That's certainly a fair comment but my point is not so much about how well it runs in terms of performance, but that it's been so far, a glitch free experience which is a separate issue from performance.
It's certainly not the buggy monster it was rumoured to be (and probably really was) at release and for a while after. Even XP had more than it's fair share of bugs at release however, so I'm not even sure Vista is really any different than most other Microsoft OS'. I'd say the biggest factor in slowing it's adoption compared to previous Microsoft OS' more than anything is that it's more of a pain to pirate and simultaneously keep updated. Microsoft could learn a lesson there in that perhaps if people can download their OS for free illegally and still keep it patched there's probably going to be more people to rate their OS up and more profit for them overall as it becomes more mainstream, mainstream enough to be adopted sooner by the large corporates and home users.
Why? Well I just built a new PC (2.83ghz quad core, 8gb RAM, 2x1tb hard drives, GeForce 280 GTX) and decided to take the plunge and stick Vista on it, amazingly I've not run into a single glitch, which is rare when building a new PC from components. I've found Vista better than I expected, which is not to say a lot because my hopes weren't high for it in the first place but without wanting to sound like a Microsoft fanboy, and I know many would be shocked to hear these words here, but... Vista really aint all that bad.
I'm a rather late adopter with Vista, I generally adopt new OS' first day so this is the first OS I've held back on due to many horror stories. Perhaps also it would be more problematic if I wasn't installing it on a brand new PC (i.e. no 64bit drivers for older hardware etc.) but as I've used it so far I have to give it a thumbs up.
I'm still not going to upgrade my 2nd PC or my laptop to Vista though, because due to all the horror stories I've heard with Vista I'm still reluctant and as mentioned above am concerned that slightly older hardware may run into problems. One things for sure though, if you don't need any legacy support, are building a new system from scratch and intend to use mostly modern applications (I'm using Office 2007, Visual Studio 2008 and more recent games as well as the usuals like Winamp on it only really) then it really aint a bad OS at all.
Of course, I've also ordered an extra pair of drives for the system which I intend to use to install Ubuntu on as I'm hoping that will also be an equally pleasant experience on my new kit but as I develop with ASP.NET professionally (PHP personally) then it's a little inconvenient to switch to Ubuntu full time unfortunately. Still it's early days, I've only been using my new machine just over a week and all though I've been putting it through it's paces hard due to being off work for the week and trying various new games and such on it it's still early days and it could yet still dissapoint I guess;)
That link isn't of much relevance, it just details redundancy payment details once you've been selected for redudnancy. This link is what you should be looking at:
As shown in all these links the key point is that there has to be a demonstrably fair reason to get rid of someone. You're certainly right that there's no shortage of people who think they're great when they're not, but under the above processes this will be uncovered by the evidence- if a worker feels they've been booted when they're not the worst performer and not the newest employee or some other valid reason then they need to prove this. Using a programmer for example, they might wish to demonstrate that they produce more lines of defect free code than other developers or something similar, this is the type of evidence they could produce from stats on such things to show that they've been dismissed unfairly or been unfairly selected for redundancy.
In some countries (European ones are a good example) governments prefer to protect employees from bosses firing for no reason because otherwise you get inflated unemployment figures. In the UK for example you have to have a reason to fire someone and it has to be fair. Even in the case of redundancies you can't get rid of the people you dislike under a lot of circumstances, you have to be able to justify why you've got rid of them if they've been there longer than other employees, you have to justify why you got rid of them if they perform better than other employees and so on. In other words you can't get rid of them if they're a good employee and you don't have good reason.
You can't even get rid of them by trying to make their life hell and making them want to leave because providing they've had the sense to document and get as much evidence (i.e. copies of e-mails) of all instances where the boss has made your life hell to try and make you leave. An employee who has had his life made difficult more so than other employees and who has evidence may choose to stay or leave the company and go for a constructive dismissal industrial tribunal. Payouts for succesful cases are often large on the order of 10s to 100s of thousands of pounds, this often acts as a good deterrent for bosses not to be particularly malicious assholes to employees. Realistically if you do stay in your job and file an industrial tribunal for this type of thing you'll probably find you have no future at that job anyway, but chances are if someone's boss is screwing them over regularly enough for them to file a tribunal you wouldn't have much to lose in that respect anyway.
