"and it should be clear that not everyone that died in the WTC on 9/11 was 100% thrilled with everything that gets the USA's name attributed to it"
OK. What does it say on your paycheck?
It's safe to assume that you are at least partially thrilled, because you continue to work there. Sure, your anti-American fifth column crusade is noble and all...but you're still taking their money, which weakens your rhetorical stance.
Do what you need to do to feed yourself, but you still work for The Man.
We can see what indiscretion in choosing "targets" and/or having a binary opinion of who is or is not "guiltly", "part of the problem", or whatever leads to.
let's try another one:
"and it should be clear that I am not always 100% thrilled with everything that my wife says or does"
OK. What does it say on your marraige certificate?
It's safe to assume that you are at least partially thrilled, because you continue to stay married. Sure, your I-wish-I-got-my-way-all-the-time fifth column crusade is noble and all...but you're still staying married, which weakens your rhetorical stance.
Do what you need to do to find happiness, but you still got owned.
I'd be happy to explain at length if you're truly curious about my employment decisions. There are many avenues for trying to change the world for the better, with varying degrees of personal comfort and ultimate effectiveness along a gradient that is at least 2 dimensional. There are those that think Microsoft is absolute evil and must be destroyed, and there are those that think that Microsoft has generally done more good than harm, and can be improved from within. I lean more towards the latter, but as I alluded to in my original post, sometimes I have doubtful days.
Only the maintainers of TeX/Metafont have the luxury of working on a perfect codebase:) For all of the rest of us, we have the opportunity to make things better for people.
Speaking for myself only (but, I am a MS employee), I seriously hope that _never_ happens.
To say that I am... dissatisfied with what we're doing in terms of DRM and content protection technologies for content we have no financial stake in.. would be an understatement. I've gotten in some pretty heated arguments with people closer to those groups internally and there are days I feel like looking for other employment options.
Imagine how awful things would be if MS owned a bunch of "traditional" content (besides software.. which has grown up with "piracy" and the market understands how to deal with it..and the providers have grown up figuring out how to stay alive inspite of it)
When one umbrella organization owns content and technology, the interests of one are going to suffer due to the other. Sony makes this plainly evident. I suspect that the content people at Sony are furious that the technology people haven't invented a remote "extort-money" button for the latest Sony-Style line of kitchen radios.. and the consumer electronics people are livid that they keep getting memos suggesting that they invent a TV that plays ONLY Sony Pictures movies from the content arm.
When I talk about stuff like the broadcast flag, etc at work, I can still posture the argument that it's not clear that we make money by playing well with that thing vs ignoring it or taking a more consumer friendly approach. If suddenly "we" benefited from crap like the broadcast flag, those arguments would be DOA.
(Just like slashdot - there is not a singular hive-mind mentality inside Microsoft, and it should be clear that not everyone is 100% thrilled with everything that gets MS's name attributed to it. I can only imagine that there are good engineers at Sony as well that are upset with what has happened to their company.. )
For the sake of everyone, I hope China can rapidly catch up to the US in terms of national standard of living. The current "problems" people think exist in the US-China relationship are really just an indication of the disparity in labor costs and standard of living. Why is it cheaper to have materials shipped into china and products shipped out and back into the US? Because of the aggregately low cost of labour and the attendant low standard of living (taken en masse.. certainly there are luxurious lifestyles being led by the massively wealthy in China..)
As China modernizes and the aggregate standard of living improves, the cost of labour will go up and the prospect of outsourcing manufacturing and all "lower" sectors of the economy to China will dry up. Then I'd expect these jobs to move to the next "up and coming" economy before we eventually reach some steady-state global economy where production happens at the ideally distributed points based on availability of resources and proximity to efficient distribution.
The real concern for the US is maintaining vertical industries in-house that are relevant from a national security perspective. As long as there aren't severe national security implications for a particular market segment or peice of the economic picture, globalization and outsourcing and "races" with other countries are just a part of economic development. For every 10 or 100 Americans that are no longer doing back-breaking agrarian labour because that is now being done in developing economies, at least one of them is doing work that is distcintly _impossible_ to do in the developing nation that "lower" work is happening in. The world moves ahead, and the developing nations can recapture what it took us years to do in a fraction of the time, thereby providing the potential for equalization to happen that much faster.
