How silly of him. MS DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows XP don't have any additional features over the any other version! It's just clever marking from Microsoft that prevents us from using DOS!
His opinion based on personal perference doesn't make him anything. It does however make you an asshat and a douche for judging someone on what OS' they prefer.
Enjoy your completely exposed install of Linux if you're not running regularly update security software. The only reason Linux doesn't get Malware is because it isn't worth the author's time, not because it's magically immune
Yes good, efficient design is from the ground up but once you've got the underlying structure sorted, you then move onto features. Once all the features are in place, then you move onto optimisation. Optimisation and bug fixing are the final stages of development, after all, you can't optimise things which haven't been implemented yet can you? Often, yes, you do get magical performance boosts late into development (have a look at videogame development for the clearest examples of this). However Microsoft have never promised magical performance boosts. They've just said less bloat, more streamlining.
No new features? There's the improved wireless, the GUI which will now load and be smooth BEFORE graphics drivers are installed (I don't believe any desktop versions of windows have done that since before win95), the interface is hugely optimised, resulting in a much smoother experience from practically everyone who has done the beta. They've shown a version that will run comfortably on netbooks whilst still looking and feeling great (and the OS is SSD optimised). They improved the UAC so you can make it as invasive or as invisible as you wish. They've implemented Libraries, Homegroups, a 'Play To' feature that will let you play media on any connected PCs. They've updated all the basic applications (notepad etc.).
It's MS going "use the beta to ensure compatibility otherwise you'll stuggle" and it's being spun here as the act of a greedy desperate company that doesn't have a clue.
I hate to tell/. this but everyone I know whose played with the beta has been incredibly impressed at how responsive and easy to use Windows 7 is. This is before they've even added in some of the big features (such as the task bar overhaul). As for the whole driver thing. With windows 7 you get the GUI straight from install without having to bother about drivers. With windows I also don't have to spend endless hours getting wireless to work either.
It's faster, smoother, more reliable, you have more control over the security (and nagging) there are few issues with vista drivers now. All the biggest faults of Vista have been addressed.
No doubt we can expect further articles like this saying how using the Ribbon in Paint is a sign that Microsoft are desperate and in trouble and other such nitpicks.
I believe the wifi networking drivers are done per cart. Given that the DS firmware wasn't meant to be flashed, it's probably the safest way of implementing it so any major networking bugs in the driver code aren't catastrophic (at most the recall of a single game rather than hardware).
People won't be bothered to make one themselves but will be interested in it after reading how he's been so generous releasing his design that they buy premade ones from him.
I'm guessing all it is, is LEDs hooked up to a chip with all the common codes for power buttons and it just cycles through them when the button is pressed. Shouldn't imagine it's something that would have a patent granted.
Why bother with this licence at all? Why not just use creative commons? Are there any notable, useful differences or is the licence trying to spread some GNU brand recognition through association?
To open Yoghurt without it spraying, don't open it with your hand pressing down on the lid as you peel it. just hover your hand over it as you peel. That way you won't increase the air pressure inside the pot and it won't spray out when it's opened
My DivX playing DVD player struggles with fast movement when read from a reasonably high bitrate SD video.
I'd imagine even high speed SD cards wouldn't be able to cope with using around 8 times the bandwidth.
But then there are also plenty of one way encryption mechanisms which mean you NEVER have access to your own data, most commonly used in passwords. In a large portion of systems with fairly secure login systems it's impossible to retrieve a password.
This is an example of someone's own data being deliberately made inaccessible to them by rights management. It may seem trivial but if you go by the pure OSS principles being thrown around a lot here, 1 way encryption is immoral and should never be used in GPL software.
There are plenty of encryption mechanisms out there where people know exactly how they work yet are unable to break them without insane amounts of computational power.
A private key system with a truly random engine behind key generation could potentially be as tough to crack as a closed source one.
.h264 is an incredibly CPU intensive codec. It would increase the cost of players and make it harder for most mobile phones to cope. Bittorrent is awful for streaming (although I believe there is work on a p2p streaming protocol) and could you imagine bittorrent on someone using a 3G data connection(either a phone or laptop)? It would cost them a fortune.
However they've offered DRM free streams and podcasts for years now, are they just intergrating these into iplayer?
Someone needs to invest in an open source DRM mechanism. You have people like the BBC who have good intentions regarding the availability of content but the lack of any DRM at all means their hands are tied when it comes to Linux.