I'm not sure however that even if these kind of laws were applicable in the country the poster lived in that not liking the patent system is grounds for avoiding the sack. When I was working in IT support I didn't particularly like users but I'm not sure I'd have got on too well if I'd refused to speak to them.
Wow, I made not a lot of sense in quite a few parts of that post, I guess posting when tired and in such hot weather aint such a great idea! Apologies for that, but I'm sure people can figure out what I meant;)
Woah, hold your horses there. You missed the important part. The most important thing in console sales is software, this is where money is really made, I'm not saying the 360 has made up for per performance compared to the Wii in other areas with software but it has sold around twice as many titles per unit as the Wii.
It's probably not on as much of a loss compared to the Wii as one might think when it's shifted something like 7 games per console compared to the Wii's average of roughly 3 games per console last time stats were released about software sales a couple of months ago.
The PS3 has even sold more units than the Wii albeit only by a small amount.
I'd wager a bet the profit margins between the Wii and 360 are a fair bit closer when you factor software in and focus on more than just hardware.
I tend to see e-mail as something you use for temporary exchange of messages and tasks/information held therein, not something to be used to archive material.
I'd argue the company's policy isn't actually far wrong, surely anything over about 180 days is something that is more suited to permanent archiving anyway?
I'll admit when I was working in tech support and I had our corporate Microsoft keys e-mailed me I kept them in my personal folders for a couple of years but realistically I have to admit I think these would be better placed in an information repository suited to more permanent store of information.
The company does then of course run the risk of people storing data that puts them at legal risk in that information repository instead however!
I'm not sure though that there are many circumstances where an e-mail client needs to act as a long term information store. I find it's generally the case that if you need to store it for a long while, it'll almost certainly be something that others in your company will need access to should you get hit by a bus tomorrow and as such, maybe shared folders (with appropriate permissions) are a better choice than personal folders?
I live in the UK and one of my obscure hobbies is growing cactus. Here and in the rest of Europe we're allowed to grow any cactus we like however Lophophora (more commonly known as Peyote) are banned in the US due to their mescaline content which occurs growing in areas with lots of sunlight.
Lophophora here do not get the conditions (unless you use artificial lighting) to produce a decent mescaline content to be used as a hallucinogenic and again as such are perfectly legally. However, whilst cacti are freely traded on eBay, even those legally collected from protected habitat it is against eBay's policy to trade Lophophora on the European eBay sites simply because it's illegal to grow in the US. As such I can totally understand how you feel because European lophphora will not only be picked up by local and US customs if shipped outside of Europe but is harmless inside of Europe anyway due to the inability to naturally produce mescaline, yet again, eBay will happily allow the trading of illegally habitat collected endangered plants.
Laws surrounding plants are not just fucked up in the US, but the whole international situation with plants and the likes of CITES is well and truly messed up. Companies like eBay with such confused policies where trading of illegal plants is turned a blind eye to and trading of perfectly legal plants in Europe is banned only serve to confuse the issue even more.
Wasn't a massive fan of MFC either if I'm honest but C#? What's wrong with it exactly? combined with the.NET framework it's like Java done right.
If you only have to write for Windows or are happy with the current Mono implementation, C# is one of the best languages out there for application development. It's a modern language, it takes what other older languages did right and fixes many of the things they did wrong.
The.NET framework is easily one of the best frameworks out there also, it's not like stuff running on the CLR is even slow, it's also a pretty efficient language in that respect also.
C# and.NET let you write some very good apps in a lot less code and hence in a much cleaner, tidier way than the vast majority of other languages out there, at least for the Windows platform that is.
Out of interest, what are your specific problems with IIS that make you suggest it's one of, if not the worst web servers out there?
I much prefer Apache, but there are scenarios where IIS is a better choice, and I don't think IIS is any worse than much else other than Apache to be honest.
It's not the IIS of old anymore, it's nowadays pretty decent. Microsoft have certainly cleaned up their act a lot in terms of security and stability of the likes of IIS/SQL server in recent years. ASP.NET is of course a major improvement over classic ASP also and combined the full suite make IIS a pretty attractive option for many applications.
