I suspect that a vast majority of spams hit a large number of law enforcement inboxes - it isn't like spammers are selectively making hand-crafted to lists. Of the spams I get (of which there has been a marked increase in the past month), a good percentage are illegal or gray-legal pennystock pump and dumps, PayPal imitators attempting to get your information, or our good Nigerian friends looking for some assistance in rescuing their money.
I'm sorry, but you're an idiot if you don't think.NET, WinFS, Avalon, and the rest of the Longhorn technologies aren't better than crappy old 2k.
Crappy old 2K? The insanity of that statement is that probably 95% of Windows 2000's advanced features aren't currently being used (as evidenced by the post), and Microsoft is upsetting the apple-cart yet again. It should be noted that with absolute certainty the vast majority of the core of Longhorn will be "crappy old 2k" (XP is Windows 2000 with a facelift -- a facelift that personally I think was a step in the wrong direction. Change for the sake of change).
Regarding the value of Longhorn, so far what I have seen is a lot of marketing bullshit (I've written for MSDN magazine, so I'm not speaking as a anti-Microsoftarian...quite contrary in fact, and I've been accused of being a Microsoft plant countless times on here): WinFS is the acceptance that most people don't use and don't care for Microsoft file search utilities (you know - the indexing service that is the outgrowth of "FindFast.exe", that app that we were perpetually trying to find and kill), so instead the file APIs themselves will route right through the search corpus system. Woot! Suck it!.NET is the same.NET that we have right now, but with some new exposed objects for the unbelievably dubious XAML model (Avalon. An idea that only works if what you're describing is unbelievably trivial, and those in the audience are too naive to think that a real world application might be a little more complex than hello world and some edit boxes).
As a Microsoft fan, I have seen nothing about Longhorn as of yet that strikes me as anything other than nonsensical ideas that should have never seen the light of day. Of course don't even ask me how I feel about.NET Remoting... (Oh, right, but it's a big improvement over "crappy old COM+", right?)
.NET is fast, 95% as fast as native, and supports far more languages.
Have you developed in.NET? It is a stretch of the truth to proclaim that it is "fast". Of course we know for benchmarks that extremely little exists, and what does exist is generally the classic "tight loop doing a single operation that the JIT compiler can highly optimize...and even then it only achieves 70% of the speed of native". I obviously can't give the numbers based upon some licensing agreements, but I will say that experience has shown that for any mildly complex, real-world activity such as managed encryption or managed compression/decompression, it is absolutely night and day:.NET is good for a VM, but it is not even in the same city block of the performance of native code. I feel the same way about Java, as a sidenote, so this isn't a religious argument. Disclaimer:.NET is a vast jump forward when used for web development, i.e. asp.net, but of course then you're comparing a JIT VM type scenario and totally interpreted every time languages.
As far as Longhorn being mostly managed, my guess (being an outsider) is that what really is happening is that Explorer.exe, the app host, is being replaced with a Managed shell that exposes managed interfaces (though it will still host classic Win32 apps no problem, as it will host apps that think they're interfacing with an NT File System - If these weren't the case then it'd be a big opening for OS XIi or whatever). That is a vast chasm of difference from the OS being rebuilt as a managed system.
Still I guess some parts of the OS will remain in native mode, such as device drivers.
Just guessing, but I would wager that about 95% of the binaries on a Windows system will remain "native", apart from a superficial shell. Of course for anything where performance is remotely desired, like encryption, network services, etc, there will be native code with an API stub in.NET (which is what a significant amount of the.NET Framework is right now).
Optional for pre-Outlook XP. Included from then on.
which is more than a year old
What's the point of this? Has the patch for older Outlook's decayed?
that makes executable attachments inaccessible to someone with no technical knowledge. It's a pain really; it goes to far in the opposite direction from too much accessibility.
Funny, it blocks me from seeing EXEs, and I'm quite technically knowledgeable -- I have absolutely no desire to see executable content in my emails (where I may, quite honestly, inadvertently hit it while jumping between windows). I have NEVER felt constrained by this limit.
Yeah, we are a cult of consumers, sure was we are a cult of food-eaters and a cult of breathers.
