It's funny, I saw a similar service on Dell's site, except they were removing Microsoft's crap. $2 to remove the games, $2 to remove the communications accessories, there were about 10 things they'd do ranging from $2-$10.
Crazy $2-$10 dollars to to run the "add/remove windows components" tool? That is absurd. Especially for computers that will be part of a domain. Removing those via group policy is trivial, taking less then 3 minutes to remove them from all computers in the domain.
I wish, I wish I was a fish. And that we could buy computers without an OS if we chose to. Sure you can. You can buy Dell n Series computers without an OS installed, but with an obligatory copy of FreeDOS (not preinstalled). You're not really expected to install FreeDOS, but for some reason (maybe legal or contractual) Dell doesn't want to sell PCs without a bundled OS, so they bundle (but don't install) an OS that you're not expected to install. My guess is this is legal. This prevents somebody from suing them for selling them a computer "unfit" for use because it lacks an OS. Or at least that is probably what the lawyers are saying. I doubt anybody could win such a case, but including FreeDOS is so inexpensive (only media costs) Dell feels it is worth it to eliminate the risk entirely.
It's also true that for the price of a microwave, I can get a nice laptop, that connects to the internet and all that. But it kinda sucks at heating food, doesn't it?
I get the point you were trying to make, but you obviously havent bought a microwave in the last 10 years. average price here is about AU$80. asus eeepc is AU$499 (cheapest laptop i know of off the top of my head, but I'm a mac guy so I dont really follow the windows subsidized market so there could be cheaper ones there). While the less expensive counter-top microwaves cost about the same here [USA] when converting using the semi-standard pricing ratios (which seem to have no relation to the actual exchange rate), the "built-in" microwaves found over the cooktops in a fair number of American homes do have a cost similar to that of a nice laptop.
You're already paying for it. National healthcare would simply redistribute the load more evenly across the entire populace. No, that's just not true. It would do a hell of a lot more than that. Some of us would have to pay even more; regional cost differences would be obliterated, punishing some people for living in an area with a lower cost of living; most likely, choice and quality of care would be reduced for many; and so on.
I understand it's a bit of an oxymoron to advocate an efficient national healthcare system, however when you look at the raw number of what we spend as a country currently and the level of service provided compared to nation healthcare system similar to our friends up north have, the term would apply. Unfortunately, you set up a false dichotomy: the current system, or a national system. We can do much to lower costs, increase choice, and get broader health care access, in the existing (mostly) private system. It used to work. There is absolutely no reason it cannot work today.
I'm not aware of any governmental system that legislates fat, lazy, and stupid both fairly and effectively. Are you going to discriminate against people who eat oreos? Be prepared for retaliation legislation ad naseum. One of the best reasons to be absolutely against national healthcare.
Absent of that, the only thing left is to reduced the problem to pure economics to reach the best logical system. If the goal is efficiently, a national program wins by raw numbers alone. No, it does not. It loses because it ruins healthcare for those of us who have it already, destroys liberty, and costs more money.
All of your points may be valid, but it depends on exactly what sort of National health care system is implemented. There are quite a few systems that could be implemented that would actually improve health care for everybody, including those who would already have it. Some (not very many, but some) of the possible systems could even do that while lowering the actual cost of healthcare. The problem is determining which potential systems can do this, implementing one, and keeping the elected officials from continuously messing with it. That last part sounds like a real problem.
If a system is basically chosen at random, only partially implemented, with politicians constantly messing with it, the problems you describe are almost certain. That makes the whole proposal a bit of a problem. It is really hard to get the politicians to do the right thing, or to even do what they said they were going to do.
I know the odds and I still love to gamble. I like craps. It's fun. However, you don't know anything about casino odds if you think there is any game where the player has an edge. Blackjack only has an edge if you're a good counting player. As far as strategy goes, the calculated house edge is based on you playing perfect basic strategy. Basic strategy meaning memorizing the *entire* basic strategy card. Btw, the best bet in the casino is the "dealer" or "banker" bet in baccarat. I thought it was the free odds bet in Craps. Hmmm... Lets see. That does seem to be correct. from Wikipedia: "banker bet (despite the 5% commission) has an advantage of 1.06%." However the free odds bets have no house advantage. Exactly 0%. To counter this though, they can only be made in conjunction with a pass/don't-pass or come/don't-come bet. Taking that into account the house advantage on the overall bet is determined by the allowed multiple for free odds. Again from Wiki: "But even with a conservative triple odds on the pass line, the casino edge can be reduced to 0.471%." That is a minuscule house advantage.
