O'Caml has a replay debugger. You can run your program in the debugger until it crashes, then step backwards through the code to see what was happening before it crashed.
Very handy, IMHO, although the O'Caml debugger sucks in other ways. (E.g. no watch conditions.)
Yes, I read this, and even though you've quoted it back to me, it still mentions nothing of the relationship between the volume of the telephone conversation and the volume of the face to face conversations.
In fact, you could even infer that this actually means the phone conversations were louder. "Normal" volume of a phone conversation is louder that "normal" volume of a face to face conversation. Although, as there it is not stated explicitly this is quite unclear.
I'm surprised the author made no reference to the relative volumes of the mobile phone converstation and the face to face conversations. Was the mobile phone conversation the same volume as the normal conversation, the loud conversation, or somewhere in between? If it was the same volume as the loud conversation, the would support the conclusions drawn by the author, that annoyance is primarily due to the exagggerated volume. If it was the same volume as the normal conversation, something else about mobile phones is annoying people.
I suspect that peoples expectations have some affect as well. People who have been annoyed by mobile phones before (ie everyone:) ) will get annoyed quicker. If this is true, it's unfortunate, because it means that even if the majority of mobile phone users can be educated to be considerate, people will still get annoyed even at them, because they've been "pre-annoyed" by the inconsiderate people.
I seem to remember that some versions of Unix (including maybe Linux??) have a "sticky" bit which can be set on executables, which causes them to stay in memory after they have been used once. Although, I've never used it, so I could be remembering totally wrong!
I think that "time/mnt/ramdrive/bin/app" shouldn't access local disk in some shells (eg bash), as "time" is built into the shell, rather than an external command. Of course, "app" might access the disk. I'd create some big programs that do nothing. Although, I suspect that you'd have to be clever to avoid stuff like demand-loaded executables defeating your benchmarking. Maybe a program which sums a large amount of static data?
Always hard to find benchmarks that relate well to real life.
Again, it really isn't that simple. If you know the average throughput of the drive in your machine, calculate how long emacs should take to load. Now, load emacs. Did it take as long as you expected?
The drive in my machine supposedly does more than 10MB/s average, and yet emacs takes much much longer than half a second to load.
If you believe you will actually in real life achieve the performance the manufacturer claims the drive is capable of, you are, to put it politely, slightly naive.
Because it's a lot more complicated that you suggest. What happens if A gets in first, but is doing an extremely long a disk-bound task? B will never get chance to access the disk. It could even be that B would stop after a very short amount of disk access, in which case it will have to wait until A is done, even though interleaving the reads would have been the "right thing to do".
Being multi-user complicates things even further. Sure, you are a single user on a desktop machine, and you double click on two programs in rapid succession, queuing them for loading one after the other may be the right thing to do. But what if those programs are actually being loaded by two different users? Can we completely lock out one user just because they started loading their program slightly later? Again, what if user A runs emacs, and a fraction of a second later, user B runs ls? Under your system, B effectively has to wait as long as it would take to load emacs, plus as long as would take to load ls?
You can't even realistically seperate the queues by user. In many situations, a single unix user may be running on behalf on many physical users (AKA human beings;) ), e.g. in the case of any kind of server.
I'm not saying that any of these problems are intractable (Linux is now doing a pretty fine job), just that they aren't as even remotely as trivial as queuing loads one after another.
Oh BTW, thanks for bringing back happy Amiga memories. Them were the days!:-)
Many artists battle with the record companies on which songs make their records. As an artist, I wouldn't want "market demand" determining the makeup of my album. On the other hand, "artists" like P. Diddy or Britney Spears might prefer it that way.
It;s probably worth pointing out that P. and Britney are making the recording industry a hellova lot more than you are.
No offense intended, and I'm not saying it's a good thing. In fact, I think that this is one of the reasons why the recording industry fears P2P so much - not because it effects sales, but because it's capable of smashing down the barriers between artist and listener.
RIAA execs don't lie awake in bed worrying that in 10 years times, sales will have been cut in half by P2P.
They instead lie awake in bed worrying that in 10 years time, artists will deliver their music straight from the recording studio in their attic, through the server in the basement, to their Internet based community of fans.