I'd never use IIS to build the next Facebook or anything personally certainly, for really high volume, high profile sites I'd still use Apache but for medium sites requiring high functionality or for intranet based web applications it's still a very good choice. Furthermore with the amount of companies running Windows out there, any negative points in using IIS over Apache are absolutely negligible compared to ease of integration into existing infrastructure and hence the ease of maintaining consistent identity management. The same is true of course on a Linux/Unix based platform with Apache and the likes certainly, but my point is that there are a lot of Windows shops out there and for them IIS is simply the better choice because the benefits of IIS truly do outweigh the benefits of Apache in many circumstances.
Again, I know praising Microsoft or their products is a touchy subject here on Slashdot and again Apache is still my favourite but I think it's rather foolish to blindly dismiss IIS with the suggestion it's one of the worst web servers there is nowadays.
Because it's not as if global warming, ozone layer depletion and such haven't taught us that creating unnatural chemical imbalances in natural systems causes problems or anything is it.
Biggest geek movie until X-Files?
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Batman Discussion
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· Score: 0, Troll
Not that that's saying much but can anyone elaborate as to why this is a big geek movie? Does it have lots of computing/IT stuff in it giving it more geek appeal and more reason to have it's very own uncategorized Slashdot article than any other similar film?
Or is it just the same, tired old Batman/Spiderman/Superman/Whateverman set of stories reiterated over and over, hyped to hell because that's what Hollywood does but isn't actually very good but with a bit of extra hype because it has a now dead actor in it?
The closest case I can think of to this was the whole Lindows (now Linspire) debacle. Microsoft complained that Lindows sounded too much like Windows and for some idiotic reason managed to win.
I don't disagree Lindows sounds like Windows, but it takes a rather impressive amount of mental incapacity to think the two are somehow the same.
What a menu down the left and arial, verdana, tahoma? I'm fairly convinced Facebook wasn't the first to come up with that setup!
I haven't logged in to the site of course so I don't know what it's like overall but really the frontend whilst admittedly a similar layout, certainly isn't identical or even particularly close to identical by any means. There's some pretty blatant differences and you'd certainly never confuse to the two.
Blizzards own Warden program sits inspecting other files and processes on your system to ensure they're not cheating tools, this is easily and equally demonstrable as against the EULA/ToS of the other applications it scans.
In winning this case, Blizzard have quite arguably declared their own Warden anti-cheating application illegal.
Indeed. If I were the Glider developer and this meant the end of my project I'd open source it and let it go underground.
That way it'd serve Blizzard right for making such idiotic legal challenges that have massive repercussions for the rest of the tech community as a whole.
If it goes underground or is passed abroad I'd imagine there is very little Blizzard could do about it. If it went to a nation with less technically inept judges I'd imagine the legal challenge would be shot down straight away. The author isn't likely to leave the US I'd imagine but there's no reason his software couldn't. I'm not sure on the legality of selling his program online with the statement "Not for sale in the US" as that's another potential option for him.
I've got to admit cryptography isn't my greatest strength so I could well have misunderstood here but I thought you could handle it as follows-
You have a public key system to transfer the keys for the encryption system used for the main transfers, the public key can decrypt in such a way that only the private key can decrypt. So: - Person 1 takes person 2's public key and encrypts their transfer encryption/decryption key with it - Person 2 decrypts person 1's key encrypted with his public key using his private key - Person 2 can then communicate with person 1 using the key sent in an encrypted form
The only way I could see man in the middle working is brute force by using the public key of person 2 to encrypt strings of text until they get a match of the key sent by person 1 to person 2 that was encrypted using person 2's public key. Person 2's private key is never sent across the network and is the only thing that can decrypt the other key that was sent encrypted by person 1. At this point the key that will be used by the two has been transferred in an encrypted form and need never be transferred again after that. As such I can't see how it would be intercepted.
Is this not possible? have I missed some blatantly obvious security gap that a man in the middle attack can exploit here? I'm pretty sure I've read about plenty of encryption systems whereby a public key can only encrypt and a private key is required to decrypt the data encrypted by the public key.
No, you've misinterpreted the situation and some of what you say is outright false. People didn't like living under Saddam, he was still extremely oppresive. The reaction from people immediately after he was overthrown was evidence that they were glad to see him go. The issue is that what he did do well was keep a lid on the different groups that are now killing each other, when he was removed these groups were free to carry out the attacks they'd wanted to carry out all along but couldn't with Saddam keeping a close eye on them.