Yes, a PC does more than a game console. But a PC that can play MODERN GAMES is pretty expensive. And here's the thing: You can buy a cheap PC for $400 that does EVERYTHING really well, except play games. Then you can buy a console for another $400 - $500 that plays games MUCH BETTER than that $400 PC, and in fact plays games better than an $800 PC. So, you get the best of both worlds for approximately the price of a mediocre "gaming PC".
All of the above ties into the "compatibility problems". It's not so much that games are hard to get running on a PC, it's more that very few people have a PC that actually meets the requirements of modern games. If you are a serious PC gamer, you know that you need a video card made in the last year, and 2GB of RAM, and dual-core CPU to play newly released games. But the average PC owner doesn't know any of that stuff. They go buy Call of Duty 4 to play on their PC, because their friend with an Xbox 360 has it, and if they can play it on their PC, they don't need to buy an Xbox 360! Of course, their 4-month-old eMachine has integrated graphics, and only has 512MB of RAM (for Vista, no less), and just flat-out isn't going to work.
THAT is the problem with PC gaming. It's too confusing for the masses, and the "technology advantage" over consoles is mostly gone, AND you get more functionality for less money by buying a console for games and buying a cheap PC for everything else. We won't even talk about the game development/publishing side of things, where consoles are the ONLY logical platform to develop for, if you want to make money.
So that's why Linux gaming will probably NEVER take off. Gaming on PCs is dying a quick death. Overall, this rings rather true. However, a couple of nits. One of the few things PCs games support well and console games fall completely flat on is modding. As it currently is, mods (even just custom maps) for FPS games are very popular, yet not one console game has real support for it. Why? Well, only very very recently have hard-drives even been available in consoles. At the current moment, the though of letting end users place additional files on the drive to change the game is all but absurd. Also PC games play well with PC games on other PC hardware. But the consoles invariably do not play well with each other. If a game is released on multiple consoles, those releases will not support mixed multiplayer. Further, at best one of the console versions will be high quality. The other(s) will be quick and dirty ports that have many bugs or missing features and receives no real support. Its for those sorts of reasons that the only console games I buy are those that are exclusive to that console. Otherwise the PC version (if there is one) is all I would buy.
.SWF is the container for the Flash application. The code contained within remains the same. Have you ever programmed using Flash?
As I recall, the SWF file is a container containing various flash resources, including various types of image resources, button resources, font resources, audio resources, etc.
One of the resource types consists of bytecode for the flash VM. This byte ccode can be extracted, edited and replaced, but it still is bytecode. As a source format, one can use a an assembly language, as is supported by flasm. However, the official Macromedia products use ActionScript as the language. That indeed is compiled to bytecode before being embedded in the.swf file. Looking into it, it looks like things may have changed some with Flash 9. I have no experience with that. My old flash 8 tools seem to have no problem with virtually all the flash files I've come across, indicating that flash 9 is not very popular yet.
Hmm... It looks like Flash 9 uses the Taramin VM, a general VM for implementing ECMAscript. It apparently still uses bytecode, so getting ActionScript back from it should still require decompilation.
This is the reason that programming languages that read closer to English are usually more popular, they're simply easier to pick up and understand. Nobody wants to remember syntax.
I have some experience working with a natural language programming language. Basically, in this language all well written programs are syntactically and grammatically valid English. (It is possible to have code that is not quite syntactically or grammatically correct English text, but that text is still perfectly understandable.
I have found code in the language trivial to read. I'm pretty certain many people who have absolutely no programming experience could read and intemperate the code with little to no difficulty.
The problem is that writting code in this language is a real pain in the ass. Far from not having to remember the syntax of the language, the syntax rules are very difficult to remember. Mostly because one attempts to use the rules of English as a base. But one must then remember each and every deviation from standard English, of which there are many. Further, the overall syntax of the language is far more complicated than a traditional programming language because the syntax of English is also far more complicated than that of a traditional programming language. Overall, It is actually easier to learn and remember the syntax of C++ than it is to remember the syntax of this language.