OK, this is an extreme idea, but it's plausibly that it will happen to some lesser greater extent. Regardless, it will make the record companies a much less powerful force.
As are all the others who think they can extrapolate the fall in hardware costs over the last n years into the next n years. Deflation in the hardware market has been driven by growth. Build faster computers more cheaply and more people will buy them. That's worked up until now, but it won't work indefinitely.
People's computer needs are finite. People buy new computers because they want to do more, faster. The industry will do it's best to keep us on the upgrade treadmill (and Gate's is one of the main contributers in this area) but it can't go on indefinitely - there's a limit to how much processor time you can waste with a word-processor, and ultimately they'll just be no point getting a new computer.
This in turn will have it's own effect on price - there will be a further downward price adjustment as price becomes a more important factor than performance, but hardware is never going to be free, unless it's that stupid kind of "free" that means "software costs so much we can build the price on the hardware into the cost of the software". But that is gonna be tricky - as open source becomes better and more organised, it will apply downward price pressure to the rest of the market.
It's not just about an OS - this isn't all about Windows. It's about leveraging Windows to push other technical components (and to some extent, visa-versa).
This visa-versa is very important, and we shouldn't dismiss it nearly as easily as you do.
If the EU do decide to make MS sell a stripped down Windows, we are going to see exactly the extent of how Microsofts strategy not only to lock people into Windows, but lock people into other MS software.
When Joe User installs Mozilla, and it fails to render a web page properly because the author has coded for IE instead of for the appropriate standards, the user isn't going to blame MS for messing with open standards, they will say "Hey, Mozilla sucks, it doesn't show this web page properly." When they can't view WMA files, they won't be mad at MS for trying to lock people into proprietry standards, they will blame whatever media mplayer they are using and go back to Windows Media Player.
We don't need to force MS to sell a stripped down os. They can still easily force people back to MS products (might even make them pay!) because their tactics and market share make it appear that their products are superior. It would be far better to force MS to adhere to open standards. That way everyone else can compete on a level playing field, rather than constantly fighting an uphill battle to be compatible with Microsofts braindeadness.
Er, and how long did it take you to come up with that +5 Insightful gem?
What is going to happen when it brings in too little money to justify? Some spammers will stop spamming. For the remainder, their response rate will go up, and spam will therefore become profitable again.
By your reasoning, one day they'll be no more computers. Eventually the profit margins will be so small, it won't be worth manufacturers making computers, so they'll all just give up.
Why don't people hear about things like the new GM Yellow Rice that helps prevent blindness in Asia?
Because the amount of funds that the biotech companies are putting into alleviating hunger and malnutrition is well BELOW 1% of the total research on GM crops.
GM Golden Rice is heavily used by the pro-GM lobby, but in actual fact, even the organisation which originally did the research has admitted that the benefits have been hugely overexaggerated, and that golden rice would do very little to solve the problem - an adult would have to eat 9kg of this rice to satisfy their minimum daily requirement, and a pregnant woman twice that quantity.
The reality is that to provide enough food for the people already here you can either use massive amounts of chemicals to increase crop yields (definitely bad for environment) or GM foods (some possible dangers but hopefully we can control them in a reasonable manner).
Nonsense. The strongly pro-GM UK government commissioned studies on this to decide whether we should commercialise GM crops. Much to their disappointment, in 2 out of 3 cases, GM crops were more damaging to the environment than the equivelent crops grown with conventional methods.
In the 3rd case, GM was found to be less damaging, but only when compared to a conventional pesticide so toxic the EU has since banned it. I.e., if this study was redone with the pesticide that farmers would now use, this study would have shown 3 out of 3 crops caused MORE damage to the environment than the equivelent conventional growing methods.
The anti-GM movement hasn't conclusively proven that GM is dangerous. But the pro-GM lobby has certainly not conclusively proved that it is safe, nor have they proved that there are any significant benefits.
Go and look for studies into the effect of GM on humans. There are virtually none. There are a few on rats, and some of them have shown adverse health effects.
This doesn't mean that GM is dangerous, but it does mean we need to do more research.
The UK goverments own research done last year shows that the public mood in the UK "[...] ranged from caution and doubt, through suspicion and scepticism, to hostility and rejection." (Quote lifted directly from the report.)