It's not therefore that people were happy to live under Saddam, just that Saddam had a stranglehold on his citizens. The situation you suggest where people owned AKs and RPGs left right and centre under his regime is fictitious, this was simply not the case. The weapons the insurgents are running round with now are the weapons Saddams army abandoned and left lying around after they were obliterated by the allied forces as well as weapons smuggled in from Iran and Syria. The places where people were armed such as Kurdistan often fought against him but often came off a hell of a lot worse as they simply didn't have the firepower to match (which is exactly why the US right to bear arms so they can overthrow their government if it pisses them off enough excuse is a bit silly, an M1 Abrams trumps your rifle 50 times over). At the end of the day you can have all the AKs and RPGs you want in the world but when a Mig comes flying over the hill and drops 500lb of explosives on you then it really isn't going to help you. Saddam had spies left right and centre so even if people were all armed it was never going to be much use because anyone who dare show any sign of revolt would quickly dissapear.
The fighting in Iraq is largely Shia vs. Sunni. The US troops get caught in it primarily because they're stood between the two factions trying to stop them. There is some specific targetting of US troops by Al Qaeda affiliated groups and similar but for the most part Iraqi's aren't rising up against and attacking the US troops, they're attacking each other. It is for this reason you regularly see reports of "30 iraqi civilians killed at wedding" or similar - attacks like this are quite clearly not attacks against the occupying forces and attacks like this are the most common types. Even with the Mahdi army the only reason they don't like US troops is because they know they're capable of disarming them leaving them unable to hit Sunnis and not because of some hatred of them removing Saddam, in fact, the likes of Muqtada Al-Sadr will only be happy with Saddam being overthrown because it leaves an opening for him to rise to levels of power he could never have achieved under Saddam. The only thing stopping him are US forces and the new Iraqi government, both of which aren't allowed to hit his forces anywhere near as hard and indiscriminately as Saddam might have should he have tried to rise up against them in the same way for fear of condemnation from the international community and further loss of international reputation for the US.
The key to fixing the situation in Iraq is to prevent the militias fighting each other and this is what is happening with the US surge, it is unexpectadly working rather well right now. It's probably also worth pointing out that things are not all that different to Ireland for us Brits. When the factions stopped fighting each other, the factions also stopped attacking British troops.
You don't seem to particularly understand the importance of nations like Italy and France. As with Britain they're nations with extremely long histories that leave them to this day with a footing in many parts of the world. Their influence is incredibly strong internationally and it's this influence that keeps them strong economically, they're nations that simply wont sink in power because there's always nations willing to support them, trade with them and hold them up, often because of strong historical ties.
France particularly is strong in many other ways also, it's a member of the UN security council for one, has a lot of sway in the EU as does Italy- the EU is by far the worlds largest economy by GDP and many other measures.
These just aren't nations that are irrelevant, nor will they likely ever will be for decades or probably even centuries to come. I'm not saying this as a European with some arrogant feeling of self-importance (in fact, I'm British so I'm actually legally obliged to hate the French anyway;)) but because these nations have so much power over international organisations and systems. They have the power to persuade the UN to push sanctions upon nations that dare consider trying to move away from the laws these nations produce for example and hence there's little that can topple them. Hell, a sizeable portion of the world depends on France and Italy for their defence, sure they could source equipment elsewhere but it'd take years and in the meantime they'd have zero support or ammo for their existing hardware.
It's probably worth also noting that France and Britain have been working to get China, India, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa in on the act for a little while now too, so as with most organisations irrelevance isn't relevant when change is possible as it is with the G8. China has been in on the G8 meets for a few years now anyway, there are only a few issues covered by the G8 from which it's excluded.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, I'm intrigued also as I've yet to have any problem with capacitors on my various motherboards through the ages.
I know at work there was a dodgy batch of MSI motherboards with capacitors that blew but it was literally just a single batch.
That's certainly a fair comment but my point is not so much about how well it runs in terms of performance, but that it's been so far, a glitch free experience which is a separate issue from performance.