You don't decompile flash, FYI. It's code and play, no compilation needed. I've grep'd the sources for both, they're nearly identical. Considering that the official Macromedia Flash studio product uses.fla as a source format and then compiles that into the final.swf file, one certainly can decompile flash. Decompiling would consist of creating an.fla file from a.swf file. A partial decompiler is one that extracts the byte-code and recreates equivalent ActionScript. And then there are just tools that can extract and disassemble the the bytecode (as well as do the reverse) such as flasm.
While the license allows you to obtain from another source, the $5 download option offers to the listener Immediacy, Authenticity, Findability and Patronage: four things which are Better than Free.
Personally, I consider Patronage to be the most valuable in this instance, as I greatly respect what Reznor and friends have done with this album/project and would like to show that I support the work. I downloaded the free Ghosts I collection last night, and after enjoying it I paid the $5 for the full download. I want to see more artists release work like this, so it's worth my money to prove that it is a viable model for those who dare to test these new waters. I agree but as an experiment, both combined together makes any results much harder to analyze. If they only did one or the other, it would make more sense. The combination of the two is somewhat odd.
Once that meta tag is there, all web pages look just as they're supposed to! I'm so glad Microsoft finally fixed this whole compatibility fiasco.
The good new is that they have fixed this. They have now decided that the presence of a doctype will Enable the latest "Standards" Rendering mode by default. The older "Standards" modes can be requested using the HTTP header or meta-tag. "Quirks" mode will be activated in the event that no doctype is available. See the blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability-principles-and-ie8.aspx
My guess is that Microsoft figured out that high level of standards compliance can work fine as a default. (Since the more standards complaint browsers have few problems with the most sites.) The oldest sites will still work fine because they would use quirks mode. Newer sites can fix themselves, or use the tag. For intranet applications adding the HTTP header or meta tag can often be added easily enough that it is just not worth hurting the Internet to spare companies the effort of adding the header or tag to their broken internal apps. This leaves only unmaintained sites (which will not get fixed or updated) that claim standards compliance (via a doctype) but actually rely on IE bugs. Those will break, but on the other hand, those sites are almost certainly broken in other browsers too, so no real loss.
Guess again. It would either be.mil for US military, or.uk for British Military ( not sure why the UK government agencys and military share.uk with every other domain in the UK, and not have their own such as.ukm and.ukg) The reason why is simple: ICANN guarantees every country one TLD. Others would need to go through a long process, and the new TLD may still not get approved. The.mil domain's existence is probably mostly a holdover of the Internets development. Remember that at that time, MILNET was a large part of arpanet. Now it was shortsighted to give special treatment to the US Government and Military, especially since the country-code top-level domain system was developed simultaneously, but then again, the original system did not actually say that those domains were US specific. It may have been the original intent that.MIL would be open to all militaries, and.GOV to all governments. Indeed, in the beginning, it was almost certain possible for such organizations to receive a 2nd level.GOV or.MIL domain. However, it was not too terribly long before those domains were delegated to NICs that enforced special restrictions on those domains making the US specific.
I'm honestly a bit confused about this whole experiment. I mean the free download is just one of the four CDs. That makes perfect sense to me, it is the Shareware concept. Under that system, having the files available for download from the site for free, and even making a torrent of the files available for free makes sense. The multiple options for purchasing the other CDs also makes great sense. However, one thing sticks out very oddly. The entire album is allegedly licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA. However because of that, it means it is legal to redistribute the files, even the one purchased. That seems to undermine the concept of the first CD available for free. Further, why is the free CDs download format only MP3? The other file formats are available for free due to the license, so having the download restricted to one format of one CD makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Can anybody explain this mess?
So how is that not counterfeit? By definition counterfeiting is an imitation that is made with the intent to deceptively represent its content or origins. Isn't that precisely what happened here? Well, true, but counterfeit generally has the connotation of being of lesser quality or not working at all. I mean there is a bit of a difference between a cheap lookalike knockoff, and a physically identical unit that was merely not authorized. Most people think of the former when the hear the word counterfeit. Of course, nobdy would argue that money produced after-hours in the same way is not counterfeit, but people seem to apply a different standard to counterfeit devices.