They also found, interestingly, that people who came into the debate undecided about GM and not knowing much about the issues became more anti-GM the more they found out, which you could interpret as meaning that a significant number of people are not anti-GM out of ignorance, rather than choice.
When customers stop buying it, corporations will stop selling it.
Which is why every major supermarket in the UK has removed GM from their products, and biotech companies are withdrawing from the UK because they don't believe there is a market for GM food.
And attitudes amongst retailers are becoming more anti-GM rather than less, e.g. supermarkets are now starting to even remove products from animals fed on GM.
The problem is, dangerous things once built are rarely not used. Your argument might stand up if we had a process where once we had developed a technology, we reviewed it and decided whether the dangers outweighed the benefits.
But we don't, due to the nature of research. Corperations do research because they want to make money. Once they have therefore spent a lot of money developing a new dangerous thing, they want to make damn sure they can sell it to make back their money. They don't give a damn whether selling their new tech is good for the world. Obviously, their loyalty is to their shareholders, and their shareholders want them to make as much money as possible.
This is why we have to make decisions about what research to do BEFORE it is researched. We can't just say, "Hey, this could be dangerous, lets research it and make a decision later about whether we want it." Once it's made, a lot of rich powerful people are going to make damn sure it's used.
Having said that, I don't really see how cloning, in the context of healing people is dangerous. Sure, there are all the usual dangers of medical research, but not really any additional ones.
Cloning for reproduction on the other hand, has a lot of implications that need to be considered very carefully. Top of the list, is the fact that with current technology, we would likely create many stillborn, deformed and otherwise severely disabled children while perfecting the cloning process. Sacrificing the lives of unborn children in the name of the advancement of science is ethically pretty shaky.
I often wonder what goes through the minds of couples who are so desperate for children they think this is a price worth paying. If you really want a kid, there are plenty out there who are equally desperate for parents. Obviously, giving a child a happy life is pretty far down their list of reasons for having a child.
You mean, you downloaded a program being advertised by spam and it was crap?! My god, d'ya reckon it's a one off or should I cancel my penis enlarger and v1agra?
Much as I hate to admit it, maybe MS have a point. Think about why Lindows chose the name they did? Why pick a name that is very close to "Windows"? Why not pick a name which associated Lindows with Linux or UNIX etc, which their OS is technically much closer to.
The answer is that they were purposely avoiding those terms because they scare computer users. They picked the name Lindows because they new that users would associate it with Windows. So the user sees three boxes on ths shelf. Windows, Lindows, and Redhat. To the user, Redhat is scary and unfamiliar, they've probably never heard of it, or if they have, it's been in association with other scary unfamiliar things like Linux and UNIX. Windows is what they know, it's familiar and safe. Lindows, on the other hand, may not be familiar to them, but they might think they can safely assume that "Lindows" must be much closer to Windows than "Linux" is.
So clearly, Lindows are attempting to market their product by creating an association with another strong brand. "By Lindows because it's like Windows" is the unsaid message.
Users won't be confused between Lindows and Windows, but they will be confused into thinking Lindows is like Windows.
IANAL, so I don't know if that's actually illegal, but to me, it seems rather dishonest - as their product isn't in any way associated with Windows. And it was clearly intentional. They presumably would never have called their OS "Lindows" if it wasn't the case that Windows has a near monopoly on the desktop.
Of course, I still hope that Microsoft lose. They are by far the greater evil.
Governments can, in certain circumstances get permission from the EU for state aid to companies. (Not that I have any idea what those circumstances are.:) )
Why don't they bury the waste on a downward going subduction plate?
Because to get it in an effective locations, you'd have to bury it insanely deep, and it would still only get drawn down below the plate at an incredibly slow rate. The plates move at most an inch or so a year.
I live about 15 miles from a nuc plant that produces my power, far cheaper (per Kwh) than anything else
Your doing better than we are here in the UK then. The entire nuclear industry would be bankrupt if it weren't for the government pouring millions and millions of pounds of taxpayers money into privately owned companies. And even then, it's still virtually bankrupt, and producing power that's more expensive per Kwh than virtually any other method. If we had a true free market in the UK power industry, we'd have no nuclear power.
with no polution that I can see
Yeah, you can't see it, but that's because it's really dangerous, and it's therefore stowed away under armed guard somewhere. Still, it will give your children a good steady job keeping it safe. And your childrens children. And your childrens childrens children. And your childrens childrens childrens children. And so on and so forth for the next ten thousand or so generations.