Being a consumer and buying stuff to enhance quality of life is normal, but rushing out to line up for the big release really does seem pathetic (as a sidenote-Is Apple putting out an OS every 8 months or so, always at full price?)- would life crumple if one were to avoid the crowds and pick it up the next time you happen to be near the electronic store?
There is an SEC regulation that effectively forces Google to IPO (or to beg for an exemption), so it isn't "greed" but rather simply accommodating financial regulations.
And apparently, the millions in sales they managed to get were far from enough to qualify X10 as a success.
x10 claimed bankruptcy, with so far insufficient financial documents (probably as they hide the money) after a $4.3 court settlement. They didn't just close the doors because they ran out of money.
And surely that happened not because some overpaid x10 ad exec called the site managers up and promised large sums of money in exchange for integrating their ad calls.
Oh I have no doubt whatsoever that sites were offered money to integrate the pop-unders, however I also realistically presume that those sites are responsible adults that made a calculated decision and decided that pop-under ads were worth it. Pretending that x10 is the bad guy is just preposterous.
If cell phones with GPS' transmitted it via some very low power technology (like bluetooth), that would be brilliant.
However if you want a basic GPS that can connect with your PC but also work detached, check out the Garmin eTrex series. I have the basic model with the data cable kit (which gives you a serial interface with the PC) and it works brilliantly. There are even software packages to download routes from the PC to the Garmin so you can then detach it - you won't have a map, but you will have the basic route markers and route.
I got mine about two weeks after ordering (as did a coworker), and their campaign worked brilliantly as shortly thereafter I purchased several more modules, and an ActiveHome kit.
X10 tried to appeal to rather base instinct: buy our video gear and you can make movies of naked or at least semi naked 19 year old models
Actually it appears to a real base instinct, which is sex. i.e. you see the ad and you notice it because it has an attractive young woman on it - you know, just like just about every advertisement there is out there. Most people don't take the ad literally, but instead it gets them thinking about what they could use a wireless camera for (I seriously considered it, after being made aware of it by an attractive woman, for security purposes, but follow-up research determined that the quality is very subpar. Indeed my problem with the ad isn't the contrived context, but rather the insinuation that it gets the sort of quality that the ad portrays rather than the grainy, pixelated barely-perceptable picture that it really offers).
Even before the pop-unders x10 had an overly enthusiastic sales group: Everything is always the final few days of some Earth shattering never to be repeated sale....oh demand is so high we've extended it for another week... Even looking at their site right now I see the classic "Hurry - Ends Tomorrow!". Yeah, okay...
Good? The "kids" were pop-under advertisement "innovators" - how in the world could they even remotely be considered the good guys in all of this? Hint: They can't.
How ridiculous to see x10 hung to out to dry when what they did required the explicit permission of every site that they tacked their ads onto (and those ads often kept those sites in business).
Well it sounds like they didn't actually spend lots of money on the web advertising campaign - the lawsuit that triggered this bankruptcy was by a pop-under company suing x10 for unpaid bills (among other nonsense). In a strange way it's a karmic balance for x10 to go bankrupt depriving some pop-up "innovators" from getting their bounty.
Having said that, x10 was amazingly successful at their campaign - from a collection of fringe items by a company that no-one knew, to millions in sales and a company whose name we all know well. I also think it's a bit foolish to demonize x10- x10 didn't put ads on the sites you visit--The site put ads there (well, apart from gator but that was a prior story). If you don't like the pop-under ads at a site, blame the site itself not the people paying the bills.
There are things that we throw away every day that take up a lot more space
Ah, good point. So let's just forget about the whole issue until we can find a solution for the #1 space consumer in landfills. Then we can move onto #2. It would be far too logical for each organization and technology to do what they can, quickly picking away at what is persisting forever when instead we can just brush it all aside. This is the same sort of nonsensical reasoning that is used by the useless to deride those who help the homeless, stray animals, etc : "Yeah, but what about starving people in Africa! Sure I'm doing absolutely nothing, but I'm better because I'm indignantly bringing up those Africans!"
Say what you want, but in 3000 years those CD's will be in much better shape then a book
Perhaps you missed the not-so-subtle innuendo in the submission, but normal polycarbonate CDs don't have a data lifespan any longer than the whole lifespan of these corn CDs - the data layer has oxidized and yields no information in just a couple of decades. The problem is that the polycarbonate husk hangs around pretty much forever. And to go back to your first point, this is a tremendous amount of perpetual garbage - sign up for an MSDN subscription and see what you're throwing away.