Keywords work just fine. In fact, I've found they actually work slightly better. (If you omit the search term it will omit the "%s" character. This will result in an empty search string causing most engines to send you the the main page of the site. So "Map NYC" will work, but just "map" will land you at the Google Maps homepage. IIRC this was not the case in Fx2, it was definately not the case in Fx1.5
applications will be signed.. which means some kind of approval method, and its associated cost. No great surprise there - all mobile platforms have something like it
My phone (Spring Mogul AKA HTC Titan/Hermes) is a Windows CE device. I've yet to find a single native application that I can't install on the device because of some problem signing it. In fact, it's only with the Java sub-system that I run into these kind of issues. Same is true of my HTC Apachee (aka. PPC-6700). By default IIRC, on my particular carrier's firmware there was some sort of warning when installing unsigned apps, but disabling it was entirely possible, and not terribly difficult. My experience with a Palm-pased phone indicated no aplication-signing system. On the other hand, my understanding is that a few phone platforms may require signing, but I have no experience with this, and may be wrong.
Now, what was with that moderation? There was nothing trollish about my message. I have indeed had the listed problems, and do regularly have issues with XP. Never the less I continue to use XP, but am not planning on moving to vista in the near future based on those past experiences. I have reason to believe most of my XP issues are due to bugs in device drivers, although I have yet been able to determine the specific problematic drivers. On the other hand, I very rarely have had any need to manually kill explorer.exe under XP, and only occasionally need to forcibly reboot the system. It does happen, but not very often. I have found them happening far more often on Vista PCs. I have used at least 3 of them, all laptops, but of different specs and manufacturers. All of them had severe performance issues, and showed a remarkable tendency to lock-up. These machines admittedly had far less RAM than a vista machine really should have, but locking up not something I feel is a reasonable response to insufficient RAM. Slow performance with lots of swapping, sure, but locking-up completely is not a reasonable response. I do definitely appreciate some of the changes Microsoft has made for Vista, and think they are good ideas (although perhaps in some cases, less than ideal implementations), but these severe performance/lock-up issues does literally make Vista unusable to me.
All I know, is that I have not used Vista for even 24 hours total, and I've had to manually kill Explorer.exe and restart it a good 3 or more times (it hangs), not to mention at least 3-hard reboots (the hold the power button to turn it off kind). From that alone I dislike it very very much. My usage methods already tend to trigger nearly every posssible bug that hurts the stability of XP, and the evidence so far seems to be that Vista have more of those bugs. That literally makes Vista completely unusable to me.
Production ready? Without browser client support? Maybe someday, not today...
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There is client browser support. All major browser except Safari support SNI according to that page.
SNI is a TLS extention where the browser sends the intended hostname as part of the TLS setup process.
Boot up your old Apple II. Type some password somewhere. Reboot.
Now, type three lines of code:
10 X=0
20 X=X+1
30 GOTO 20
Scan the screen printout and see if there is anything that scares you! Sure managed to scare my computer teacher and muck up my HS's lab computers back in the 1980's, hee hee. Good old Corvis. Hmm... Are you not missing some form of "PRINT PEEK(X)" statement?
I used to be an auto insurance adjuster with a three-state territory (MD, DC, and VA) (yeah, I'm counting DC - that's where the majority of my cases were). As such, I had to obtain police reports, often. Police reports, at least with regards to auto accidents, are public record. If you just happen to drive past an accident, and note when and where it was, you can request a police report if you like.
NONE of the municipalities I dealt with had any online availability. I had to physically mail them a request, and almost ALL police jurisdictions charged for copies of the accident reports. In DC, it was $3. In Prince George County, MD, it was $5. I know there was one municipality in VA that charged $15 for the report (I THINK it was Orange, VA, but I could be wrong). Fair enough. However, it should be possible to see the records for free if you are willing to be in the same place as the record. A $3-$5 fee for a police report seems about right (which is to say just a tiny bit overpriced) when you consider the copying costs, mailing costs, and the costs of the associated labor. (Paying the officer to find the record, copy it, replace it, fill out the envelope, place the copy inside, apply postage, and place in the mailbox.) I mean sure it sucks, but they still need to recover the costs.
Only in the US do the people have problems with the police.
