Not *necessarily* cheaper, true. I would say the point to take away, however, is that it *can* be cheaper in the long run, if your site is expected to have a long run in the first place, and if it is serving a high volume of pages. This could really be generalised to any software application. People generally justify using scripting languages instead of programming generally by pointing out that it's cheaper to spend 10 times as much on a faster computer for a script kiddy to work on than to hire a proper programmer, and that it's cheaper to buy an office full of new computers than to wait an extra two weeks for development in many cases. True enough, at that scale it often is. However scale is a factor normally ignored, and should not be. Ten times the cost of equipment for one developer is one thing, and ten times the power usage may not be a blip on the radar at that scale, but ten times the initial outlay, physical space, power usage etc. on a large server farm is an entirely different story. That adds up quick, and makes the case for hiring real programmers (if there are any left to be hired) and doing the job properly.
No, there is a huge difference. Anyone that's played any team sport competitively would know that. "There is no I in team."
If everyone in Britain now speaks broken English then I suggest you start importing teachers from a country that hasnt forgotten how to speak your native language. And shoot all the nitwits that told you lot that singular nouns take verbs in plural case. Immediately.
We do the same for team's "Arsenal are amazing, Manchester United are shit", treating it as a collection of individuals (which they are) makes as much sense as treating them as a single entity.
Did you even read my last paragraph which directly anticipated and refuted this before you even scribbled it?
A team can be amazing without having any standout players (this is called "teamwork,) and on the other side a team of "all stars" can play like shit (if they lack cohesion and play as individuals, rather than as a unit.) In other words "Arsenal is amazing" tells us about the qualities of the team as a team not necessarily anything about the individual players, coaches, etc.
Imagine if this were applied consistently. It would convert ALL nouns into plurals.
A corporation is composed of many people in a certain sense, yes (although see below.) A person is composed of many cells. An object is composed of many molecules, a molecule of many atoms, even atoms are composed of other things. By this logic we would eliminate the singular cases entirely and simply treat every noun as plural. We would be saying "I are going to those store." This is broken English, nothing more. I is a singular noun, and it doesnt matter how many individual things we can distinguish making up that I, it's still a singular noun. You can say "all the cells in my body are going to the store" if you want, just as you can say "all the employees of apple are x" and that's fine, because the subjects in those sentences are grammatically plural (cells and divisions) but "Apple are" is just as broken as "I are".
And your explanation, even if it were valid (see above, it isnt) still is mistaken, because if we follow your suggestion and read the statement with the singular noun "Apple" with "Apple's management and employees" we change the meaning of the sentence quite a bit. "Apple are a threat" or properly "Apple is a threat" doesnt meant the same thing as "Apples management and employees are a threat" - it may look close if you are a sloppy thinker, but they still arent the same thing. The first refers to Apple as a corporate entity - the threat comes from Apple as a company, not from the individuals who work for it. In fact, it seems certain that is exactly what the OP intended to say - you could fire and replace every employee of the company, management and otherwise, but the company itself would continue to be (or not be) a threat regardless.
British English used to be considered the standard outside the yankee infestation, but crap like that is exactly why it's increasingly considered irrelevant. It's absurd, illogical, ungrammatical, and serves no purpose at all except to make sure your reader knows you are a pommy wanker.
becasue telstra got paid to cover area's that weren't immediately profitable, and then raped everyone with outrageous prices.
True words. Yes, it's much more expensive to try and cover a larger landmass with less population, of course. But Telstra didnt have to pay that expense, the tax payers did. Now telstra pretends they paid for all this out of pocket and have to charge extortionist rates to make back that investment even though they never made it in the first place. The big ISP/Telcos in the US play the same game. The taxpayers have already paid for the infrastructure at least twice, and the ratepayers continue to be charged for it as well. It's a sweet scam, getting paid over and over again for infrastructure you didnt even pay for in the first place.
I disagree, because I think that would be a huge imposition on some people. When I was in high school I wrote a Half-Life server-side mod that I gave out for free. Being a teenager who was learning to code, I didn't have any kind of version control, I just kept editing the same source directory. Two years after my first release the project had moved on considerably and I most certainly did not have the original source. Two years after the last release I doubt I had the source for any version of the code.
So? Did you apply for and enforce a copyright grant on that code? Somehow I dont think so.
