I haven't used it in a couple of months myself, but it was always very heavy on ActiveX. And you've got a few businesses that have been suckered into building a lot with it, a lot of stuff that didn't even need it really. Microsoft pushed it real hard for awhile.
I'm happy to say they've actually gotten better in that regard. I have successfully removed IE entirely from my machine, and when I go there with Opera, their detection series takes me to this page (hopefully that will work, but you may get redirected) which is actually very friendly and helpful, providing direct links to the same updates, instead of demanding that you install MSIE like they used to do. I get that page with Opera and the user string set to anything except MSIE. Pretending to be exploder gets a couple of empty frames - a fitting response, I think.
It's definately possible to really dislike Microsoft, the way only someone that's been using their products for nearly 20 years can dislike them, and still not feel like you can't admit they ever do anything right. They do things right sometimes - that's what makes them dangerous.
I'm sure it's annoying, and it does qualify as a 'trojan horse' since you weren't alerted to its installation, but it's not a virus. Viruses are programs that replicate, that reproduce, however you want to phrase it.
It's not just the date that's off by a power of 10 in Platos story, but also the dimensions. This consistency makes it seem very likely that it's simply a result of a greek mistake while interpreting egyptian numbers.
The island is also called Santorini, btw, and it was not the capital of the Minoans, at least during the times we know of, and neither was Minoa... the capital was Knossos on Crete, Minoa is closer to Thera. However, hopefully someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't remember any reason to rule out the hypothesis that Thera was the site of the Minoan capital in prehistoric times, before the explosion?
Anyway, it's a far better fit than any other site I've seen for the Atlantis story, the details all seem to fit, as long as we change the actual numbers consistently by factors of 10.
As an Opera user I know the phenomenon. Opera has several pre-defined UA strings which can be switched on the fly. I normally leave it set to Opera, however, because I don't want to make it even easier for people to pretend Exploder is the only browser.
Occasionally I change it, to show Mozilla or MSIE, to get into a site like you are talking about, and you know what? I can't think of once when it was anything but a stupid waste of time. These websites are made by morons that substitute flash-bang for content anyway. They can rot in hell, I don't need them. I'll leave my UA string to Opera and just skip any sites that don't like it, unless it's a site I really have to access like for work or something.
Piracy is when you take music that didn't belong to you (or your immediate family).
No, actually piracy is when you take over a ship on the high seas. What you are talking about is copyright infringement. I don't mean to be rude, but please don't do their work for them by helping them mangle the language like that.
Part of the reason that meat tastes good (to those of us that like it) is the fat content. Would vat-grown meat have fat content?
Absolutely. In fact, care would likely have to be taken to stimulate the growing tissue relatively, working it to keep it from getting TOO fat. Depending of course on the initial genes selected, but every animal has fat, and conditions like being grown in a sea of nutrients, with no need to work for food, would surely cause any of us to get fat, no?
An even easier way is to use TVP. You can rehydrate it and cook it however you wish. Excellent vegan Chinese restaurants soak TVP and then use it for fake beef, chicken, etc. All the flavoring is in the spices and preparation -- real chicken and fake chicken don't taste like much by themselves.
Maybe it tastes close enough to fool you, but for many people the above is utterly false.
The fact is that if you're not poor, and you don't mind some work, you can now get a good, balanced diet without meat. This is good. It doesn't mean that some of us don't prefer meat though, and it doesn't mean that it's healthy to go vegetarian if you can't or won't spend extra time and money to make sure that your diet has enough of the right proteins.
There's no way to justify meat-eating on ethical, moral, health, or practical grounds, so you do so solely due to custom.
Absolutely false. Ethical? Moral? Wtf are you talking about? Health - it's healthy to eat less meat than most americans do. That doesn't mean that no one should ever eat meat. Huge jump. Practical? It's quite practical, it provides not only a lot of protein (we don't really need a lot after all) in a small package, it's also a good mix of proteins - something often difficult to assemble from plant sources. It's not difficult to get, and most of us like the taste, at least if it's cooked right.
If you don't like it, that's just fine, but enough with the silly overdramatic oversimplified juvenile nonsense about how everyone who doesn't agree with your taste in food is unhealthy and immoral.