In Australia if you see a policeman then you feel safe and if you need help they will be eager to help you.
I'm sure Europe is the same.
If you don't use your ability then the government will realize that (which they seem to have done) and the results aren't pretty. The simple truth is here that many, (far from all, especially in some small towns) police departments want the people to fear them. The reasons are not very sane (want the criminals to fear them, sure, but want the general population to fear them?), but it is still a common policy. However, from a very brief trip to England, despite not interacting with them at all. I'm quite confident they they would be quite friendly and helpful. Actually, I found that was true of the average citizen, but I would expect it to be even more true of the Police. They understand the "to serve" part of "to serve and protect". I only wish more here in the States would too. (Although I'll admit, I've found a few very helpful and moderately friendly cops in NYC (where I would tend to least expect it), so perhaps things are better than they might seem).
Actually, that sounds like a clear case of the following rule which will result in removal and possible suspension of the offending account:
Feedback left by a member who bid on or purchased an item solely to have the opportunity to leave negative feedback for the seller, with no intention of completing the transaction.
Leaving negative feedback so early is clearly an indication that the party never intended to follow through with the transaction.
I thought that too at first, and then I "got" it: Right now, every website I go to, I create a new account. New account, new password, new entry in my passmanager. I usually use the same login name/user name, for simplicity's sake. You probably do this also.
Now, I can use OpenID to stop dealing with my passmanager! I can get the same login name everywhere. If I want the simple route, I simply use diggity.myopenid.com. If I want the advanced "I control it all" route, then I can host it myself using phpMyID (although that makes it a fair bit less anonymous:).
The best part though, and I think this is where you are confused, is that you can create as many OpenIDs, using as many providers, as you want to keep track of! You could have ten different logins to Slashdot if you wanted. You can have that already right now, but OpenID allows you to take this the extra step and take any of these logins with you to any other site in the future. If you want extra security, you can use a provider in a foreign country that deletes all logs, never tracks IPs, and understands full deniability. Whatever. This is totally up to you!.
- DaftShadow Excellent explanation. However, you did not mention the mid-layer possibility. In that case your OpenID is actually a url on a site you control, but points to a different site to do the actual authentication. A week later you decide you don't like that site's authentication, you make a small change to the page on your site, and then use a different site's authentication method.
I don't think that's too much of a problem - if you're using a site enough to be doing something like keeping your own journal, it's not too much hassle to get an account. It is hassle to get an account just to make a single comment, which is the major hurdle OpenID overcomes.
join a community
I agree, this limitation seems a bit strange, especially as they allow OpenID users to keep friends lists.
comment on posts that have restricted comments to LiveJournal users
Although that's a choice that's up to the journal owner. They had to have that really, as originally there was the option to disallow anonymous comments, but for backwards compatibility, I think OpenID would have to fall into the same category. But it would be nice to have an option that says "Allow LiveJournal or OpenID comments, but not anonymous". But setting up an OpenID server that automatically authenticates anybody who types in that url (does not attempt to verify identity) is trivial. Any such URL is then an anonymous OpenID. That more or less would defeat the point, would it not?
Slashdot Mirror
Crazy $2-$10 dollars to to run the "add/remove windows components" tool? That is absurd. Especially for computers that will be part of a domain. Removing those via group policy is trivial, taking less then 3 minutes to remove them from all computers in the domain.
I get the point you were trying to make, but you obviously havent bought a microwave in the last 10 years. average price here is about AU$80. asus eeepc is AU$499 (cheapest laptop i know of off the top of my head, but I'm a mac guy so I dont really follow the windows subsidized market so there could be cheaper ones there). While the less expensive counter-top microwaves cost about the same here [USA] when converting using the semi-standard pricing ratios (which seem to have no relation to the actual exchange rate), the "built-in" microwaves found over the cooktops in a fair number of American homes do have a cost similar to that of a nice laptop.
All of your points may be valid, but it depends on exactly what sort of National health care system is implemented. There are quite a few systems that could be implemented that would actually improve health care for everybody, including those who would already have it. Some (not very many, but some) of the possible systems could even do that while lowering the actual cost of healthcare. The problem is determining which potential systems can do this, implementing one, and keeping the elected officials from continuously messing with it. That last part sounds like a real problem.