The so called "trade deficit" with China doesn't bother me one iota. We're pumping money into China's economy because that is an effective way for us to be spending that money, freeing up our resources to do other things. As the world economy flattens, the quality of life of _all_ people goes up, the mobility of all people goes up, etc etc.
Finally, while the #1 thing the US exports is money, and the #2 thing might be military influence... somewhere high on the list are "democracy", "work ethic", and "self deterministic attitude". To be fair, we've been exporting so much democracy lately we seem to be running a bit low on it here at home:), but the point being that trade with the US has other less tangible benefits that "US CEOs getting richer" or the standard of living going up on the trade partner. Part of ones standard of living is unfetted exposure to outside ideas, individual voice in government, etc. It is undeniable that Americans and Chinese know more about each other today than they did in 1955. After trade and economic cooperation comes cultural cooperation and mutual understanding.
Exposure to the US's money, ideas, "culture", etc, will lead to an increased demand for personal freedom and upward mobility in China and in everyone that we do business with.
The biggest issue seems to be US emissions and fuel laws. A secondary issue is the lasting sting the european manufacturers feel from trying to introduce diesels in the US in the 80s. That more or less bombed.
One issue is the cost of EPA certification for a new powertrain system. BMW only brings a handful of engine types to the US market because each additional one drastically increases their costs for a variety fo reasons - EPA regs, sales/service training, marketing material, dilution of other powertrains sales numbers, etc etc. There has to be a super compelling reason (like sales volume) for them to do this and so far its been questionable.
When you add to the fact that california basically makes it impossible to sell a diesel passenger car, and that many other states follow californias lead, that further complicates things. BMW hasn't sold "49 state" (i.e. not california) and "california" versions of cars since hte early 80s and that is a boat they intend to stay in.
The Germans are slowly bringing diesels back here - the MB 320CDi, the various VW products. BMW NA keeps saying "we're looking at it.. it depends on the new fuel laws / fuel quality".
Fwiw, if I could get something like an A4 1.9/2.5 TDi Avant Quattro Manual here, i'd have one. Maybe two. Unfortuneately, getting all 4 factors in one car (AWD, Manual Transmission, Station Wagon (Estate or Kombi to some of you cross-ponders), and Diesel) is essentially impossible in the US. Some people have started with the Passat Wagon 4Motion Automatic as a base and then (illegally) swapped in a complete european diesel manual AWD drivetrain + electronics package.
Actually a quote from a Toyota guy said that the expected battery life of the prius is 5-7 years. While that may be the life of the car to many people, I am driving a set of german cars made in the late 80s (which are still safer and more performant than many modern American cars, fwiw)
I sometimes hear about people that go to private liberal arts colleges and pay 30k+ in tuition to get a 4 year degree in art appreciation. And i say "you are a damn idiot.. you'll never pay off those student loans and you are utterly unemployable"
But, by the same token, I know I went to school with all those kids that heard CompSci was the degree to get to land a cushy computer job with a big salary. And I despised these kids for chasing money in a field they weren't interested in, dumbing down the industry, etc.
Hypocritical? Probably. (assuming that the 30k/yr art appreciation was done out of true love for the subject, which, isn't always the case)
As I am at the stage of life where I am thinking about children and how to financially plan for them.. the prospect of paying for 4 years of college education per child, in a system where prices seem to double every few years.. means that a 1m 4 year education in ~20 years is going to be common place. it seems like a 4% annual COLA increase in salary has you making 2.19* what you would today after 20 years, but the cost of university education is far outpacing that. So in real dollars, education is becoming rapidly more expensive to the point that one must consider paying for it in terms of investment value (putting me in the second camp, above)
For all of the effort I spent getting dual degrees (BS CS, BS Mathematics), I cannot say that I use _much_ of it in my day to day job. The CS work has given me excellent context and background in what I do, and I have a good sense for what is possible and what isn't, what is performant and what isn't, etc. But I am not sure the current scheme really "works".
I could just as well buy the Hennessey and Patterson book and read it myself. I still have my copy, and I remember at the time being interested enough in it that in addition to the assignments out of the book, I wrote a cache simulator to try and convince myself of something it said that I was unconvinced of. There were only a handful of us that were doing non-assignment work, and there was nothing about being at a university that was _condusive_ to doing extra work out of love of the field... it was easy to get burnt out doing the stuff you were "assigned" to do, and nevermind the distractions of learning how to become an adult, chasing girls, etc.