There are plenty of security issues on any platform, sure. But they have a vastly different character. Typically unix alerts are about obscure bugs that haven't been exploited, but could be, and the patches to fix them are usually very quick. With MS, the problems are pretty major, often have already been exploited, and the fixes, if they ever arrive, at the very least are not timely.
And most of the control panel wouldnt work either.
Actually it all works just fine, thanks.
If you have a "start" menu, you have IE like it or not.
If you are running a system with the "explorer" shell ( explorer.exe is always running ), then you still have IE installed. You may not be using it and it may appear to be removed, but it is still there.
Not at all true. You're talking far beyond your knowledge.
You aren't the first. You won't be the last. But don't assume that just because you know a little more about the OS than the average Joe that you know it all. You don't.
I'm running explorer.exe. An old one, that predates IE. There are plenty of other options for a shell that don't require MSIE, that's just the particular one I've chosen, and it shows your assertion to be completely and utterly wrong.
If you have a licensed copy of '95OSR2, you have a perfectly usable (actually much MORE usable than the later versions, IMOP) of explorer.exe that doesn't use MSIE in any way. Neither does litestep, or progman.exe or fileman.exe for that matter.
A computer with the Kernel, Win32 subsytem, command shell, and regedit WILL NOT SELL in the mass market.
I don't believe I ever said they would. But one with all that, plus Mozilla and PerfectOffice? Half the customer base wouldn't notice the difference, and many that did would be pleased with the difference.
If you want any kind of a management GUI then you have to add IE.
A gui to manage what?
The freedom to remove IE and Outlook express DOES exist. Once you do that you will have a really *crippled* OS.
Umm, no, my system is far from crippled.
If you dont think its crippled then you have no experience trying to strip down the OS using the XP embedded kit.
Well there's your first mistake. Never try to use a microsoft OS until the first years worth of bug fixes are checked in.
Everything up through Windows2000, including 2k>sp2 or so, can be cleanly and automatically disinfected. It'll take a little time before XP is safe for use anyway. Early adopters of MS products get nothing but the prestige of having paid to beta test. It's still way too early to be using XP.
If your initial analysis indicates that the cost of doing a port is far more than the possible profit from doing a port, then you may as well just write to the platform and cut the costs of the initial application design.
As long as you don't mind that your code will die the next time the architecture shifts, sure. I prefer to use software that is built to weather mere architecture shifts, however.
Ergo, if it's cheaper to design software such that it is tied to the 'proprietary, closed, unportable' HTML render engine, and would cost an estimated $20,000 less (in terms of development time, or possibly much more amortized over the duration of the product lifecycle) to do so, then it's probably worth it.
And if an open, portable, perhaps even Free HTML render engine were also available, but the closed proprietary one were chosen instead?
I repeat, bad design. Particularly considering what a remarkably poor choice an HTML rendering engine is for doing the things it is usually used for.
You could certainly run Gentoo on that system. But you wouldn't want to compile on it. You'd want to have another, faster machine do the compiles for it.
If you don't have the luxury of a faster machine to serve as a compile farm, I would say just get Slack instead.
Haven't had any need for those programs. If I did, and found that they required components I have removed, I would have a choice of adding those components back in (easily done) or finding a competing product that is better designed.
One application I used before DID fail to work without MSIE - that was Yahoo Messenger, of all things. Fortunately there is Trillian, which I am much happier with anyway, and works just fine with no MSIE.
The HTML renderer (which some people consider to be IE) is still installed, however. You can't easily get rid of that without causing some problems.
Actually you can. There are a number of alternative shells - ranging from progman.exe to litestep. Personally, I'm quite happy using the old explorer.exe off my windows 95 disk - since it has no "integration" with IE I lose a couple of "features" like "active desktop" and the launcher bar on the task bar, neither of which I or anyone else I know has ever missed for a moment, and it's very noticeably faster.
Windows without IE and Outlook express is just the kernel and Win32 api, with a command shell only, which wouldnt be worth a crap to the mass consumer market, only to a very specialized group.