Here in the UK we coat everything in tons of bromine based flame retardants, particularly things like sofas. More so than almost any other country in the world.
Stops fires, but believed by a lots of scientists to cause liver and kidney damage, and birth defects.
Of course, it still saves far more people than it kills, but there are less toxic alternatives that are just as effective, but sadly more expensive.
Yeah, but that's hardly relevant. It's trivially easy to make a mail client the works like this, so it doesn't surprise me that Eudora is far less braindead.
The point is, Eudora is a niche market. Eudora is used by a tiny number of people compared to Lookout.
The users that double click on attachments without thinking are the same users who are never going to install Eudora, but rather just use Outlook because it's what's been given to them.
The "exploit" is the feature of dumb Microsoft mail clients which makes it so easy to execute random programs which arrive by e-mail.
Why not just remove this feature? How many people would really be inconvenienced if it was impossible to execute a program that arrived by e-mail?
It's possible that many users would still be stupid enough to save executables and run then anyway. In which case, the executables should be tagged as "Insecure" when they arrive by e-mail. If users then save them and try to run them, a big scary looking warning box should pop up, suggesting that the user probably doesn't really want to run the program.
This wouldn't eliminate the problem. You can never totally prevent users being stupid. But if users have to think for longer than it takes to double click on an icon, the damage caused by these virus would be geratly reduced.
(DISCLAIMER: I haven't actually used Outlook for years, so maybe it does something like this already, in which case I withdraw this comment and admit I'm wrong.:) )
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O'Caml has a replay debugger. You can run your program in the debugger until it crashes, then step backwards through the code to see what was happening before it crashed.
Very handy, IMHO, although the O'Caml debugger sucks in other ways. (E.g. no watch conditions.)
Yes, I read this, and even though you've quoted it back to me, it still mentions nothing of the relationship between the volume of the telephone conversation and the volume of the face to face conversations.
In fact, you could even infer that this actually means the phone conversations were louder. "Normal" volume of a phone conversation is louder that "normal" volume of a face to face conversation. Although, as there it is not stated explicitly this is quite unclear.
No, he said what do you install after your operating system. ;)
A few thoughts on this research.
:) ) will get annoyed quicker. If this is true, it's unfortunate, because it means that even if the majority of mobile phone users can be educated to be considerate, people will still get annoyed even at them, because they've been "pre-annoyed" by the inconsiderate people.
I'm surprised the author made no reference to the relative volumes of the mobile phone converstation and the face to face conversations. Was the mobile phone conversation the same volume as the normal conversation, the loud conversation, or somewhere in between? If it was the same volume as the loud conversation, the would support the conclusions drawn by the author, that annoyance is primarily due to the exagggerated volume. If it was the same volume as the normal conversation, something else about mobile phones is annoying people.
I suspect that peoples expectations have some affect as well. People who have been annoyed by mobile phones before (ie everyone
I seem to remember that some versions of Unix (including maybe Linux??) have a "sticky" bit which can be set on executables, which causes them to stay in memory after they have been used once. Although, I've never used it, so I could be remembering totally wrong!
/mnt/ramdrive/bin/app" shouldn't access local disk in some shells (eg bash), as "time" is built into the shell, rather than an external command. Of course, "app" might access the disk. I'd create some big programs that do nothing. Although, I suspect that you'd have to be clever to avoid stuff like demand-loaded executables defeating your benchmarking. Maybe a program which sums a large amount of static data?
I think that "time
Always hard to find benchmarks that relate well to real life.
Again, it really isn't that simple. If you know the average throughput of the drive in your machine, calculate how long emacs should take to load. Now, load emacs. Did it take as long as you expected?
The drive in my machine supposedly does more than 10MB/s average, and yet emacs takes much much longer than half a second to load.
If you believe you will actually in real life achieve the performance the manufacturer claims the drive is capable of, you are, to put it politely, slightly naive.