If a system is basically chosen at random, only partially implemented, with politicians constantly messing with it, the problems you describe are almost certain. That makes the whole proposal a bit of a problem. It is really hard to get the politicians to do the right thing, or to even do what they said they were going to do.
Yes, a PC does more than a game console. But a PC that can play MODERN GAMES is pretty expensive. And here's the thing: You can buy a cheap PC for $400 that does EVERYTHING really well, except play games. Then you can buy a console for another $400 - $500 that plays games MUCH BETTER than that $400 PC, and in fact plays games better than an $800 PC. So, you get the best of both worlds for approximately the price of a mediocre "gaming PC".
All of the above ties into the "compatibility problems". It's not so much that games are hard to get running on a PC, it's more that very few people have a PC that actually meets the requirements of modern games. If you are a serious PC gamer, you know that you need a video card made in the last year, and 2GB of RAM, and dual-core CPU to play newly released games. But the average PC owner doesn't know any of that stuff. They go buy Call of Duty 4 to play on their PC, because their friend with an Xbox 360 has it, and if they can play it on their PC, they don't need to buy an Xbox 360! Of course, their 4-month-old eMachine has integrated graphics, and only has 512MB of RAM (for Vista, no less), and just flat-out isn't going to work.
THAT is the problem with PC gaming. It's too confusing for the masses, and the "technology advantage" over consoles is mostly gone, AND you get more functionality for less money by buying a console for games and buying a cheap PC for everything else. We won't even talk about the game development/publishing side of things, where consoles are the ONLY logical platform to develop for, if you want to make money.
So that's why Linux gaming will probably NEVER take off. Gaming on PCs is dying a quick death. Overall, this rings rather true. However, a couple of nits. One of the few things PCs games support well and console games fall completely flat on is modding. As it currently is, mods (even just custom maps) for FPS games are very popular, yet not one console game has real support for it. Why? Well, only very very recently have hard-drives even been available in consoles. At the current moment, the though of letting end users place additional files on the drive to change the game is all but absurd. Also PC games play well with PC games on other PC hardware. But the consoles invariably do not play well with each other. If a game is released on multiple consoles, those releases will not support mixed multiplayer. Further, at best one of the console versions will be high quality. The other(s) will be quick and dirty ports that have many bugs or missing features and receives no real support. Its for those sorts of reasons that the only console games I buy are those that are exclusive to that console. Otherwise the PC version (if there is one) is all I would buy.
.SWF is the container for the Flash application. The code contained within remains the same. Have you ever programmed using Flash?As I recall, the SWF file is a container containing various flash resources, including various types of image resources, button resources, font resources, audio resources, etc. One of the resource types consists of bytecode for the flash VM. This byte ccode can be extracted, edited and replaced, but it still is bytecode. As a source format, one can use a an assembly language, as is supported by flasm. However, the official Macromedia products use ActionScript as the language. That indeed is compiled to bytecode before being embedded in the .swf file. Looking into it, it looks like things may have changed some with Flash 9. I have no experience with that. My old flash 8 tools seem to have no problem with virtually all the flash files I've come across, indicating that flash 9 is not very popular yet.
Hmm... It looks like Flash 9 uses the Taramin VM, a general VM for implementing ECMAscript. It apparently still uses bytecode, so getting ActionScript back from it should still require decompilation.
I have some experience working with a natural language programming language. Basically, in this language all well written programs are syntactically and grammatically valid English. (It is possible to have code that is not quite syntactically or grammatically correct English text, but that text is still perfectly understandable.
I have found code in the language trivial to read. I'm pretty certain many people who have absolutely no programming experience could read and intemperate the code with little to no difficulty.
The problem is that writting code in this language is a real pain in the ass. Far from not having to remember the syntax of the language, the syntax rules are very difficult to remember. Mostly because one attempts to use the rules of English as a base. But one must then remember each and every deviation from standard English, of which there are many. Further, the overall syntax of the language is far more complicated than a traditional programming language because the syntax of English is also far more complicated than that of a traditional programming language. Overall, It is actually easier to learn and remember the syntax of C++ than it is to remember the syntax of this language.