These days we have the Berne Convention nonsense that copyright is supposed to be automatic, of course. Constitutional (pre-Berne convention) copyright didnt work that way, and was a much better plan. Originally, if you wanted a copyright you had to apply for it. The application had to be accompanied by a hard copy of the work for the Library of Congress. This was not a "gift" which stole from humanity to enrich one person without at least there being a tradeoff - in return for the monopoly you *had* to publish, and leave a copy with the LoC as a sort of escrow, which ensured that after the copyright term expired your work would still be available in the public domain. By default, if you did not do this, there was no copyright on any work. And this regime worked brilliantly for over a hundred years.
There was no "software" when the US Constitution was written, but it's not hard to see how it would be applied. First off, no registration, no copyright, period. Feel free to treat your program as a trade secret, of course. But if you want a copyright on your software, that would be perfectly possible. You would simply have to file an application, including the complete human-readable source code, with the library of congress. In return for a legal monopoly on publication of that work for a limited time, you would ensure that the code would be available to future generations to study, compile, port to new platforms, etc.
The very notion that one can hold and use copyright on a binary blob without ever publishing the actual source code is anathema to the constitutional regime of copyright to begin with.
The screensaver interface in Windows is 'integrated' in the OS and therefore a vulnerability there is a vulnerability in the OS. On the other hand Linux is a little smarter and doesnt dictate high-level abstractions, the vulnerability in question is one in GNOME not Linux, and has no effect at all on the many Linux users who do not choose to ruin a perfectly good system by installing GNOME on it.
If you have any idea what a "browser" is, and which browser you need, which most people simply don't, then you wouldn't need random order to "help you" in your choice. We know what this is really about: the other 4 browser makers hoping to gain some market share by confusing the Windows users.
Err, no, they are hoping to gain some market share of confused windows users. A demographic that now goes nearly 100% to IE, profitting MicroSoft, the authors of confusion.
Of all the replies to this post yours was the best. Uniquely, you appear to make a valid counterpoint.
However, like all analogical arguments, this one only works to the degree that the items used actually do match up in important ways. In this case, you are comparing a general purpose computer with a car, and I would submit the two items have large differences specifically in ways that are directly relevant to UI design and therefore the car analogy fails.
A car does a relatively small number of things. Driving the car is simply a matter of varying a handful of basic parameters - steering deviation, engine speed, drivetrain gear ratio, and braking are the core functions of the car.
Now it just occured to me that this analogy actually *does* work, just not how you are using it. But the computer equivalent of the general customary layout of controls on a car would be either a high level language like C that has a single instance available and working on basically every platform - sounds like gcc to me - or at a lower level in common constructs of the machine language and microcode of different architectures.
What you are talking about is an entirely different level of analysis, however, and at this level the analogy fails spectacularly, because a general purpose computer is not normally perceived or treated as if it only is a machine that can perform a limited number of simple mathematical functions with I/O functions tacked on, which is the literal truth, but it must still be analysed in terms of human experience and society, of course. And at that level of analysis a general purpose computer is a meta-machine. It is a machine that becomes (or controls) other machines. It does not simply accelerate, decelerate, and vector in a three dimensional system which is a close approximation of a two dimensional one - it is easily thousands of times as complex.
Your point is still good even if you did misconstrue that detail.
This is not a sample of users or downloaders or anything like that. It is a self-selected group of people who are registering high scores. In that particular subset of users there appears to be a high rate of piracy and so far (it was a single week of data though!) there were no conversions to sale. No data is provided as to how that subset relates to the broader group of users however, so while interesting and possibly suggestive this proves little. Most high scores are probably being submitted by 13 year old boys with lots of time on their hands but no credit card hey?
The fact that the plug-in had no right to be on the system at all is irreverent.
It may be irreverent but it is definitely relevant as all heck.
What if it wasn't Microsoft's add-on, but something you knowingly installed? Would you feel different then?
And what if milk was rum? What if day was night? What if life was death?
How silly can you possibly be?
But I will try to fix that up so it makes sense to answer. How about what if, despite the fact that you didnt knowingly install this crap, you do actually want it on your machine? Then let MS know they need to do it right! That means it cannot install silently, but only with active user consent, and it must allow uninstallation by the normal means. MS' failure to put out the plugin in a form that is not malware is on them, not on Mozilla!