Because it's a lot more complicated that you suggest. What happens if A gets in first, but is doing an extremely long a disk-bound task? B will never get chance to access the disk. It could even be that B would stop after a very short amount of disk access, in which case it will have to wait until A is done, even though interleaving the reads would have been the "right thing to do".
;) ), e.g. in the case of any kind of server.
:-)
Being multi-user complicates things even further. Sure, you are a single user on a desktop machine, and you double click on two programs in rapid succession, queuing them for loading one after the other may be the right thing to do. But what if those programs are actually being loaded by two different users? Can we completely lock out one user just because they started loading their program slightly later? Again, what if user A runs emacs, and a fraction of a second later, user B runs ls? Under your system, B effectively has to wait as long as it would take to load emacs, plus as long as would take to load ls?
You can't even realistically seperate the queues by user. In many situations, a single unix user may be running on behalf on many physical users (AKA human beings
I'm not saying that any of these problems are intractable (Linux is now doing a pretty fine job), just that they aren't as even remotely as trivial as queuing loads one after another.
Oh BTW, thanks for bringing back happy Amiga memories. Them were the days!
They call it shape searching.
They were in a meeting for hours deciding that... you should have seen the names they rejected.
Many artists battle with the record companies on which songs make their records. As an artist, I wouldn't want "market demand" determining the makeup of my album. On the other hand, "artists" like P. Diddy or Britney Spears might prefer it that way.
It;s probably worth pointing out that P. and Britney are making the recording industry a hellova lot more than you are.
No offense intended, and I'm not saying it's a good thing. In fact, I think that this is one of the reasons why the recording industry fears P2P so much - not because it effects sales, but because it's capable of smashing down the barriers between artist and listener.
RIAA execs don't lie awake in bed worrying that in 10 years times, sales will have been cut in half by P2P.
They instead lie awake in bed worrying that in 10 years time, artists will deliver their music straight from the recording studio in their attic, through the server in the basement, to their Internet based community of fans.
OK, this is an extreme idea, but it's plausibly that it will happen to some lesser greater extent. Regardless, it will make the record companies a much less powerful force.
As are all the others who think they can extrapolate the fall in hardware costs over the last n years into the next n years. Deflation in the hardware market has been driven by growth. Build faster computers more cheaply and more people will buy them. That's worked up until now, but it won't work indefinitely.
People's computer needs are finite. People buy new computers because they want to do more, faster. The industry will do it's best to keep us on the upgrade treadmill (and Gate's is one of the main contributers in this area) but it can't go on indefinitely - there's a limit to how much processor time you can waste with a word-processor, and ultimately they'll just be no point getting a new computer.
This in turn will have it's own effect on price - there will be a further downward price adjustment as price becomes a more important factor than performance, but hardware is never going to be free, unless it's that stupid kind of "free" that means "software costs so much we can build the price on the hardware into the cost of the software". But that is gonna be tricky - as open source becomes better and more organised, it will apply downward price pressure to the rest of the market.
It's not just about an OS - this isn't all about Windows. It's about leveraging Windows to push other technical components (and to some extent, visa-versa).
This visa-versa is very important, and we shouldn't dismiss it nearly as easily as you do.
If the EU do decide to make MS sell a stripped down Windows, we are going to see exactly the extent of how Microsofts strategy not only to lock people into Windows, but lock people into other MS software.
When Joe User installs Mozilla, and it fails to render a web page properly because the author has coded for IE instead of for the appropriate standards, the user isn't going to blame MS for messing with open standards, they will say "Hey, Mozilla sucks, it doesn't show this web page properly." When they can't view WMA files, they won't be mad at MS for trying to lock people into proprietry standards, they will blame whatever media mplayer they are using and go back to Windows Media Player.
We don't need to force MS to sell a stripped down os. They can still easily force people back to MS products (might even make them pay!) because their tactics and market share make it appear that their products are superior. It would be far better to force MS to adhere to open standards. That way everyone else can compete on a level playing field, rather than constantly fighting an uphill battle to be compatible with Microsofts braindeadness.
Er, and how long did it take you to come up with that +5 Insightful gem?
What is going to happen when it brings in too little money to justify? Some spammers will stop spamming. For the remainder, their response rate will go up, and spam will therefore become profitable again.
