your father, will he actually be working in 15 years, i suspect he be in bognor regis by then
His father owns a share of the practice, or maybe the entire practice, and will sell his share to another veterinarian when he retires. Even if he has no sentimental attachment, he has an interesting in ensuring the future of the practice so he can get a good price for his share.
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You think I'm a Microsoft apologist? In case you didn't notice, I insulted IE users ("target demographics") and IE itself (by pointing out that malware writers are much more familiar with IE than with Firefox.) Funny you read that as a defense of IE.
In any case, the attack demonstrates an exploitable bug in Firefox. How exploitable is it? If you have some way of knowing, please tell me. My guess is the attackers put a higher priority on launching an effective attack as soon as possible than on trying to subvert Firefox as well.
The exploit is in the IE plugin, not Adobe Reader. The criminals probably figured out some exploit of Firefox that caused it to crash on the site knowing that Firefox users instinctively open IE when Firefox fails to load a site properly.
More likely, Firefox and IE are both vulnerable to this attack, but the attackers had to pick one target, and they chose IE because of familiarity or target demographics. Executing the IE-targeted attack against Firefox has the random effect of crashing the browser.
Standards aren't important to end users, but they're critical to developers.
I'm having a hard time seeing that as an argument that Firefox changed computing. Firefox is an end-user application. Even in the darkest days of IE dominance, end users could choose from several browsers that worked decently enough. Gmail debuted in 2004, at the height of IE's dominance, so IE didn't prevent innovation and evolution in web programming, either.
Even for web developers, better compliance with standards hasn't changed things that much. Professional web designers still have to make sure everything works in IE6. They depend heavily on cross-browser libraries that hide browser incompatibilities, and they still regularly run across discrepancies, even between different highly-standards-compliant browsers. The web designers who sit near me at work test against IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, and a couple versions each of Mozilla, Opera, and Safari. Plus they make special mobile versions of lots of pages, highly optimized for iPhone but also tested against BlackBerries.
And yet I still see professionally-done pages that don't render correctly in Linux Firefox. dominos.com is unusable under Linux Firefox, for example. Whether that's a bug in the page or Firefox or Flash or Firefox's embedding of Flash, it shows that web standards haven't changed the basic rule of cross-browser rendering: if the developers are committed to testing and tweaking their code against a browser, then it will work with that browser. Otherwise, it's a crapshoot.
So, given the continuing need to make everything work under IE6, it seems like the only thing that web standards changed is that there are now four or five decent rendering engines instead of two or three. You still can't be a web designer without being a student of browser quirks. Even if you attributed the entire HTML/CSS/Javascript standardization phenomenon to Firefox, it still wouldn't qualify as one of the top ten apps that "changed computing."
Standards have nothing to do with it. Browsers are supported on the basis of market share, nothing else. In other words, there's no chance that a sizeable number of people would be left without a working browser. Maybe we'd all be stuck with IE6 (and slightly crappy IE6 renderer-clones on Linux, like we have OpenOffice and KOffice for MS Office docs) -- but what would have been radically different about that? It would suck a little bit not to have tabbed browsing and AdBlock, and a few other amenities like keyword search might be missing, but would that change the web experience so much?
Besides, according to Wikipedia's market share numbers IE had over 90% of users during 2002-2006. I managed to rely on Mozilla and Firefox during that time period, so Firefox's success was not a prerequisite for alternative browsers to work "well enough."
Agreed. Half the apps the author chose were just winners in markets created by other products. If Microsoft Office had never existed, office computing would not have skipped a beat. Everyone would have adopted something very similar, possibly superior, on the same timeline. The fact that the author favored Mozilla or even Firefox reveals that he is too impressed by winners. What did Firefox change? Would web browsers have stopped evolving and improving without Firefox? Not likely. I used an ancient version of Mozilla earlier today, in fact, and frankly, if we were still stuck on 2002-era Mozilla (with a modern Javascript implementation) the web wouldn't be much different.