Personally, I consider Patronage to be the most valuable in this instance, as I greatly respect what Reznor and friends have done with this album/project and would like to show that I support the work. I downloaded the free Ghosts I collection last night, and after enjoying it I paid the $5 for the full download. I want to see more artists release work like this, so it's worth my money to prove that it is a viable model for those who dare to test these new waters. I agree but as an experiment, both combined together makes any results much harder to analyze. If they only did one or the other, it would make more sense. The combination of the two is somewhat odd.
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8"
Once that meta tag is there, all web pages look just as they're supposed to! I'm so glad Microsoft finally fixed this whole compatibility fiasco.
The good new is that they have fixed this. They have now decided that the presence of a doctype will Enable the latest "Standards" Rendering mode by default. The older "Standards" modes can be requested using the HTTP header or meta-tag. "Quirks" mode will be activated in the event that no doctype is available. See the blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability-principles-and-ie8.aspx
My guess is that Microsoft figured out that high level of standards compliance can work fine as a default. (Since the more standards complaint browsers have few problems with the most sites.) The oldest sites will still work fine because they would use quirks mode. Newer sites can fix themselves, or use the tag. For intranet applications adding the HTTP header or meta tag can often be added easily enough that it is just not worth hurting the Internet to spare companies the effort of adding the header or tag to their broken internal apps. This leaves only unmaintained sites (which will not get fixed or updated) that claim standards compliance (via a doctype) but actually rely on IE bugs. Those will break, but on the other hand, those sites are almost certainly broken in other browsers too, so no real loss.
I'm honestly a bit confused about this whole experiment. I mean the free download is just one of the four CDs. That makes perfect sense to me, it is the Shareware concept. Under that system, having the files available for download from the site for free, and even making a torrent of the files available for free makes sense. The multiple options for purchasing the other CDs also makes great sense. However, one thing sticks out very oddly. The entire album is allegedly licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA. However because of that, it means it is legal to redistribute the files, even the one purchased. That seems to undermine the concept of the first CD available for free. Further, why is the free CDs download format only MP3? The other file formats are available for free due to the license, so having the download restricted to one format of one CD makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Can anybody explain this mess?
Keywords work just fine. In fact, I've found they actually work slightly better. (If you omit the search term it will omit the "%s" character. This will result in an empty search string causing most engines to send you the the main page of the site. So "Map NYC" will work, but just "map" will land you at the Google Maps homepage. IIRC this was not the case in Fx2, it was definately not the case in Fx1.5
My phone (Spring Mogul AKA HTC Titan/Hermes) is a Windows CE device. I've yet to find a single native application that I can't install on the device because of some problem signing it. In fact, it's only with the Java sub-system that I run into these kind of issues. Same is true of my HTC Apachee (aka. PPC-6700). By default IIRC, on my particular carrier's firmware there was some sort of warning when installing unsigned apps, but disabling it was entirely possible, and not terribly difficult. My experience with a Palm-pased phone indicated no aplication-signing system. On the other hand, my understanding is that a few phone platforms may require signing, but I have no experience with this, and may be wrong.
Now, what was with that moderation? There was nothing trollish about my message. I have indeed had the listed problems, and do regularly have issues with XP. Never the less I continue to use XP, but am not planning on moving to vista in the near future based on those past experiences. I have reason to believe most of my XP issues are due to bugs in device drivers, although I have yet been able to determine the specific problematic drivers. On the other hand, I very rarely have had any need to manually kill explorer.exe under XP, and only occasionally need to forcibly reboot the system. It does happen, but not very often. I have found them happening far more often on Vista PCs. I have used at least 3 of them, all laptops, but of different specs and manufacturers. All of them had severe performance issues, and showed a remarkable tendency to lock-up. These machines admittedly had far less RAM than a vista machine really should have, but locking up not something I feel is a reasonable response to insufficient RAM. Slow performance with lots of swapping, sure, but locking-up completely is not a reasonable response. I do definitely appreciate some of the changes Microsoft has made for Vista, and think they are good ideas (although perhaps in some cases, less than ideal implementations), but these severe performance/lock-up issues does literally make Vista unusable to me.
All I know, is that I have not used Vista for even 24 hours total, and I've had to manually kill Explorer.exe and restart it a good 3 or more times (it hangs), not to mention at least 3-hard reboots (the hold the power button to turn it off kind). From that alone I dislike it very very much. My usage methods already tend to trigger nearly every posssible bug that hurts the stability of XP, and the evidence so far seems to be that Vista have more of those bugs. That literally makes Vista completely unusable to me.