It's certainly not the buggy monster it was rumoured to be (and probably really was) at release and for a while after. Even XP had more than it's fair share of bugs at release however, so I'm not even sure Vista is really any different than most other Microsoft OS'. I'd say the biggest factor in slowing it's adoption compared to previous Microsoft OS' more than anything is that it's more of a pain to pirate and simultaneously keep updated. Microsoft could learn a lesson there in that perhaps if people can download their OS for free illegally and still keep it patched there's probably going to be more people to rate their OS up and more profit for them overall as it becomes more mainstream, mainstream enough to be adopted sooner by the large corporates and home users.
I've been talking Vista up lately too!
Why? Well I just built a new PC (2.83ghz quad core, 8gb RAM, 2x1tb hard drives, GeForce 280 GTX) and decided to take the plunge and stick Vista on it, amazingly I've not run into a single glitch, which is rare when building a new PC from components. I've found Vista better than I expected, which is not to say a lot because my hopes weren't high for it in the first place but without wanting to sound like a Microsoft fanboy, and I know many would be shocked to hear these words here, but... Vista really aint all that bad.
I'm a rather late adopter with Vista, I generally adopt new OS' first day so this is the first OS I've held back on due to many horror stories. Perhaps also it would be more problematic if I wasn't installing it on a brand new PC (i.e. no 64bit drivers for older hardware etc.) but as I've used it so far I have to give it a thumbs up.
I'm still not going to upgrade my 2nd PC or my laptop to Vista though, because due to all the horror stories I've heard with Vista I'm still reluctant and as mentioned above am concerned that slightly older hardware may run into problems. One things for sure though, if you don't need any legacy support, are building a new system from scratch and intend to use mostly modern applications (I'm using Office 2007, Visual Studio 2008 and more recent games as well as the usuals like Winamp on it only really) then it really aint a bad OS at all.
Of course, I've also ordered an extra pair of drives for the system which I intend to use to install Ubuntu on as I'm hoping that will also be an equally pleasant experience on my new kit but as I develop with ASP.NET professionally (PHP personally) then it's a little inconvenient to switch to Ubuntu full time unfortunately. Still it's early days, I've only been using my new machine just over a week and all though I've been putting it through it's paces hard due to being off work for the week and trying various new games and such on it it's still early days and it could yet still dissapoint I guess ;)
That link isn't of much relevance, it just details redundancy payment details once you've been selected for redudnancy. This link is what you should be looking at:
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/RedundancyAndLeavingYourJob/DG_10029832
These two links are also relevant:
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/RedundancyAndLeavingYourJob/DG_10026696
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/RedundancyAndLeavingYourJob/DG_10026692
As shown in all these links the key point is that there has to be a demonstrably fair reason to get rid of someone. You're certainly right that there's no shortage of people who think they're great when they're not, but under the above processes this will be uncovered by the evidence- if a worker feels they've been booted when they're not the worst performer and not the newest employee or some other valid reason then they need to prove this. Using a programmer for example, they might wish to demonstrate that they produce more lines of defect free code than other developers or something similar, this is the type of evidence they could produce from stats on such things to show that they've been dismissed unfairly or been unfairly selected for redundancy.
In some countries (European ones are a good example) governments prefer to protect employees from bosses firing for no reason because otherwise you get inflated unemployment figures. In the UK for example you have to have a reason to fire someone and it has to be fair. Even in the case of redundancies you can't get rid of the people you dislike under a lot of circumstances, you have to be able to justify why you've got rid of them if they've been there longer than other employees, you have to justify why you got rid of them if they perform better than other employees and so on. In other words you can't get rid of them if they're a good employee and you don't have good reason.
You can't even get rid of them by trying to make their life hell and making them want to leave because providing they've had the sense to document and get as much evidence (i.e. copies of e-mails) of all instances where the boss has made your life hell to try and make you leave. An employee who has had his life made difficult more so than other employees and who has evidence may choose to stay or leave the company and go for a constructive dismissal industrial tribunal. Payouts for succesful cases are often large on the order of 10s to 100s of thousands of pounds, this often acts as a good deterrent for bosses not to be particularly malicious assholes to employees. Realistically if you do stay in your job and file an industrial tribunal for this type of thing you'll probably find you have no future at that job anyway, but chances are if someone's boss is screwing them over regularly enough for them to file a tribunal you wouldn't have much to lose in that respect anyway.