Absolute nonsense. The kernel and the Win32 subsystem, along with a command shell, is all you need to run all the third party software you could want. Mozilla and/or Opera can replace IE, Pegasus or Eudora are big improvements over Outhouse, and Trillian is certainly a better solution than MS Messenger.
The ridiculous claims that windows won't work without these components are disproven on a daily basis by myself and other users who actually know how to make windows work. The only real problem is that MS is dead set against ever letting OEMs do what I do with my own system, and therefore steadily add more and more cruft and "integrated" code to try an obstruct windows' inherent modularity, and legally forbid OEMs from making such changes as well. They have yet to make it impossible at the code level, although they've certainly managed to make it more difficult than it should be.
That's not really true. It has ALL the existing copyright law as precedent.
The Mythical Newline Virus
on
Spy v. Spy
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· Score: 1
Funny, after first getting rude, then getting upset, now you squirm around and try to claim a new, but faulty definition.
Reproduce does not mean: take a portion of myself and place it in object Y. Find a definition that satisfies that requirement. A virus can be a virus that puts a newline at the end of an object file. As long as a newline (\012) is part of the code of the virus. That is hardly reproduction but satisfies the definition.
Your lack of clarity is notewourthy, but still, some small substance has been found in your utterence. You are claiming that a program that placed a newline at the end of object files would therefore be a virus, since it "embeds" a portion of itself in those files.
But this would not be a virus at all. Viruses, as your first definition clearly says, must "infect" other files. Placing LF at the end of a binary file could count as random vandalism, but hardly infection. To infect a program requires introducing the code that does the infection into the program itself.
Unless they are planning a linux only type release then openoffice is nowhere near version 1, I'm all for software for linux but really it isn't hard to make the code portable enough that it will compile on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OsX etc. Right now it compiles nicely in NetBSD ports n thats it, the others are all broken. If I was enough of a C hacker I would try and do my bit but my gripe is the portability issue should have been thought of from the start, if it had been then we could be close to a true open source office solution that everyone (nearly) can use.
Slow down there hoss.
OpenOffice is quite portable. It's being developed on Linux and Win32 x86, Solaris (both architectures, Linux PPC, NetBSD, and FreeBSD.
Not all of the ports are keeping up with the main tree, it's true. Since it's a volunteer effort you know what to do about that... the tree itself is probably as portable as anything out there.
The Hurd and L 4 are some of the promising new technologies under development.
At the same time, don't go getting the idea Linux is going away any time soon. It can take over 20 years for a codebase to really mature, and a mature codebase may still be useful for many years after it is no longer cutting edge.
I noticed the same thing. A guess: Perhaps what he meant was that since they did this, StarOffice is dead in the long run. Which would make sense. Eventually OpenOffice will outstrip StarOffice and there will no longer be any reason to pay for Star. Sun is just cannibalising it for a short term revenue stream, really.
[...]Microsoft has a corner on the collegiate market[...]
That is hardly true.
Business departments tend to run Windows. If they're big or old enough, the probably have come IBM minis too. A lot of departments are likely to use MSWin. Computer science, however, is not one of them. Serious CS departments are still big on *nix, whether it's PA-RISC, SPARC, or Linux/FreeBSD on Intel. Free Software has a HUGE advantage there - there's no substitute for having the use of the source, when you learn to program.
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I haven't used it in a couple of months myself, but it was always very heavy on ActiveX. And you've got a few businesses that have been suckered into building a lot with it, a lot of stuff that didn't even need it really. Microsoft pushed it real hard for awhile.
I'm happy to say they've actually gotten better in that regard. I have successfully removed IE entirely from my machine, and when I go there with Opera, their detection series takes me to this page (hopefully that will work, but you may get redirected) which is actually very friendly and helpful, providing direct links to the same updates, instead of demanding that you install MSIE like they used to do. I get that page with Opera and the user string set to anything except MSIE. Pretending to be exploder gets a couple of empty frames - a fitting response, I think.
It's definately possible to really dislike Microsoft, the way only someone that's been using their products for nearly 20 years can dislike them, and still not feel like you can't admit they ever do anything right. They do things right sometimes - that's what makes them dangerous.