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There is client browser support. All major browser except Safari support SNI according to that page. SNI is a TLS extention where the browser sends the intended hostname as part of the TLS setup process.
Now, type three lines of code: Scan the screen printout and see if there is anything that scares you! Sure managed to scare my computer teacher and muck up my HS's lab computers back in the 1980's, hee hee. Good old Corvis. Hmm... Are you not missing some form of "PRINT PEEK(X)" statement?
I used to be an auto insurance adjuster with a three-state territory (MD, DC, and VA) (yeah, I'm counting DC - that's where the majority of my cases were). As such, I had to obtain police reports, often. Police reports, at least with regards to auto accidents, are public record. If you just happen to drive past an accident, and note when and where it was, you can request a police report if you like.
NONE of the municipalities I dealt with had any online availability. I had to physically mail them a request, and almost ALL police jurisdictions charged for copies of the accident reports. In DC, it was $3. In Prince George County, MD, it was $5. I know there was one municipality in VA that charged $15 for the report (I THINK it was Orange, VA, but I could be wrong). Fair enough. However, it should be possible to see the records for free if you are willing to be in the same place as the record. A $3-$5 fee for a police report seems about right (which is to say just a tiny bit overpriced) when you consider the copying costs, mailing costs, and the costs of the associated labor. (Paying the officer to find the record, copy it, replace it, fill out the envelope, place the copy inside, apply postage, and place in the mailbox.) I mean sure it sucks, but they still need to recover the costs.
In Australia if you see a policeman then you feel safe and if you need help they will be eager to help you.
I'm sure Europe is the same.
If you don't use your ability then the government will realize that (which they seem to have done) and the results aren't pretty. The simple truth is here that many, (far from all, especially in some small towns) police departments want the people to fear them. The reasons are not very sane (want the criminals to fear them, sure, but want the general population to fear them?), but it is still a common policy. However, from a very brief trip to England, despite not interacting with them at all. I'm quite confident they they would be quite friendly and helpful. Actually, I found that was true of the average citizen, but I would expect it to be even more true of the Police. They understand the "to serve" part of "to serve and protect". I only wish more here in the States would too. (Although I'll admit, I've found a few very helpful and moderately friendly cops in NYC (where I would tend to least expect it), so perhaps things are better than they might seem).
Now, I can use OpenID to stop dealing with my passmanager! I can get the same login name everywhere. If I want the simple route, I simply use diggity.myopenid.com. If I want the advanced "I control it all" route, then I can host it myself using phpMyID (although that makes it a fair bit less anonymous
The best part though, and I think this is where you are confused, is that you can create as many OpenIDs, using as many providers, as you want to keep track of! You could have ten different logins to Slashdot if you wanted. You can have that already right now, but OpenID allows you to take this the extra step and take any of these logins with you to any other site in the future. If you want extra security, you can use a provider in a foreign country that deletes all logs, never tracks IPs, and understands full deniability. Whatever. This is totally up to you!.
- DaftShadow Excellent explanation. However, you did not mention the mid-layer possibility. In that case your OpenID is actually a url on a site you control, but points to a different site to do the actual authentication. A week later you decide you don't like that site's authentication, you make a small change to the page on your site, and then use a different site's authentication method.
I don't think that's too much of a problem - if you're using a site enough to be doing something like keeping your own journal, it's not too much hassle to get an account. It is hassle to get an account just to make a single comment, which is the major hurdle OpenID overcomes.
join a community
I agree, this limitation seems a bit strange, especially as they allow OpenID users to keep friends lists.
comment on posts that have restricted comments to LiveJournal users
Although that's a choice that's up to the journal owner. They had to have that really, as originally there was the option to disallow anonymous comments, but for backwards compatibility, I think OpenID would have to fall into the same category. But it would be nice to have an option that says "Allow LiveJournal or OpenID comments, but not anonymous". But setting up an OpenID server that automatically authenticates anybody who types in that url (does not attempt to verify identity) is trivial. Any such URL is then an anonymous OpenID. That more or less would defeat the point, would it not?