I'm not sure however that even if these kind of laws were applicable in the country the poster lived in that not liking the patent system is grounds for avoiding the sack. When I was working in IT support I didn't particularly like users but I'm not sure I'd have got on too well if I'd refused to speak to them.
Wow, I made not a lot of sense in quite a few parts of that post, I guess posting when tired and in such hot weather aint such a great idea! Apologies for that, but I'm sure people can figure out what I meant ;)
See Portal.
Next question?
Woah, hold your horses there. You missed the important part. The most important thing in console sales is software, this is where money is really made, I'm not saying the 360 has made up for per performance compared to the Wii in other areas with software but it has sold around twice as many titles per unit as the Wii.
It's probably not on as much of a loss compared to the Wii as one might think when it's shifted something like 7 games per console compared to the Wii's average of roughly 3 games per console last time stats were released about software sales a couple of months ago.
The PS3 has even sold more units than the Wii albeit only by a small amount.
I'd wager a bet the profit margins between the Wii and 360 are a fair bit closer when you factor software in and focus on more than just hardware.
I tend to see e-mail as something you use for temporary exchange of messages and tasks/information held therein, not something to be used to archive material.
I'd argue the company's policy isn't actually far wrong, surely anything over about 180 days is something that is more suited to permanent archiving anyway?
I'll admit when I was working in tech support and I had our corporate Microsoft keys e-mailed me I kept them in my personal folders for a couple of years but realistically I have to admit I think these would be better placed in an information repository suited to more permanent store of information.
The company does then of course run the risk of people storing data that puts them at legal risk in that information repository instead however!
I'm not sure though that there are many circumstances where an e-mail client needs to act as a long term information store. I find it's generally the case that if you need to store it for a long while, it'll almost certainly be something that others in your company will need access to should you get hit by a bus tomorrow and as such, maybe shared folders (with appropriate permissions) are a better choice than personal folders?
I live in the UK and one of my obscure hobbies is growing cactus. Here and in the rest of Europe we're allowed to grow any cactus we like however Lophophora (more commonly known as Peyote) are banned in the US due to their mescaline content which occurs growing in areas with lots of sunlight.
Lophophora here do not get the conditions (unless you use artificial lighting) to produce a decent mescaline content to be used as a hallucinogenic and again as such are perfectly legally. However, whilst cacti are freely traded on eBay, even those legally collected from protected habitat it is against eBay's policy to trade Lophophora on the European eBay sites simply because it's illegal to grow in the US. As such I can totally understand how you feel because European lophphora will not only be picked up by local and US customs if shipped outside of Europe but is harmless inside of Europe anyway due to the inability to naturally produce mescaline, yet again, eBay will happily allow the trading of illegally habitat collected endangered plants.
Laws surrounding plants are not just fucked up in the US, but the whole international situation with plants and the likes of CITES is well and truly messed up. Companies like eBay with such confused policies where trading of illegal plants is turned a blind eye to and trading of perfectly legal plants in Europe is banned only serve to confuse the issue even more.
Wasn't a massive fan of MFC either if I'm honest but C#? What's wrong with it exactly? combined with the .NET framework it's like Java done right.
If you only have to write for Windows or are happy with the current Mono implementation, C# is one of the best languages out there for application development. It's a modern language, it takes what other older languages did right and fixes many of the things they did wrong.
The .NET framework is easily one of the best frameworks out there also, it's not like stuff running on the CLR is even slow, it's also a pretty efficient language in that respect also.
C# and .NET let you write some very good apps in a lot less code and hence in a much cleaner, tidier way than the vast majority of other languages out there, at least for the Windows platform that is.
Out of interest, what are your specific problems with IIS that make you suggest it's one of, if not the worst web servers out there?
I much prefer Apache, but there are scenarios where IIS is a better choice, and I don't think IIS is any worse than much else other than Apache to be honest.
It's not the IIS of old anymore, it's nowadays pretty decent. Microsoft have certainly cleaned up their act a lot in terms of security and stability of the likes of IIS/SQL server in recent years. ASP.NET is of course a major improvement over classic ASP also and combined the full suite make IIS a pretty attractive option for many applications.