If some of the more talented OSS devs got off their high horse, they'd realise that if they were the first to create a true secure DRM format, they would be free to shape it in a way that is best for consumers whilst still being good for content producers. Being first would mean the chances of adoption were much greater.
No, the encryption and transmission comes down to PhD level programming. The logs themselves could be presented as a simple paper chart saying "a vote for X was cast on machine Y at voting station Z at time T". You could then easily spot voting discrepancies: "I voted for N, not Y when I voted!". It would be anonymous(ish) but verifiable , especially if you displayed a clock showing the server time at the voting and there are steps you could take to further anonomise it (assign a random letter to the machine each vote that the voter can see rather than giving them a fixed id).
Any major errors would be immediately apparent because the info wouldn't decrpyt or it wouldn't match the local logs. Further errors can be identified from anyone who wishes to verify their vote was counted so long as they know their machine code and the time they voted.
To see that something works you don't need to understand it completely, only to know what it does and be able to verify it for yourself.
Again to compare to paper balloting. I know how tamper proof seals can work. They have a printed design on them and when you try to remove the seal, it's impossible to remove without the some of that design being left on the box or being damaged on the tape.
Do I know how this tape is made? Nope. Would I be able to tour the factory to see? Nope. Is it probably a surprisingly complicated process to produce that requires a complex production line? Yes. Yet I trust it works because I can see the end result.
and with the paper voting, you have to trust the counting and handling the ballot boxes. The only difference is that you're changing the group of people you trust.
I love the way people ignore the flaws with paper voting and highlight any slight flaw with electronic voting.
If someone wants to tamper with paper ballots there are countless ways of doing it, especially for counters. You can stuff the ballot box, you can spoil ballots, you can replace paper votes.
Those are just as likely as someone getting through a tamper proof seal, opening up the voting machine, connecting up your own software and then replacing the information with your own that hopefully matches a voter tally you've no way of predicting. All whilst hoping people haven't noticed that you're taking 20 minutes to do a 30 second vote and are ignoring the funny noises being made.
I'm not saying it's without flaws but potentially it can be far more secure than paper voting. Want a paper trail? Have the voting machines phone home every time a vote has been placed and store voting results locally and remotely via a secure connection. Have the remote servers (read only) access to the memory and file system of the voting machine and check at random intervals to ensure the software passes checksums.
Ultimately at some point you're going to have to trust that someone isn't corrupt. The coders, the counters and to some extent the voters.
If you want total anonymity of voters, you're leaving yourself open to election fraud, it's impossible to completely eliminate it because at some point, you're relying on a person or a group of people not being corrupt. This is the same for any anonymous method of voting.
20' is enough to ensure everyone in a train carriage or cinema is unable to receive or make a call (the lower signal strenth in a cinema will make it more effective).
They if they checked the signal before someone activated the jammer they wouldn't know they were unreachable and they could be someone who's on call (doctor, firefighter, coastguard etc.) or waiting on a message.
Radio Jammers are most definately not fun. It's bad enough the ones that send out a burst designed to disconnect phonecalls but one that's designed to run for 2-4 hours...
If someone on a cell phone is annoying you, ask them to keep it down or turn it off. Don't potentially block a call that may be to (or from) the emergency services or another life or death communication. There's a reason jammers carry stiff penalties in most Western countries.
I honestly do not know if I dream in black and white or colour. I just can't remember dreams in that much detail, even seconds after waking I wouldn't be able to answer for sure.
However isn't there a big problem with memorising dreams. It's widely known that dreams are meant to be forgotten, they're 'stored' in part of a brain that's meant to not keep things. As such to remember a dream, you first recall it whilst it's fresh, then you seperately remember what you've recalled. Essentially a version of chinese whispers.
There's a risk that people aren't remembering the dream but remembering what they thought the dream was. If any of that makes sense...
How much money do you think it'd cost Amazon to have their servers down for 12 hours in terms of lost sales? $100,000's? $1,000,000's? What about ad supported content sites? I'd bet the time they're not receiving adviews is costly, not to mention the chance of potential readers being dissuaded from ever coming back.
Blocking access to a website has pretty high costs, the examples I used where obvious examples of lost revenue but although sites with no obvious means of generating income may not be seen to be affected in any way other than inconvenience by downtime, they can still be effected indirectly, either from interested parties being turned away or from a bad reputation being gained.
You know DDOS have ramifications far beyond simple "just a kid having some fun" when organised crime use it to extort money.