For a great combination, stick a PCCard GPS or even a Garmin with a serial cable on your notebook, and MapPoint can track your position in realtime, offering driving instructions.
I can't comment as to whether MapPoint is purchased technology (though Microsoft has been at Streets and Trips, which is a variant, for years), however Microsoft bought Vicinity early this year: Obviously Vicinity, the makers of MapBlast, didn't give them MapPoint unless it was in some weird time warp manner where they imbued them with it in the past.
While MapPoint is an actual MS product and service, they spun off Expedia. I believe that Expedia is no longer Microsoft owned or controlled.
Having said that, Microsoft sells a Mappoint Web Services (it used to be a big subscription thing with some pretty hefty sign-up fees, but I can't seem to find those pages now) that allows you to integrate MapPoint web technologies into your site. Given that Expedia was, and probably still is, Microsoft technology based, it seems likely that they'd utilize it as a paying customer.
The SCSI cd-rom was a quad, and the IDE a 6X. It took 30 seconds to load a level on the 6X IDE system and 4 seconds to load on the quad SCSI system...
You see, here's the problem with armchair benchmarkers, such as the site linked by Slashdot, and your, er, benchmark - You do realize, of course, that a 6x CDROM has a throughput of a blistering 1MB/second, right? That even on traditional IDE the controller subsystem sat around waiting for data about 97% of the time? The idea that there is any measureable difference between interfaces at such an absurdly low throughput, even accounting for massive interrupt overhead (such that classic IDE had, but modern IDE doesn't) would be just a blip on the radar. Your methodology is crap, and the more likely explanation is that the IDE drive had a physical problem such as overspeed or a focusing issue.
The ONLY advantage IDE has is price. End of story.
Wow, I guess we might as well wrap this whole discussion up right now!
Firstly, let's remember what I was replying to, which is the observation that wealth begets taller children in American families (apparently we're just going to keep getting taller until we're too large for this planet -- screw biological necessity) - an absolutely ridiculous presumption as even the poorest American families have exceedingly adequate nutrition for growth (indeed, some could say too adequate -- the ultra-high fat, particularly the saturated variety, leads to unnaturally early puberty and an excess of growth hormone - this is a serious problem, not a benefit). The average height of Americans hasn't changed in three generations (though everyone still prays that their kid will somehow grow to be 6'4" despite parents that are 5'7).
Yeah, because they really need a "safe passage" to get into a country that is currently hosting some 5 million illegal immigrants, has a rampant illegal weapon and drug trade, and has counterfeit documents throughout the globe.
I can concieve it. Wealth -> more+better food -> size -> height.
Jesus Christ here is this ridiculous myth again. Height is largely genetic and has absolutely nothing, whatsoever, to do with diet apart from extreme outlier cases (severe malnourishment. Even then you can't say for sure : Many African nations with extreme food shortages yield the world's tallest people). This idea that Jimmy is 6'4" because he ate his wheeties (or conversely didn't drink coffee...love that myth too) is the height of absurdity, and is disproven five billion times over throughout the globe.
If someone is tall, it's because they're either a natural abberation (just as it could lead to a short person), or they share genetic traits with an ancestor who was tall.
This whole height thing is brutally easy to understand - If you're short, and we know how that remains one of the "allowed" generalization and stereotype realms, it is much less likely that you'll develop a healthy self-confidence. A healthy or over-self-confidence is the key to business success. It isn't rocket science. I wonder how people who stutter or with a lisp would do on such a wage survey.
One of the problems is that us tallish people tend to be more modest, since we don't have to keep over compensating
This particular stereotypical, bigoted myth fascinates me: Whatever a shorter person does is over-compensating, while whatever a taller person does is just natural. If a shorter person works out and stays fit, they're overcompensating. If a taller person works out, they're staying healthy. Fascinating stuff.
Oh, and if a female boss is demanding or in control, she's just an over-compensating bitch, right?
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that a vast majority of spams hit a large number of law enforcement inboxes - it isn't like spammers are selectively making hand-crafted to lists. Of the spams I get (of which there has been a marked increase in the past month), a good percentage are illegal or gray-legal pennystock pump and dumps, PayPal imitators attempting to get your information, or our good Nigerian friends looking for some assistance in rescuing their money.