By your reasoning, one day they'll be no more computers. Eventually the profit margins will be so small, it won't be worth manufacturers making computers, so they'll all just give up.
Why don't people hear about things like the new GM Yellow Rice that helps prevent blindness in Asia?
Because the amount of funds that the biotech companies are putting into alleviating hunger and malnutrition is well BELOW 1% of the total research on GM crops.
GM Golden Rice is heavily used by the pro-GM lobby, but in actual fact, even the organisation which originally did the research has admitted that the benefits have been hugely overexaggerated, and that golden rice would do very little to solve the problem - an adult would have to eat 9kg of this rice to satisfy their minimum daily requirement, and a pregnant woman twice that quantity.
The reality is that to provide enough food for the people already here you can either use massive amounts of chemicals to increase crop yields (definitely bad for environment) or GM foods (some possible dangers but hopefully we can control them in a reasonable manner).
Nonsense. The strongly pro-GM UK government commissioned studies on this to decide whether we should commercialise GM crops. Much to their disappointment, in 2 out of 3 cases, GM crops were more damaging to the environment than the equivelent crops grown with conventional methods.
In the 3rd case, GM was found to be less damaging, but only when compared to a conventional pesticide so toxic the EU has since banned it. I.e., if this study was redone with the pesticide that farmers would now use, this study would have shown 3 out of 3 crops caused MORE damage to the environment than the equivelent conventional growing methods.
The anti-GM movement hasn't conclusively proven that GM is dangerous. But the pro-GM lobby has certainly not conclusively proved that it is safe, nor have they proved that there are any significant benefits.
Go and look for studies into the effect of GM on humans. There are virtually none. There are a few on rats, and some of them have shown adverse health effects.
This doesn't mean that GM is dangerous, but it does mean we need to do more research.
the anti-GM camp is vocal, but small.
That rather depends where you live.
The UK goverments own research done last year shows that the public mood in the UK "[...] ranged from caution and doubt, through suspicion and scepticism, to hostility and rejection." (Quote lifted directly from the report.)
They also found, interestingly, that people who came into the debate undecided about GM and not knowing much about the issues became more anti-GM the more they found out, which you could interpret as meaning that a significant number of people are not anti-GM out of ignorance, rather than choice.
When customers stop buying it, corporations will stop selling it.
Which is why every major supermarket in the UK has removed GM from their products, and biotech companies are withdrawing from the UK because they don't believe there is a market for GM food.
And attitudes amongst retailers are becoming more anti-GM rather than less, e.g. supermarkets are now starting to even remove products from animals fed on GM.
I would never buy a product advertised by spam - including the President.
Only in US would you hear the democratic process described as "buying a President".
The problem is, dangerous things once built are rarely not used. Your argument might stand up if we had a process where once we had developed a technology, we reviewed it and decided whether the dangers outweighed the benefits.
But we don't, due to the nature of research. Corperations do research because they want to make money. Once they have therefore spent a lot of money developing a new dangerous thing, they want to make damn sure they can sell it to make back their money. They don't give a damn whether selling their new tech is good for the world. Obviously, their loyalty is to their shareholders, and their shareholders want them to make as much money as possible.
This is why we have to make decisions about what research to do BEFORE it is researched. We can't just say, "Hey, this could be dangerous, lets research it and make a decision later about whether we want it." Once it's made, a lot of rich powerful people are going to make damn sure it's used.
Having said that, I don't really see how cloning, in the context of healing people is dangerous. Sure, there are all the usual dangers of medical research, but not really any additional ones.
Cloning for reproduction on the other hand, has a lot of implications that need to be considered very carefully. Top of the list, is the fact that with current technology, we would likely create many stillborn, deformed and otherwise severely disabled children while perfecting the cloning process. Sacrificing the lives of unborn children in the name of the advancement of science is ethically pretty shaky.
I often wonder what goes through the minds of couples who are so desperate for children they think this is a price worth paying. If you really want a kid, there are plenty out there who are equally desperate for parents. Obviously, giving a child a happy life is pretty far down their list of reasons for having a child.
Well, they need batteries, but you might be satisfied with Hokey Spokes. They even communicate somehow and sync if you have several on one wheel.