I'd never use IIS to build the next Facebook or anything personally certainly, for really high volume, high profile sites I'd still use Apache but for medium sites requiring high functionality or for intranet based web applications it's still a very good choice. Furthermore with the amount of companies running Windows out there, any negative points in using IIS over Apache are absolutely negligible compared to ease of integration into existing infrastructure and hence the ease of maintaining consistent identity management. The same is true of course on a Linux/Unix based platform with Apache and the likes certainly, but my point is that there are a lot of Windows shops out there and for them IIS is simply the better choice because the benefits of IIS truly do outweigh the benefits of Apache in many circumstances.
Again, I know praising Microsoft or their products is a touchy subject here on Slashdot and again Apache is still my favourite but I think it's rather foolish to blindly dismiss IIS with the suggestion it's one of the worst web servers there is nowadays.
Because it's not as if global warming, ozone layer depletion and such haven't taught us that creating unnatural chemical imbalances in natural systems causes problems or anything is it.
Not that that's saying much but can anyone elaborate as to why this is a big geek movie? Does it have lots of computing/IT stuff in it giving it more geek appeal and more reason to have it's very own uncategorized Slashdot article than any other similar film?
Or is it just the same, tired old Batman/Spiderman/Superman/Whateverman set of stories reiterated over and over, hyped to hell because that's what Hollywood does but isn't actually very good but with a bit of extra hype because it has a now dead actor in it?
The closest case I can think of to this was the whole Lindows (now Linspire) debacle. Microsoft complained that Lindows sounded too much like Windows and for some idiotic reason managed to win.
I don't disagree Lindows sounds like Windows, but it takes a rather impressive amount of mental incapacity to think the two are somehow the same.
What a menu down the left and arial, verdana, tahoma? I'm fairly convinced Facebook wasn't the first to come up with that setup!
I haven't logged in to the site of course so I don't know what it's like overall but really the frontend whilst admittedly a similar layout, certainly isn't identical or even particularly close to identical by any means. There's some pretty blatant differences and you'd certainly never confuse to the two.
What's Facebook so afraid of?
That was my understanding too and I thought I'd go see what these newsgroup providers take on it was.
Quick jump to Giganews and they're actually even taking advantage of it by offering deals to users of all the ISPs who are dropping alt.*
It's always nice to see sensible companies cashing in on the idiocy of others ;)
Blizzards own Warden program sits inspecting other files and processes on your system to ensure they're not cheating tools, this is easily and equally demonstrable as against the EULA/ToS of the other applications it scans.
In winning this case, Blizzard have quite arguably declared their own Warden anti-cheating application illegal.
Indeed. If I were the Glider developer and this meant the end of my project I'd open source it and let it go underground.
That way it'd serve Blizzard right for making such idiotic legal challenges that have massive repercussions for the rest of the tech community as a whole.
If it goes underground or is passed abroad I'd imagine there is very little Blizzard could do about it. If it went to a nation with less technically inept judges I'd imagine the legal challenge would be shot down straight away. The author isn't likely to leave the US I'd imagine but there's no reason his software couldn't. I'm not sure on the legality of selling his program online with the statement "Not for sale in the US" as that's another potential option for him.
There goes the legality of most current Virus Scanners in the US then.
Cheers for that ;) Makes sense now!
I've got to admit cryptography isn't my greatest strength so I could well have misunderstood here but I thought you could handle it as follows-
You have a public key system to transfer the keys for the encryption system used for the main transfers, the public key can decrypt in such a way that only the private key can decrypt. So:
- Person 1 takes person 2's public key and encrypts their transfer encryption/decryption key with it
- Person 2 decrypts person 1's key encrypted with his public key using his private key
- Person 2 can then communicate with person 1 using the key sent in an encrypted form
The only way I could see man in the middle working is brute force by using the public key of person 2 to encrypt strings of text until they get a match of the key sent by person 1 to person 2 that was encrypted using person 2's public key. Person 2's private key is never sent across the network and is the only thing that can decrypt the other key that was sent encrypted by person 1. At this point the key that will be used by the two has been transferred in an encrypted form and need never be transferred again after that. As such I can't see how it would be intercepted.
Is this not possible? have I missed some blatantly obvious security gap that a man in the middle attack can exploit here? I'm pretty sure I've read about plenty of encryption systems whereby a public key can only encrypt and a private key is required to decrypt the data encrypted by the public key.