Whenever someone claims the rest of the world is...it is because they themselves do it.
Interesting, and amazingly common (among armchair psychologists), hypothesis, though I would say it best falls under the "head in the sand" category.
I'm sorry, but you're an idiot if you don't think .NET, WinFS, Avalon, and the rest of the Longhorn technologies aren't better than crappy old 2k.
.NET is the same .NET that we have right now, but with some new exposed objects for the unbelievably dubious XAML model (Avalon. An idea that only works if what you're describing is unbelievably trivial, and those in the audience are too naive to think that a real world application might be a little more complex than hello world and some edit boxes).
.NET Remoting... (Oh, right, but it's a big improvement over "crappy old COM+", right?)
Crappy old 2K? The insanity of that statement is that probably 95% of Windows 2000's advanced features aren't currently being used (as evidenced by the post), and Microsoft is upsetting the apple-cart yet again. It should be noted that with absolute certainty the vast majority of the core of Longhorn will be "crappy old 2k" (XP is Windows 2000 with a facelift -- a facelift that personally I think was a step in the wrong direction. Change for the sake of change).
Regarding the value of Longhorn, so far what I have seen is a lot of marketing bullshit (I've written for MSDN magazine, so I'm not speaking as a anti-Microsoftarian...quite contrary in fact, and I've been accused of being a Microsoft plant countless times on here): WinFS is the acceptance that most people don't use and don't care for Microsoft file search utilities (you know - the indexing service that is the outgrowth of "FindFast.exe", that app that we were perpetually trying to find and kill), so instead the file APIs themselves will route right through the search corpus system. Woot! Suck it!
As a Microsoft fan, I have seen nothing about Longhorn as of yet that strikes me as anything other than nonsensical ideas that should have never seen the light of day. Of course don't even ask me how I feel about
.NET is fast, 95% as fast as native, and supports far more languages.
.NET? It is a stretch of the truth to proclaim that it is "fast". Of course we know for benchmarks that extremely little exists, and what does exist is generally the classic "tight loop doing a single operation that the JIT compiler can highly optimize...and even then it only achieves 70% of the speed of native". I obviously can't give the numbers based upon some licensing agreements, but I will say that experience has shown that for any mildly complex, real-world activity such as managed encryption or managed compression/decompression, it is absolutely night and day: .NET is good for a VM, but it is not even in the same city block of the performance of native code. I feel the same way about Java, as a sidenote, so this isn't a religious argument. Disclaimer: .NET is a vast jump forward when used for web development, i.e. asp.net, but of course then you're comparing a JIT VM type scenario and totally interpreted every time languages.
.NET (which is what a significant amount of the .NET Framework is right now).
Have you developed in
As far as Longhorn being mostly managed, my guess (being an outsider) is that what really is happening is that Explorer.exe, the app host, is being replaced with a Managed shell that exposes managed interfaces (though it will still host classic Win32 apps no problem, as it will host apps that think they're interfacing with an NT File System - If these weren't the case then it'd be a big opening for OS XIi or whatever). That is a vast chasm of difference from the OS being rebuilt as a managed system.
Still I guess some parts of the OS will remain in native mode, such as device drivers.
Just guessing, but I would wager that about 95% of the binaries on a Windows system will remain "native", apart from a superficial shell. Of course for anything where performance is remotely desired, like encryption, network services, etc, there will be native code with an API stub in
There is an optional update from Microsoft
Optional for pre-Outlook XP. Included from then on.
which is more than a year old
What's the point of this? Has the patch for older Outlook's decayed?
that makes executable attachments inaccessible to someone with no technical knowledge. It's a pain really; it goes to far in the opposite direction from too much accessibility.
Funny, it blocks me from seeing EXEs, and I'm quite technically knowledgeable -- I have absolutely no desire to see executable content in my emails (where I may, quite honestly, inadvertently hit it while jumping between windows). I have NEVER felt constrained by this limit.
Kudos on an excellently crafted, and factually complete and relevant reply. Such a beast is rare in these parts.
There's an island just outside of Seattle that is called "Whidbey Island".
Yeah, we are a cult of consumers, sure was we are a cult of food-eaters and a cult of breathers.