I'm sure it's annoying, and it does qualify as a 'trojan horse' since you weren't alerted to its installation, but it's not a virus. Viruses are programs that replicate, that reproduce, however you want to phrase it.
It's not just the date that's off by a power of 10 in Platos story, but also the dimensions. This consistency makes it seem very likely that it's simply a result of a greek mistake while interpreting egyptian numbers.
The island is also called Santorini, btw, and it was not the capital of the Minoans, at least during the times we know of, and neither was Minoa... the capital was Knossos on Crete, Minoa is closer to Thera. However, hopefully someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't remember any reason to rule out the hypothesis that Thera was the site of the Minoan capital in prehistoric times, before the explosion?
Anyway, it's a far better fit than any other site I've seen for the Atlantis story, the details all seem to fit, as long as we change the actual numbers consistently by factors of 10.
As an Opera user I know the phenomenon. Opera has several pre-defined UA strings which can be switched on the fly. I normally leave it set to Opera, however, because I don't want to make it even easier for people to pretend Exploder is the only browser.
Occasionally I change it, to show Mozilla or MSIE, to get into a site like you are talking about, and you know what? I can't think of once when it was anything but a stupid waste of time. These websites are made by morons that substitute flash-bang for content anyway. They can rot in hell, I don't need them. I'll leave my UA string to Opera and just skip any sites that don't like it, unless it's a site I really have to access like for work or something.
No, actually piracy is when you take over a ship on the high seas. What you are talking about is copyright infringement. I don't mean to be rude, but please don't do their work for them by helping them mangle the language like that.
Thanks for the link, Kerio is nice. I was running ZA Pro, but the 'for dummies' interface was annoying me. I'm uninstalling ZA now.
With all due respect to the Mutt project.
Absolutely. In fact, care would likely have to be taken to stimulate the growing tissue relatively, working it to keep it from getting TOO fat. Depending of course on the initial genes selected, but every animal has fat, and conditions like being grown in a sea of nutrients, with no need to work for food, would surely cause any of us to get fat, no?
Maybe it tastes close enough to fool you, but for many people the above is utterly false.
The fact is that if you're not poor, and you don't mind some work, you can now get a good, balanced diet without meat. This is good. It doesn't mean that some of us don't prefer meat though, and it doesn't mean that it's healthy to go vegetarian if you can't or won't spend extra time and money to make sure that your diet has enough of the right proteins.
Absolutely false. Ethical? Moral? Wtf are you talking about? Health - it's healthy to eat less meat than most americans do. That doesn't mean that no one should ever eat meat. Huge jump. Practical? It's quite practical, it provides not only a lot of protein (we don't really need a lot after all) in a small package, it's also a good mix of proteins - something often difficult to assemble from plant sources. It's not difficult to get, and most of us like the taste, at least if it's cooked right.
If you don't like it, that's just fine, but enough with the silly overdramatic oversimplified juvenile nonsense about how everyone who doesn't agree with your taste in food is unhealthy and immoral.
There are plenty of security issues on any platform, sure. But they have a vastly different character. Typically unix alerts are about obscure bugs that haven't been exploited, but could be, and the patches to fix them are usually very quick. With MS, the problems are pretty major, often have already been exploited, and the fixes, if they ever arrive, at the very least are not timely.
Actually it all works just fine, thanks.
Not at all true. You're talking far beyond your knowledge.
You aren't the first. You won't be the last. But don't assume that just because you know a little more about the OS than the average Joe that you know it all. You don't.
I'm running explorer.exe. An old one, that predates IE. There are plenty of other options for a shell that don't require MSIE, that's just the particular one I've chosen, and it shows your assertion to be completely and utterly wrong.
If you have a licensed copy of '95OSR2, you have a perfectly usable (actually much MORE usable than the later versions, IMOP) of explorer.exe that doesn't use MSIE in any way. Neither does litestep, or progman.exe or fileman.exe for that matter.
I don't believe I ever said they would. But one with all that, plus Mozilla and PerfectOffice? Half the customer base wouldn't notice the difference, and many that did would be pleased with the difference.
A gui to manage what?
Umm, no, my system is far from crippled.
Well there's your first mistake. Never try to use a microsoft OS until the first years worth of bug fixes are checked in.