Is that site painfully slow because it's been Slashdotted or because it's running on a C64 ;) ?
More importantly, what happens when a C64 gets Slashdotted, does it start chewing up tapes or melt or anything?
No, you've misinterpreted the situation and some of what you say is outright false. People didn't like living under Saddam, he was still extremely oppresive. The reaction from people immediately after he was overthrown was evidence that they were glad to see him go. The issue is that what he did do well was keep a lid on the different groups that are now killing each other, when he was removed these groups were free to carry out the attacks they'd wanted to carry out all along but couldn't with Saddam keeping a close eye on them.
It's not therefore that people were happy to live under Saddam, just that Saddam had a stranglehold on his citizens. The situation you suggest where people owned AKs and RPGs left right and centre under his regime is fictitious, this was simply not the case. The weapons the insurgents are running round with now are the weapons Saddams army abandoned and left lying around after they were obliterated by the allied forces as well as weapons smuggled in from Iran and Syria. The places where people were armed such as Kurdistan often fought against him but often came off a hell of a lot worse as they simply didn't have the firepower to match (which is exactly why the US right to bear arms so they can overthrow their government if it pisses them off enough excuse is a bit silly, an M1 Abrams trumps your rifle 50 times over). At the end of the day you can have all the AKs and RPGs you want in the world but when a Mig comes flying over the hill and drops 500lb of explosives on you then it really isn't going to help you. Saddam had spies left right and centre so even if people were all armed it was never going to be much use because anyone who dare show any sign of revolt would quickly dissapear.
The fighting in Iraq is largely Shia vs. Sunni. The US troops get caught in it primarily because they're stood between the two factions trying to stop them. There is some specific targetting of US troops by Al Qaeda affiliated groups and similar but for the most part Iraqi's aren't rising up against and attacking the US troops, they're attacking each other. It is for this reason you regularly see reports of "30 iraqi civilians killed at wedding" or similar - attacks like this are quite clearly not attacks against the occupying forces and attacks like this are the most common types. Even with the Mahdi army the only reason they don't like US troops is because they know they're capable of disarming them leaving them unable to hit Sunnis and not because of some hatred of them removing Saddam, in fact, the likes of Muqtada Al-Sadr will only be happy with Saddam being overthrown because it leaves an opening for him to rise to levels of power he could never have achieved under Saddam. The only thing stopping him are US forces and the new Iraqi government, both of which aren't allowed to hit his forces anywhere near as hard and indiscriminately as Saddam might have should he have tried to rise up against them in the same way for fear of condemnation from the international community and further loss of international reputation for the US.
The key to fixing the situation in Iraq is to prevent the militias fighting each other and this is what is happening with the US surge, it is unexpectadly working rather well right now. It's probably also worth pointing out that things are not all that different to Ireland for us Brits. When the factions stopped fighting each other, the factions also stopped attacking British troops.
You don't seem to particularly understand the importance of nations like Italy and France. As with Britain they're nations with extremely long histories that leave them to this day with a footing in many parts of the world. Their influence is incredibly strong internationally and it's this influence that keeps them strong economically, they're nations that simply wont sink in power because there's always nations willing to support them, trade with them and hold them up, often because of strong historical ties.
France particularly is strong in many other ways also, it's a member of the UN security council for one, has a lot of sway in the EU as does Italy- the EU is by far the worlds largest economy by GDP and many other measures.
These just aren't nations that are irrelevant, nor will they likely ever will be for decades or probably even centuries to come. I'm not saying this as a European with some arrogant feeling of self-importance (in fact, I'm British so I'm actually legally obliged to hate the French anyway ;)) but because these nations have so much power over international organisations and systems. They have the power to persuade the UN to push sanctions upon nations that dare consider trying to move away from the laws these nations produce for example and hence there's little that can topple them. Hell, a sizeable portion of the world depends on France and Italy for their defence, sure they could source equipment elsewhere but it'd take years and in the meantime they'd have zero support or ammo for their existing hardware.
It's probably worth also noting that France and Britain have been working to get China, India, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa in on the act for a little while now too, so as with most organisations irrelevance isn't relevant when change is possible as it is with the G8. China has been in on the G8 meets for a few years now anyway, there are only a few issues covered by the G8 from which it's excluded.