So what is the value of a university education? What makes it worthwhile? Is it more than a booklist? Is it a booklist + assignments? A booklist + assignments + access to experts? Is it merely that it is a societally accepted way for kids to move out of their parents house but not have any real responsibilities for a few years.. which ostensibly they use to fill their heads with an education?
Could I replicate a CS education by asking questions to sci.* and comp.* on usenet? (1st year project - write a filter that drops any replies about mortgages, genitals, or medicines:)) I remember back in highschool I asked the PGP guy (Phil Zimmerman?)about what was wrong with me using my 486's PRNG to create data for a one-time-pad, and he answered. That was a _novice_ level cryptography question and yet he answered me. I couldn't afford to go to a university where he taught, but I was able to ask _the man_ directly and get an answer (that was several years more advanced than I was able to fully understand at the time).
Since college, I've moved to a town with lots of blue collar work and where University education and professional jobs aren't as prevalent. I've got some good friends where the wife has a (professionally useless) 4 year degree and a desk job she hates, and the husband dropped out and has a blue collar (litterally - he wears mechanics coveralls) job he really likes.
He comes into contact with lots of other non-university-graduates. One story he was telling me is how he ran into a 40s-50s year old career welder (welding is somewhere between an art and a skilled trade if you've
Wow! How did the immediate parent get modded Flamebait? I'd think it would either be "Informative" - he basically offers a factual contradiction of the original post. Unless the guy is just plain wrong, in which case a response along the lines of "wrong:" with a citation would be the better approach.
Which, on the topic of the OP - IMO it should have been flamebait, troll, or off-topic - it adds nothing to the discussion at hand, is begging for negative reactions, or is purposefully taking a point of view to incite heated response.
Modding someone down that disagrees with a particular world view is damn hypocritical in an article about the FCC destroying inconvenient evidence.
For a group of people so intent on having their message heard, they are awfully resistant to hearing the message that the TV viewing public is sending back.
You know. The message that says "get fucked, TV advertisers. Your commercials suck, piss us off, and we're never buying your shit products. The more you make bad commercials and show them every 7 minutes, the more we hate you, and will do anything to avoid you and your products"
I cancelled TV service completely. It has had a generally positive effect on my life. Borrowing DVDs from the library and bittorrent have filled in any gaps in our household.
None other than "the" John Carmack has an enlightening rebuttal to the Register article. This is the John Carmack that has "a bit" of experience in turning easy to acquire checmicals into rocket fuels.
Oh, and this should remind people that the register cannot even be taken seriously as a source for IT news.. much less anything important. When will people learn?
My wife was going to start a business in an older classic home in our neighborhood. It was already commercially zoned (previously, a yarn store had been there). She wanted to open a teahouse that would feature the special blends of teas she makes and several baked items of her own design (whole wheat flour, no added sugar.. amazing food really.. )
The problems with this were many. The rules around food preparation were intense - food ahd to be prepared on site in a kitchen that met lots of standards. Ok, i can see that. Since preparing the food involved _heat_, there had to be a sprinkler system. Ok, I can see that also. Naturally, only a registiered-with-the-government person can install a sprinkler system. Grrr. Also, any place that serves food needs to have a bathroom. Fine, this is a 100 year old house, it already has a bathroom. The ADA says that any bathroom has to be accessible. Lovely. The bathroom is on the 2nd floor. We are NOT putting in an elevator, NOT knocking out walls to enlarge the bathroom, and NOT covering the whole damn building with ramps.
Oh, and because we'd be tenants of the property and not the owner, we wouldn't be allowed to do any of the improvements ourselves, even witht he land owners permission. No, a 3rd party contractor would need to do all of the work.
We were prepared to curtail the menu in such a way that we could scale back our kitchen and fire requirements. We got some bids from professional contractors on how to do the remaining work that we wouldn't be allowed to do, and it seemed like we'd be able to pull it off.
The ADA regulations are what really made the whole thing infeasible. I've done multiple kitchen and bathroom remodels before so I know what it takes even if you DIY everything. Satisfying the bathroom requirements would have completely destroyed the space and/or the budget.
So, once again, government gets in the way of entreprenuership. Given that the potential market here likely includes the elderly, there's little doubt that given time and business sustainability, we'd have worked to make the place more accessible. But we never got the chance to start. So now nobody will have the opportunity to benefit from our desire to improve the community, improve the property, improve the economy, restore an older building, etc.