Everything up through Windows2000, including 2k>sp2 or so, can be cleanly and automatically disinfected. It'll take a little time before XP is safe for use anyway. Early adopters of MS products get nothing but the prestige of having paid to beta test. It's still way too early to be using XP.
As long as you don't mind that your code will die the next time the architecture shifts, sure. I prefer to use software that is built to weather mere architecture shifts, however.
And if an open, portable, perhaps even Free HTML render engine were also available, but the closed proprietary one were chosen instead?
I repeat, bad design. Particularly considering what a remarkably poor choice an HTML rendering engine is for doing the things it is usually used for.
You could certainly run Gentoo on that system. But you wouldn't want to compile on it. You'd want to have another, faster machine do the compiles for it.
If you don't have the luxury of a faster machine to serve as a compile farm, I would say just get Slack instead.
Using one that is proprietary, closed, and unportable certainly does indicate poor design to me, yes.
Haven't had any need for those programs. If I did, and found that they required components I have removed, I would have a choice of adding those components back in (easily done) or finding a competing product that is better designed.
One application I used before DID fail to work without MSIE - that was Yahoo Messenger, of all things. Fortunately there is Trillian, which I am much happier with anyway, and works just fine with no MSIE.
Actually you can. There are a number of alternative shells - ranging from progman.exe to litestep. Personally, I'm quite happy using the old explorer.exe off my windows 95 disk - since it has no "integration" with IE I lose a couple of "features" like "active desktop" and the launcher bar on the task bar, neither of which I or anyone else I know has ever missed for a moment, and it's very noticeably faster.
Absolute nonsense. The kernel and the Win32 subsystem, along with a command shell, is all you need to run all the third party software you could want. Mozilla and/or Opera can replace IE, Pegasus or Eudora are big improvements over Outhouse, and Trillian is certainly a better solution than MS Messenger.
The ridiculous claims that windows won't work without these components are disproven on a daily basis by myself and other users who actually know how to make windows work. The only real problem is that MS is dead set against ever letting OEMs do what I do with my own system, and therefore steadily add more and more cruft and "integrated" code to try an obstruct windows' inherent modularity, and legally forbid OEMs from making such changes as well. They have yet to make it impossible at the code level, although they've certainly managed to make it more difficult than it should be.
No, I understand you fine. I was just trying to guess what ESR meant. That I'm still not sure on.
That's not really true. It has ALL the existing copyright law as precedent.
Funny, after first getting rude, then getting upset, now you squirm around and try to claim a new, but faulty definition.
Your lack of clarity is notewourthy, but still, some small substance has been found in your utterence. You are claiming that a program that placed a newline at the end of object files would therefore be a virus, since it "embeds" a portion of itself in those files.
But this would not be a virus at all. Viruses, as your first definition clearly says, must "infect" other files. Placing LF at the end of a binary file could count as random vandalism, but hardly infection. To infect a program requires introducing the code that does the infection into the program itself.
Slow down there hoss.
OpenOffice is quite portable. It's being developed on Linux and Win32 x86, Solaris (both architectures, Linux PPC, NetBSD, and FreeBSD.
Not all of the ports are keeping up with the main tree, it's true. Since it's a volunteer effort you know what to do about that... the tree itself is probably as portable as anything out there.
The Hurd and L 4 are some of the promising new technologies under development.
At the same time, don't go getting the idea Linux is going away any time soon. It can take over 20 years for a codebase to really mature, and a mature codebase may still be useful for many years after it is no longer cutting edge.
I noticed the same thing. A guess: Perhaps what he meant was that since they did this, StarOffice is dead in the long run. Which would make sense. Eventually OpenOffice will outstrip StarOffice and there will no longer be any reason to pay for Star. Sun is just cannibalising it for a short term revenue stream, really.
That is hardly true.
Business departments tend to run Windows. If they're big or old enough, the probably have come IBM minis too. A lot of departments are likely to use MSWin. Computer science, however, is not one of them. Serious CS departments are still big on *nix, whether it's PA-RISC, SPARC, or Linux/FreeBSD on Intel. Free Software has a HUGE advantage there - there's no substitute for having the use of the source, when you learn to program.