Slashdot Mirror
His opinion based on personal perference doesn't make him anything. It does however make you an asshat and a douche for judging someone on what OS' they prefer.
Enjoy your completely exposed install of Linux if you're not running regularly update security software. The only reason Linux doesn't get Malware is because it isn't worth the author's time, not because it's magically immune
Yes good, efficient design is from the ground up but once you've got the underlying structure sorted, you then move onto features. Once all the features are in place, then you move onto optimisation. Optimisation and bug fixing are the final stages of development, after all, you can't optimise things which haven't been implemented yet can you? Often, yes, you do get magical performance boosts late into development (have a look at videogame development for the clearest examples of this). However Microsoft have never promised magical performance boosts. They've just said less bloat, more streamlining.
No new features? There's the improved wireless, the GUI which will now load and be smooth BEFORE graphics drivers are installed (I don't believe any desktop versions of windows have done that since before win95), the interface is hugely optimised, resulting in a much smoother experience from practically everyone who has done the beta. They've shown a version that will run comfortably on netbooks whilst still looking and feeling great (and the OS is SSD optimised). They improved the UAC so you can make it as invasive or as invisible as you wish. They've implemented Libraries, Homegroups, a 'Play To' feature that will let you play media on any connected PCs. They've updated all the basic applications (notepad etc.).
Just because it's easy doesn't mean device manufacturers couldn't come across unforseen issues if they don't test.
It's MS going "use the beta to ensure compatibility otherwise you'll stuggle" and it's being spun here as the act of a greedy desperate company that doesn't have a clue.
I hate to tell /. this but everyone I know whose played with the beta has been incredibly impressed at how responsive and easy to use Windows 7 is. This is before they've even added in some of the big features (such as the task bar overhaul). As for the whole driver thing. With windows 7 you get the GUI straight from install without having to bother about drivers. With windows I also don't have to spend endless hours getting wireless to work either.
It's faster, smoother, more reliable, you have more control over the security (and nagging) there are few issues with vista drivers now. All the biggest faults of Vista have been addressed.
No doubt we can expect further articles like this saying how using the Ribbon in Paint is a sign that Microsoft are desperate and in trouble and other such nitpicks.
I believe the wifi networking drivers are done per cart. Given that the DS firmware wasn't meant to be flashed, it's probably the safest way of implementing it so any major networking bugs in the driver code aren't catastrophic (at most the recall of a single game rather than hardware).
Also, that power button looks a nightmare for lefties. you only need to tap it to reset the console? euch.
People won't be bothered to make one themselves but will be interested in it after reading how he's been so generous releasing his design that they buy premade ones from him.
I'm guessing all it is, is LEDs hooked up to a chip with all the common codes for power buttons and it just cycles through them when the button is pressed. Shouldn't imagine it's something that would have a patent granted.
Why bother with this licence at all? Why not just use creative commons? Are there any notable, useful differences or is the licence trying to spread some GNU brand recognition through association?
To open Yoghurt without it spraying, don't open it with your hand pressing down on the lid as you peel it. just hover your hand over it as you peel. That way you won't increase the air pressure inside the pot and it won't spray out when it's opened
My DivX playing DVD player struggles with fast movement when read from a reasonably high bitrate SD video. I'd imagine even high speed SD cards wouldn't be able to cope with using around 8 times the bandwidth.
This is an example of someone's own data being deliberately made inaccessible to them by rights management. It may seem trivial but if you go by the pure OSS principles being thrown around a lot here, 1 way encryption is immoral and should never be used in GPL software.
So, what's your view on open source encryption software like TrueCrypt then? Encryption is just another form of DRM.
A private key system with a truly random engine behind key generation could potentially be as tough to crack as a closed source one.
A scalpel has good uses and it has sinister uses. Don't blame the tools for their misuse.
.h264 is an incredibly CPU intensive codec. It would increase the cost of players and make it harder for most mobile phones to cope. Bittorrent is awful for streaming (although I believe there is work on a p2p streaming protocol) and could you imagine bittorrent on someone using a 3G data connection(either a phone or laptop)? It would cost them a fortune.
However they've offered DRM free streams and podcasts for years now, are they just intergrating these into iplayer?
Someone needs to invest in an open source DRM mechanism. You have people like the BBC who have good intentions regarding the availability of content but the lack of any DRM at all means their hands are tied when it comes to Linux.