Imagine what would have happened if Mozilla remotely disabled everyone's Flash plug-in each time a new vulnerability was discovered in it?
Hrmm either that would result in Flash getting the thorough clean-up it needs, or being effectively eliminated from the web. Either way, I dont see a downside. This is a great idea!
Frankly, I agree with you, Java misbehaves in a similar fashion and deserves similar treatment. But that is no excuse to roll over for MS. Also:
Not to defend Microsoft, but that is unbelievably paranoid. In fact, I'd say it qualifies as an outright conspiracy theory.
And I would say you sound very naive. Having worked with MS for a good 20 years now, I'd say it sounded like a reasonable educated guess from someone who knows their MO.
He might well have installed it as a prerequisite for one particularly important application that was programmed by brain-dead chimps. Doesnt mean he wanted it hijacking his browser.
The plugins being discussed do more than just change the User Agent of the browser. They allow for XAML applications to run in Firefox and ClickOnce program distribution. For everyone that normally cries about Microsoft pushing IE and trying to lock users into their browser, this is an attempt to allow people to use an alternative browser while still having access to their other Microsoft-centric technologies (.NET in this case). Isn't this a good thing?
No, actually, it is not. Not at all a good thing, quite the opposite. If you are using firefox to run "content" via a closed, windows-only system like.net, you might as well be using IE. In fact that would be better - at least no one would be fooled into thinking they were writing something that would work on firefox when in fact it would only work on Windows/Firefox.
There is a lot of interesting comment there, including the fact that while everyone is crying about Microsoft "secretly" adding the plugin and preventing users from disabling it, Mozilla doesn't even give users an option to enable it! Their blocklist is all or nothing. Why doesn't that bother anyone here?
Because MS forced the plugin out without user consent and without even a disable option to begin with. Either of which is sufficient in and of itself to classify this bug as malware and remove it whenever encountered without further fuss.
Taking this kind of control away from the users is simply unacceptable, doubly so for businesses.
Oh, indeed it is. MS nonetheless has been doing it regularly for decades, and usually get away with it.
Good to see Mozilla give them what they deserve, even if I do suspect astroturfers like you will wind up sadly blunting the impact as usual.
You show a good reason why TI would *like* to be able to prohibit me from modifying *my* calculator.
You do not show any legal, moral, or ethical reason why their desire is not simply one of millions of impractical fancies. "If wishes were horses the beggars would ride."
I agree, putting windows on this thing makes it utterly pointless.
The Xandros version that my EeePC came with was rough and needed work. Not a *lot* of work, mostly stuff I could do myself given perhaps a week or two to focus on it, but obviously that isnt really close enough.
Windows isnt much better in that respect, and totally unsuited otherwise. I dont discount the allegations some sort of dirty trick or payoff was involved - with MS that is always a safe bet.
Slashdot Mirror
Not *necessarily* cheaper, true. I would say the point to take away, however, is that it *can* be cheaper in the long run, if your site is expected to have a long run in the first place, and if it is serving a high volume of pages. This could really be generalised to any software application. People generally justify using scripting languages instead of programming generally by pointing out that it's cheaper to spend 10 times as much on a faster computer for a script kiddy to work on than to hire a proper programmer, and that it's cheaper to buy an office full of new computers than to wait an extra two weeks for development in many cases. True enough, at that scale it often is. However scale is a factor normally ignored, and should not be. Ten times the cost of equipment for one developer is one thing, and ten times the power usage may not be a blip on the radar at that scale, but ten times the initial outlay, physical space, power usage etc. on a large server farm is an entirely different story. That adds up quick, and makes the case for hiring real programmers (if there are any left to be hired) and doing the job properly.
No, there is a huge difference. Anyone that's played any team sport competitively would know that. "There is no I in team."
If everyone in Britain now speaks broken English then I suggest you start importing teachers from a country that hasnt forgotten how to speak your native language. And shoot all the nitwits that told you lot that singular nouns take verbs in plural case. Immediately.
NO U.
Did you even read my last paragraph which directly anticipated and refuted this before you even scribbled it?
A team can be amazing without having any standout players (this is called "teamwork,) and on the other side a team of "all stars" can play like shit (if they lack cohesion and play as individuals, rather than as a unit.) In other words "Arsenal is amazing" tells us about the qualities of the team as a team not necessarily anything about the individual players, coaches, etc.