For Oracle, the article says,
Oracle, founded in 1977, was able to come of age right around the time database systems became both affordable and necessary for enterprises.
In other words, right place, right time, the product itself was inevitable but Oracle came out on top.
By that standard, Usain Bolt totally changed Olympic sprinting. Without him, it would be a bunch of slow fat guys, right?
H1N1 is the most common type of human influenza. It causes a large proportional of seasonal flu illnesses. It happens to include both Spanish Flu and this new strain, as well as milder forms.
100 cases and 1 death don't give us a 1% fatality rate... we have to make sure those 100 people recover.
100 cases and 1 death don't give us a 1% fatality rate, because we have to take into account the people who got sick and didn't seek medical attention.
Anyway, where do you get those numbers? I thought the latest word was that it might not be any more fatal or infectious than normal. And since nobody has told me what the original fear of high mortality was based on (unless it was the 12 dead out of 312 confirmed cases in Mexico, a terrible statistic to base a mortality estimate on) I'm not inclined to buy into it.
Damn, how did I post that AC? For the record, it was me.
That is an excellent answer and the first sane article I've read about the issue.
Still, I'm not convinced it's worth it. What's the maximum N for which we should keep N thousand students out of school for a month to save a life? We're leaving it up to somebody to answer that question for us. Who is it?
What's the point of closing schools if the virus isn't virulent enough to burn itself out? If it's about as severe and durable as the garden-variety flu strains that circulate everywhere anyway, then it will continue to circulate in Mexico indefinitely, and wherever else it establishes itself. We can't exterminate it any more than we can exterminate other moderate strains of flu.
So when we reopen the schools, borders, or whatever else people are screaming for, the swine flu will be there waiting... waiting to make us cough and hack and stay home from work... waiting to kill children, the weak, the elderly... waiting... just like the regular garden-variety flu that we get every year.
(I'm not a biologist, I'm just baiting a real biologist to correct or clarify anything I got wrong. Please and TIA.)
Hell, we seem to be obsessed by them. We romanticize them. We justify using crappy obsolete technology by the fact that it caters to old-school techniques. We seem to think that if it weren't for the old-school techniques, there wouldn't be any opportunity to improve our software using hard work and ingenuity.
"Our software sucks because we use Python, which doesn't offer any scope for hard work and ingenuity. Man, if we wrote in assembler or Perl, we could rock out with some wicked cool code and give our software the hard, nasty edge we need to kick ass!"
No, no, the opportunities for hard work and ingenuity are sitting right in front of us while we daydream about how awesome we would be if the world hadn't gone all soft and candy-assed on us.
What you said:
In our geographical market most of the households do in fact reply to junk mail and so forth.
What your GP said:
I've run opt-in marketing campaigns, and have converted multiple employers from opt-out to opt-in. Before the switch, every mailout would result in an inbox full of complaints and threats.
Connection?
Mike Tyson thought she wanted it, too. Keep your unsolicited junk out of my slot.
Dude, even married people dream of getting laid someday.
It seemed more anti-Linux to me, as in, "It isn't a real problem until it affects Windows."
A 'movie meal' (large drink with popcorn or nachos) is $15.
If movie tickets cost $12 or $15 where you live, then $15 for a meal out is a bargain. (Eating movie nachos for dinner sucks, but that's your mistake.)
But I'm also glad that I didn't have a stake in it - It had to be an unsettling investment for those who did. It's got to feel good to have participated, but it was obviously a gamble from the beginning. Watchmen is definitely aimed at a niche market.
On the contrary, it was probably a pretty predictable quantity compared to other movies. Not that any new release is predictable, but this one wasn't anything like 300 or Sin City where they were hoping to pull in people who knew nothing about the source material, or like Persepolis where it was unknown whether the enthusiasm for the books would last through the release of the movie (and where there was probably a lot of doubt that fans of the books would even bother to see the movie.) It was a so-so movie based on a popular and prestigious graphic novel. They knew the size of the niche. They knew that the readership of the graphic novel would contain more movie fans than the general population, and, having test-screened the movie, they knew it wouldn't break out to a broader audience or inspire massive rewatching.