If some of the more talented OSS devs got off their high horse, they'd realise that if they were the first to create a true secure DRM format, they would be free to shape it in a way that is best for consumers whilst still being good for content producers. Being first would mean the chances of adoption were much greater.
No, the encryption and transmission comes down to PhD level programming. The logs themselves could be presented as a simple paper chart saying "a vote for X was cast on machine Y at voting station Z at time T". You could then easily spot voting discrepancies: "I voted for N, not Y when I voted!". It would be anonymous(ish) but verifiable , especially if you displayed a clock showing the server time at the voting and there are steps you could take to further anonomise it (assign a random letter to the machine each vote that the voter can see rather than giving them a fixed id).
Any major errors would be immediately apparent because the info wouldn't decrpyt or it wouldn't match the local logs. Further errors can be identified from anyone who wishes to verify their vote was counted so long as they know their machine code and the time they voted.
To see that something works you don't need to understand it completely, only to know what it does and be able to verify it for yourself.
Again to compare to paper balloting. I know how tamper proof seals can work. They have a printed design on them and when you try to remove the seal, it's impossible to remove without the some of that design being left on the box or being damaged on the tape.
Do I know how this tape is made? Nope. Would I be able to tour the factory to see? Nope. Is it probably a surprisingly complicated process to produce that requires a complex production line? Yes. Yet I trust it works because I can see the end result.
and with the paper voting, you have to trust the counting and handling the ballot boxes. The only difference is that you're changing the group of people you trust.
I love the way people ignore the flaws with paper voting and highlight any slight flaw with electronic voting.
If someone wants to tamper with paper ballots there are countless ways of doing it, especially for counters. You can stuff the ballot box, you can spoil ballots, you can replace paper votes.
Those are just as likely as someone getting through a tamper proof seal, opening up the voting machine, connecting up your own software and then replacing the information with your own that hopefully matches a voter tally you've no way of predicting. All whilst hoping people haven't noticed that you're taking 20 minutes to do a 30 second vote and are ignoring the funny noises being made.
I'm not saying it's without flaws but potentially it can be far more secure than paper voting. Want a paper trail? Have the voting machines phone home every time a vote has been placed and store voting results locally and remotely via a secure connection. Have the remote servers (read only) access to the memory and file system of the voting machine and check at random intervals to ensure the software passes checksums.
Ultimately at some point you're going to have to trust that someone isn't corrupt. The coders, the counters and to some extent the voters.
If you want total anonymity of voters, you're leaving yourself open to election fraud, it's impossible to completely eliminate it because at some point, you're relying on a person or a group of people not being corrupt. This is the same for any anonymous method of voting.
20' is enough to ensure everyone in a train carriage or cinema is unable to receive or make a call (the lower signal strenth in a cinema will make it more effective).
They if they checked the signal before someone activated the jammer they wouldn't know they were unreachable and they could be someone who's on call (doctor, firefighter, coastguard etc.) or waiting on a message.
Radio Jammers are most definately not fun. It's bad enough the ones that send out a burst designed to disconnect phonecalls but one that's designed to run for 2-4 hours...
If someone on a cell phone is annoying you, ask them to keep it down or turn it off. Don't potentially block a call that may be to (or from) the emergency services or another life or death communication. There's a reason jammers carry stiff penalties in most Western countries.
I honestly do not know if I dream in black and white or colour. I just can't remember dreams in that much detail, even seconds after waking I wouldn't be able to answer for sure.
However isn't there a big problem with memorising dreams. It's widely known that dreams are meant to be forgotten, they're 'stored' in part of a brain that's meant to not keep things. As such to remember a dream, you first recall it whilst it's fresh, then you seperately remember what you've recalled. Essentially a version of chinese whispers.
There's a risk that people aren't remembering the dream but remembering what they thought the dream was. If any of that makes sense...
You're right, lets ignore crimes being taking place because we don't like the victims, that's the hallmark of a fair and just society!
and if you don't agree you're clearly a scientologist/terrorist/commie/Jew and you're just as deserving of acts like these taking place!
Blocking access to a website has pretty high costs, the examples I used where obvious examples of lost revenue but although sites with no obvious means of generating income may not be seen to be affected in any way other than inconvenience by downtime, they can still be effected indirectly, either from interested parties being turned away or from a bad reputation being gained.
You know DDOS have ramifications far beyond simple "just a kid having some fun" when organised crime use it to extort money.
People say that it's a bogus standard because no one but Microsoft can really ever claim to have 100% compatibility.
The W3C's been churning out bogus standards for years then :P