Uh, no.
Imagine if this were applied consistently. It would convert ALL nouns into plurals.
A corporation is composed of many people in a certain sense, yes (although see below.) A person is composed of many cells. An object is composed of many molecules, a molecule of many atoms, even atoms are composed of other things. By this logic we would eliminate the singular cases entirely and simply treat every noun as plural. We would be saying "I are going to those store." This is broken English, nothing more. I is a singular noun, and it doesnt matter how many individual things we can distinguish making up that I, it's still a singular noun. You can say "all the cells in my body are going to the store" if you want, just as you can say "all the employees of apple are x" and that's fine, because the subjects in those sentences are grammatically plural (cells and divisions) but "Apple are" is just as broken as "I are".
And your explanation, even if it were valid (see above, it isnt) still is mistaken, because if we follow your suggestion and read the statement with the singular noun "Apple" with "Apple's management and employees" we change the meaning of the sentence quite a bit. "Apple are a threat" or properly "Apple is a threat" doesnt meant the same thing as "Apples management and employees are a threat" - it may look close if you are a sloppy thinker, but they still arent the same thing. The first refers to Apple as a corporate entity - the threat comes from Apple as a company, not from the individuals who work for it. In fact, it seems certain that is exactly what the OP intended to say - you could fire and replace every employee of the company, management and otherwise, but the company itself would continue to be (or not be) a threat regardless.
British English used to be considered the standard outside the yankee infestation, but crap like that is exactly why it's increasingly considered irrelevant. It's absurd, illogical, ungrammatical, and serves no purpose at all except to make sure your reader knows you are a pommy wanker.
True words. Yes, it's much more expensive to try and cover a larger landmass with less population, of course. But Telstra didnt have to pay that expense, the tax payers did. Now telstra pretends they paid for all this out of pocket and have to charge extortionist rates to make back that investment even though they never made it in the first place. The big ISP/Telcos in the US play the same game. The taxpayers have already paid for the infrastructure at least twice, and the ratepayers continue to be charged for it as well. It's a sweet scam, getting paid over and over again for infrastructure you didnt even pay for in the first place.
I can certainly understand that, I am a male myself and I have always found it revolting.
So? Did you apply for and enforce a copyright grant on that code? Somehow I dont think so.
These days we have the Berne Convention nonsense that copyright is supposed to be automatic, of course. Constitutional (pre-Berne convention) copyright didnt work that way, and was a much better plan. Originally, if you wanted a copyright you had to apply for it. The application had to be accompanied by a hard copy of the work for the Library of Congress. This was not a "gift" which stole from humanity to enrich one person without at least there being a tradeoff - in return for the monopoly you *had* to publish, and leave a copy with the LoC as a sort of escrow, which ensured that after the copyright term expired your work would still be available in the public domain. By default, if you did not do this, there was no copyright on any work. And this regime worked brilliantly for over a hundred years.
There was no "software" when the US Constitution was written, but it's not hard to see how it would be applied. First off, no registration, no copyright, period. Feel free to treat your program as a trade secret, of course. But if you want a copyright on your software, that would be perfectly possible. You would simply have to file an application, including the complete human-readable source code, with the library of congress. In return for a legal monopoly on publication of that work for a limited time, you would ensure that the code would be available to future generations to study, compile, port to new platforms, etc.
The very notion that one can hold and use copyright on a binary blob without ever publishing the actual source code is anathema to the constitutional regime of copyright to begin with.
Which is why flash has no place in the GNU OS.
The screensaver interface in Windows is 'integrated' in the OS and therefore a vulnerability there is a vulnerability in the OS. On the other hand Linux is a little smarter and doesnt dictate high-level abstractions, the vulnerability in question is one in GNOME not Linux, and has no effect at all on the many Linux users who do not choose to ruin a perfectly good system by installing GNOME on it.
Err, no, they are hoping to gain some market share of confused windows users. A demographic that now goes nearly 100% to IE, profitting MicroSoft, the authors of confusion.