Being a consumer and buying stuff to enhance quality of life is normal, but rushing out to line up for the big release really does seem pathetic (as a sidenote-Is Apple putting out an OS every 8 months or so, always at full price?)- would life crumple if one were to avoid the crowds and pick it up the next time you happen to be near the electronic store?
There is an SEC regulation that effectively forces Google to IPO (or to beg for an exemption), so it isn't "greed" but rather simply accommodating financial regulations.
And apparently, the millions in sales they managed to get were far from enough to qualify X10 as a success.
x10 claimed bankruptcy, with so far insufficient financial documents (probably as they hide the money) after a $4.3 court settlement. They didn't just close the doors because they ran out of money.
And surely that happened not because some overpaid x10 ad exec called the site managers up and promised large sums of money in exchange for integrating their ad calls.
Oh I have no doubt whatsoever that sites were offered money to integrate the pop-unders, however I also realistically presume that those sites are responsible adults that made a calculated decision and decided that pop-under ads were worth it. Pretending that x10 is the bad guy is just preposterous.
If cell phones with GPS' transmitted it via some very low power technology (like bluetooth), that would be brilliant.
However if you want a basic GPS that can connect with your PC but also work detached, check out the Garmin eTrex series. I have the basic model with the data cable kit (which gives you a serial interface with the PC) and it works brilliantly. There are even software packages to download routes from the PC to the Garmin so you can then detach it - you won't have a map, but you will have the basic route markers and route.
I'm still waiting for mine and that was 1999.
I got mine about two weeks after ordering (as did a coworker), and their campaign worked brilliantly as shortly thereafter I purchased several more modules, and an ActiveHome kit.
X10 tried to appeal to rather base instinct: buy our video gear and you can make movies of naked or at least semi naked 19 year old models
Actually it appears to a real base instinct, which is sex. i.e. you see the ad and you notice it because it has an attractive young woman on it - you know, just like just about every advertisement there is out there. Most people don't take the ad literally, but instead it gets them thinking about what they could use a wireless camera for (I seriously considered it, after being made aware of it by an attractive woman, for security purposes, but follow-up research determined that the quality is very subpar. Indeed my problem with the ad isn't the contrived context, but rather the insinuation that it gets the sort of quality that the ad portrays rather than the grainy, pixelated barely-perceptable picture that it really offers).
Even before the pop-unders x10 had an overly enthusiastic sales group: Everything is always the final few days of some Earth shattering never to be repeated sale....oh demand is so high we've extended it for another week... Even looking at their site right now I see the classic "Hurry - Ends Tomorrow!". Yeah, okay...
Good? The "kids" were pop-under advertisement "innovators" - how in the world could they even remotely be considered the good guys in all of this? Hint: They can't.
How ridiculous to see x10 hung to out to dry when what they did required the explicit permission of every site that they tacked their ads onto (and those ads often kept those sites in business).
Well it sounds like they didn't actually spend lots of money on the web advertising campaign - the lawsuit that triggered this bankruptcy was by a pop-under company suing x10 for unpaid bills (among other nonsense). In a strange way it's a karmic balance for x10 to go bankrupt depriving some pop-up "innovators" from getting their bounty.
Having said that, x10 was amazingly successful at their campaign - from a collection of fringe items by a company that no-one knew, to millions in sales and a company whose name we all know well. I also think it's a bit foolish to demonize x10- x10 didn't put ads on the sites you visit--The site put ads there (well, apart from gator but that was a prior story). If you don't like the pop-under ads at a site, blame the site itself not the people paying the bills.
There are things that we throw away every day that take up a lot more space
Ah, good point. So let's just forget about the whole issue until we can find a solution for the #1 space consumer in landfills. Then we can move onto #2. It would be far too logical for each organization and technology to do what they can, quickly picking away at what is persisting forever when instead we can just brush it all aside. This is the same sort of nonsensical reasoning that is used by the useless to deride those who help the homeless, stray animals, etc : "Yeah, but what about starving people in Africa! Sure I'm doing absolutely nothing, but I'm better because I'm indignantly bringing up those Africans!"