Assuming that the broadcast and rental rights were sold before the film screened, the DVD sales are probably the riskiest part -- how many people want to see it again? Will fans of the graphic novel want to buy a movie that failed to do the source material justice (inevitably and maybe blamelessly, but still)?
That's the perfect state for when there's a clear path ahead. The conscious mind has a role in creative problem-solving, but sometimes it doesn't know when to get out of the way and let your instincts handle the trivial problems in the marvellously efficient way they have.
If you don't like waiting for the internet to settle down at night, I find it helps to wrap some old towels around the tubes. That muffles the sound of the bits flowing through. American bits are pretty loud no matter what you do, unfortunately.
You can churn out quite a bit of good code but one error and your night is gone.
Funny, this was my experience with alcohol also. It was wonderfully disinhibiting, and I wrote a lot of pretty decent code without obsessing over fine points of style like I normally would. However, after three or four I was absolutely helpless at fixing anything I had screwed up except minor typos. I couldn't even get my C++ code to compile unless the compiler reported an error at exactly the right line number, because I literally could not read the template error messages from g++ (and believe it or not, I normally can.) Eventually I figured out just to give up and go to bed (or keep coding without compiling) at the first sign of trouble. And eventually I realized drinking and coding late into the night was not the right way to deal with that crappy job, and eventually I quit and got a new one.
Um... congratulations? Or are you just trying to point out that the article should have been in Politics instead of News?
I think the idea is to regulate places where the fraudsters, bluffers, and snake-oil salesman might resurface when their old haunting grounds are regulated. The current size of a sector doesn't rule it out. Venture capital seems pretty simple (invest in a company, make money if it succeeds) but mortgage lending is pretty simple, too (lend to a homebuyer, make money if he pays you back). If mortgage lending can be complexified until blatant frauds and wishful thinking can hide behind the sophistication, then perhaps venture capital could be turned into the next hot source of unlimited, guaranteed, completely illusory returns. And it would have plenty of political protection: it could cloak itself in the American dream of entrepreneurship like mortgage-backed abominations cloaked themselves in the American dream of home ownership.
That's not to say I think VCs should be regulated like hedge funds; in fact, I don't. I just wanted to explain why someone in DC, looking back at the mortgage mess and trying to imagine where the fatal combination of complexity, wishful thinking and fraud will come from, might think it's a good idea to regulate venture capitalists.
Marriage? How about dating? Sometimes you buy her dinner, sometimes you get laid. If one stops happening, the other stops too.
This quote really cracks me up, though:
He told BBC News that the direct link between success in hunting and reproduction highlighted by this study could "help in our thinking about humans".
If he had never previously recognized these patterns in humans, it's a safe bet he hasn't been putting them into practice. The poor guy must be really devoted to his research. Or his chimps.
he has an interesting in
Sheesh, time for me to quit for the day.
Yeah, people are quick to push back when the customer asks for something impossible or boring, but not when the customer requests something that is so FUN to geek out about. The fans will go first! Virtualization is the answer! SSDs, so much to argue about there! All so true, all so premature. It's true that the question says, "How do I provide a workstation that lasts 15 years?" but from a customer's point of view, a "workstation" is a working system they can use. You don't use hardware without software, so you can't talk about a workstation lasting 15 years until you know what kind of software you'll be running in 15 years. His father is NOT just asking for hardware that will last that long, or if he is, his question is based on incorrect assumptions that his son needs to discuss with him.
how old is your father, will he actually be working in 15 years, i suspect he be in bognor regis by then
His father owns a share of the practice, or maybe the entire practice, and will sell his share to another veterinarian when he retires. Even if he has no sentimental attachment, he has an interesting in ensuring the future of the practice so he can get a good price for his share.