Of all the replies to this post yours was the best. Uniquely, you appear to make a valid counterpoint. However, like all analogical arguments, this one only works to the degree that the items used actually do match up in important ways. In this case, you are comparing a general purpose computer with a car, and I would submit the two items have large differences specifically in ways that are directly relevant to UI design and therefore the car analogy fails. A car does a relatively small number of things. Driving the car is simply a matter of varying a handful of basic parameters - steering deviation, engine speed, drivetrain gear ratio, and braking are the core functions of the car. Now it just occured to me that this analogy actually *does* work, just not how you are using it. But the computer equivalent of the general customary layout of controls on a car would be either a high level language like C that has a single instance available and working on basically every platform - sounds like gcc to me - or at a lower level in common constructs of the machine language and microcode of different architectures. What you are talking about is an entirely different level of analysis, however, and at this level the analogy fails spectacularly, because a general purpose computer is not normally perceived or treated as if it only is a machine that can perform a limited number of simple mathematical functions with I/O functions tacked on, which is the literal truth, but it must still be analysed in terms of human experience and society, of course. And at that level of analysis a general purpose computer is a meta-machine. It is a machine that becomes (or controls) other machines. It does not simply accelerate, decelerate, and vector in a three dimensional system which is a close approximation of a two dimensional one - it is easily thousands of times as complex.
Make a system any idiot can use and only idiots will use it.
Sign of unreliable chips to come? (Score:0, Troll) /me cannot decide whether to mod troll or funny as both apply.
Your point is still good even if you did misconstrue that detail.
This is not a sample of users or downloaders or anything like that. It is a self-selected group of people who are registering high scores. In that particular subset of users there appears to be a high rate of piracy and so far (it was a single week of data though!) there were no conversions to sale. No data is provided as to how that subset relates to the broader group of users however, so while interesting and possibly suggestive this proves little. Most high scores are probably being submitted by 13 year old boys with lots of time on their hands but no credit card hey?
It may be irreverent but it is definitely relevant as all heck.
And what if milk was rum? What if day was night? What if life was death?
How silly can you possibly be?
But I will try to fix that up so it makes sense to answer. How about what if, despite the fact that you didnt knowingly install this crap, you do actually want it on your machine? Then let MS know they need to do it right! That means it cannot install silently, but only with active user consent, and it must allow uninstallation by the normal means. MS' failure to put out the plugin in a form that is not malware is on them, not on Mozilla!
Hrmm either that would result in Flash getting the thorough clean-up it needs, or being effectively eliminated from the web. Either way, I dont see a downside. This is a great idea!
Frankly, I agree with you, Java misbehaves in a similar fashion and deserves similar treatment. But that is no excuse to roll over for MS. Also:
And I would say you sound very naive. Having worked with MS for a good 20 years now, I'd say it sounded like a reasonable educated guess from someone who knows their MO.
He might well have installed it as a prerequisite for one particularly important application that was programmed by brain-dead chimps. Doesnt mean he wanted it hijacking his browser.
No, actually, it is not. Not at all a good thing, quite the opposite. If you are using firefox to run "content" via a closed, windows-only system like .net, you might as well be using IE. In fact that would be better - at least no one would be fooled into thinking they were writing something that would work on firefox when in fact it would only work on Windows/Firefox.
Because MS forced the plugin out without user consent and without even a disable option to begin with. Either of which is sufficient in and of itself to classify this bug as malware and remove it whenever encountered without further fuss.
Oh, indeed it is. MS nonetheless has been doing it regularly for decades, and usually get away with it.
Good to see Mozilla give them what they deserve, even if I do suspect astroturfers like you will wind up sadly blunting the impact as usual.
Just because my rights make it more difficult for you to pick my pockets doesnt mean you get to ignore them.
Or, you know, if they really "want the student to solve the problem and not the calculator" they could simply ban calculators from the tests!
You show a good reason why TI would *like* to be able to prohibit me from modifying *my* calculator. You do not show any legal, moral, or ethical reason why their desire is not simply one of millions of impractical fancies. "If wishes were horses the beggars would ride."
Yes, Liberty is a very slippery slope. This is why the enemies of liberty try to avoid any compromise with it.
I agree, putting windows on this thing makes it utterly pointless. The Xandros version that my EeePC came with was rough and needed work. Not a *lot* of work, mostly stuff I could do myself given perhaps a week or two to focus on it, but obviously that isnt really close enough. Windows isnt much better in that respect, and totally unsuited otherwise. I dont discount the allegations some sort of dirty trick or payoff was involved - with MS that is always a safe bet.