Say what you want, but in 3000 years those CD's will be in much better shape then a book
Perhaps you missed the not-so-subtle innuendo in the submission, but normal polycarbonate CDs don't have a data lifespan any longer than the whole lifespan of these corn CDs - the data layer has oxidized and yields no information in just a couple of decades. The problem is that the polycarbonate husk hangs around pretty much forever. And to go back to your first point, this is a tremendous amount of perpetual garbage - sign up for an MSDN subscription and see what you're throwing away.
For a great combination, stick a PCCard GPS or even a Garmin with a serial cable on your notebook, and MapPoint can track your position in realtime, offering driving instructions.
I can't comment as to whether MapPoint is purchased technology (though Microsoft has been at Streets and Trips, which is a variant, for years), however Microsoft bought Vicinity early this year: Obviously Vicinity, the makers of MapBlast, didn't give them MapPoint unless it was in some weird time warp manner where they imbued them with it in the past.
While MapPoint is an actual MS product and service, they spun off Expedia. I believe that Expedia is no longer Microsoft owned or controlled.
Having said that, Microsoft sells a Mappoint Web Services (it used to be a big subscription thing with some pretty hefty sign-up fees, but I can't seem to find those pages now) that allows you to integrate MapPoint web technologies into your site. Given that Expedia was, and probably still is, Microsoft technology based, it seems likely that they'd utilize it as a paying customer.
The SCSI cd-rom was a quad, and the IDE a 6X. It took 30 seconds to load a level on the 6X IDE system and 4 seconds to load on the quad SCSI system...
You see, here's the problem with armchair benchmarkers, such as the site linked by Slashdot, and your, er, benchmark - You do realize, of course, that a 6x CDROM has a throughput of a blistering 1MB/second, right? That even on traditional IDE the controller subsystem sat around waiting for data about 97% of the time? The idea that there is any measureable difference between interfaces at such an absurdly low throughput, even accounting for massive interrupt overhead (such that classic IDE had, but modern IDE doesn't) would be just a blip on the radar. Your methodology is crap, and the more likely explanation is that the IDE drive had a physical problem such as overspeed or a focusing issue.
The ONLY advantage IDE has is price. End of story.
Wow, I guess we might as well wrap this whole discussion up right now!
Firstly, let's remember what I was replying to, which is the observation that wealth begets taller children in American families (apparently we're just going to keep getting taller until we're too large for this planet -- screw biological necessity) - an absolutely ridiculous presumption as even the poorest American families have exceedingly adequate nutrition for growth (indeed, some could say too adequate -- the ultra-high fat, particularly the saturated variety, leads to unnaturally early puberty and an excess of growth hormone - this is a serious problem, not a benefit). The average height of Americans hasn't changed in three generations (though everyone still prays that their kid will somehow grow to be 6'4" despite parents that are 5'7).
Yeah, because they really need a "safe passage" to get into a country that is currently hosting some 5 million illegal immigrants, has a rampant illegal weapon and drug trade, and has counterfeit documents throughout the globe.
I can concieve it. Wealth -> more+better food -> size -> height.
Jesus Christ here is this ridiculous myth again. Height is largely genetic and has absolutely nothing, whatsoever, to do with diet apart from extreme outlier cases (severe malnourishment. Even then you can't say for sure : Many African nations with extreme food shortages yield the world's tallest people). This idea that Jimmy is 6'4" because he ate his wheeties (or conversely didn't drink coffee...love that myth too) is the height of absurdity, and is disproven five billion times over throughout the globe.
If someone is tall, it's because they're either a natural abberation (just as it could lead to a short person), or they share genetic traits with an ancestor who was tall.
This whole height thing is brutally easy to understand - If you're short, and we know how that remains one of the "allowed" generalization and stereotype realms, it is much less likely that you'll develop a healthy self-confidence. A healthy or over-self-confidence is the key to business success. It isn't rocket science. I wonder how people who stutter or with a lisp would do on such a wage survey.
One of the problems is that us tallish people tend to be more modest, since we don't have to keep over compensating
This particular stereotypical, bigoted myth fascinates me: Whatever a shorter person does is over-compensating, while whatever a taller person does is just natural. If a shorter person works out and stays fit, they're overcompensating. If a taller person works out, they're staying healthy. Fascinating stuff.
Oh, and if a female boss is demanding or in control, she's just an over-compensating bitch, right?
This is absurd. Except in cases of extreme malnourishment, diet has nothing whatsoever to do with height.