You mean, you downloaded a program being advertised by spam and it was crap?! My god, d'ya reckon it's a one off or should I cancel my penis enlarger and v1agra?
Much as I hate to admit it, maybe MS have a point. Think about why Lindows chose the name they did? Why pick a name that is very close to "Windows"? Why not pick a name which associated Lindows with Linux or UNIX etc, which their OS is technically much closer to.
The answer is that they were purposely avoiding those terms because they scare computer users. They picked the name Lindows because they new that users would associate it with Windows. So the user sees three boxes on ths shelf. Windows, Lindows, and Redhat. To the user, Redhat is scary and unfamiliar, they've probably never heard of it, or if they have, it's been in association with other scary unfamiliar things like Linux and UNIX. Windows is what they know, it's familiar and safe. Lindows, on the other hand, may not be familiar to them, but they might think they can safely assume that "Lindows" must be much closer to Windows than "Linux" is.
So clearly, Lindows are attempting to market their product by creating an association with another strong brand. "By Lindows because it's like Windows" is the unsaid message.
Users won't be confused between Lindows and Windows, but they will be confused into thinking Lindows is like Windows.
IANAL, so I don't know if that's actually illegal, but to me, it seems rather dishonest - as their product isn't in any way associated with Windows. And it was clearly intentional. They presumably would never have called their OS "Lindows" if it wasn't the case that Windows has a near monopoly on the desktop.
Of course, I still hope that Microsoft lose. They are by far the greater evil.
Fantastic! Lets deal with angry customers by rewarding the ones who are openly abusive, and therefore punishing those who are patient and calm.
The people working in the call centres are really going to thank them for that.
Governments can, in certain circumstances get permission from the EU for state aid to companies. (Not that I have any idea what those circumstances are. :) )
Why don't they bury the waste on a downward going subduction plate?
Because to get it in an effective locations, you'd have to bury it insanely deep, and it would still only get drawn down below the plate at an incredibly slow rate. The plates move at most an inch or so a year.
I live about 15 miles from a nuc plant that produces my power, far cheaper (per Kwh) than anything else
Your doing better than we are here in the UK then. The entire nuclear industry would be bankrupt if it weren't for the government pouring millions and millions of pounds of taxpayers money into privately owned companies. And even then, it's still virtually bankrupt, and producing power that's more expensive per Kwh than virtually any other method. If we had a true free market in the UK power industry, we'd have no nuclear power.
with no polution that I can see
Yeah, you can't see it, but that's because it's really dangerous, and it's therefore stowed away under armed guard somewhere. Still, it will give your children a good steady job keeping it safe. And your childrens children. And your childrens childrens children. And your childrens childrens childrens children. And so on and so forth for the next ten thousand or so generations.
Here in the UK we coat everything in tons of bromine based flame retardants, particularly things like sofas. More so than almost any other country in the world.
Stops fires, but believed by a lots of scientists to cause liver and kidney damage, and birth defects.
Of course, it still saves far more people than it kills, but there are less toxic alternatives that are just as effective, but sadly more expensive.
Yeah, but that's hardly relevant. It's trivially easy to make a mail client the works like this, so it doesn't surprise me that Eudora is far less braindead.
The point is, Eudora is a niche market. Eudora is used by a tiny number of people compared to Lookout.
The users that double click on attachments without thinking are the same users who are never going to install Eudora, but rather just use Outlook because it's what's been given to them.
The "exploit" is the feature of dumb Microsoft mail clients which makes it so easy to execute random programs which arrive by e-mail.
:) )
Why not just remove this feature? How many people would really be inconvenienced if it was impossible to execute a program that arrived by e-mail?
It's possible that many users would still be stupid enough to save executables and run then anyway. In which case, the executables should be tagged as "Insecure" when they arrive by e-mail. If users then save them and try to run them, a big scary looking warning box should pop up, suggesting that the user probably doesn't really want to run the program.
This wouldn't eliminate the problem. You can never totally prevent users being stupid. But if users have to think for longer than it takes to double click on an icon, the damage caused by these virus would be geratly reduced.
(DISCLAIMER: I haven't actually used Outlook for years, so maybe it does something like this already, in which case I withdraw this comment and admit I'm wrong.