The building has sat for over a year with no tenants, by the way.
It is clear that if you are a man in the United States, and your soon-to-be-ex-wife starts working the system to work you over, your best option is to kill your soon-to-be ex-wife, do the time, and then start over a few years down the road.
Study up on the law so you know what to do / say to make sure it seems non-premeditated (to reduce the degree of the offense), and if you can swing it, do something where it's plausible manslaughter instead of murder.
Men get completely shafted by the legal system in divorce/custody proceedings unless the wife is still in a good mood and no lawyers get to her before its all said and done. You'll lose all your money, your kids, your respect, probably your job, your house, any of your possessions that you actually liked. You'll spend the next 1-18 years paying for children you dont get to see only to have the money spent by your ex wifes new boyfriend, the two of which just tell your kids what a shithead you are.
When you consider the wasted money, feelings of helplessness, and complete waste of your own years, a more satisfying and expedient route than the ridiculous divorce climate here is a well planned murder early on in the proceedings.
You're probably thinking -- this seems _ridiculous_, criminal, inhumane, and so on. A perversion of the legal system, a gross manipulation of justice...
I agree. Which is why I suggested murder as the best way out of the situation..
Neither of these precludes speed as a contributing factor.
Agreed
In fact, even driving 10-15mph over the speed limit greatly decreases control one has over their vehicle.
This is not only incorrect, but provably false.
The speed limit on many sections of road has an arbitrary or politicized aspect to it.
Suppose that I am willing to accept your premise that "driving over the limit decreases my control". Let's say the limit is 30, i am driving 40, so i have "n" units of decreased control.
Scenario 1: municipality changes the limit from 30 to 25. I am now going 50% "more" over the limit than I used to be. Has my amount of control over the vehicle changed? I claim that it has not.
Scenario 2: municipality elects some non-panties-wadded libertarian candidates to office; draconianly low speed limit revoked and changed to 40mph.
I am now not exceeding the speed limit at all. Has my control over my vehicle improved?
The point here is - the speed limit is not _the_ determinant factor regarding the safety of a particular driving profile, mostly because the speed limit is often poorly chosen.
Bonus question: what is the relationship between having _no_ speed limit and vehicle control.. as we see on about 30% of Germany's Autobahn system? Are those vehicles being operated in infinite or perfect safety? (as an aside, i've driven on this road system with vehicles at Vmax for extended periods of time.. IME, it's much safer than setting cruise control on a US interstate's posted speed limit.. due to factor #1 and #4 below)
The key determinants in what constitutes a "safe" speed are: driver awareness driver capability vehicle capability environment issues (visibility corridor, etc)
You would have been correct if you had approached this from a physics perspective (small increases in speed cause sigificant increases in stopping distance; small increases in speed cause significant increases in KE, and thus damage imparted in a collision) but your post, as worded, is simply incorrect and confuses the issues.
It is undeniable that the set of "terrorists" is almost entirely contained in the intersection of "dark skinned" and "muslim".
Did the KKK & IRA and all those other terrorist and militant anarchist groups suddenly disband when I wasn't looking?
I donno - I haven't heard of anything rotten done by them in a long time. And a few things I've never heard of them doing is destroying skyscrapers using passenger aircraft, releasing gas in subways, bombing subways, sinking military ships, blowing up nightclubs, killing an entire olympic team, and so on.
Now, I'm not the best informed person, and I don't mind being corrected when I'm seeing things incorectly, so if you think you can make the "Islamist terrorists aren't any worse than ${group}" argument convincing this time around (b/c I've heard it made poorly on countless occasions), by all means, give it a shot.
It is undeniable that the set of "terrorists" is almost entirely contained in the intersection of "dark skinned" and "muslim".
Yes... "undeniable". "Dark skinned" like Ted Kazinski, Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, John Walker Lindh, et al.
Are you being pedantic or actually trying to debate this point? Note that I allowed for non-Islamist terrorists, and yes, I remember the examples you mention.
I also remember that all of them (except the IRA, who are not the problem of the US, and so not specifically something I am worried about addressing for the purposes of this discussion) are lone actors and who had some specific beef with the government or specific people and were targeting those individuals or representatives of same.
What those people did is awful, but I think it is a little different than an organized group with the stated goal of the destruction of the US, democracy, etc, trying to kill as many uninvolved civilians as possible.
Problem: Defend our society from those hell bent on destroying it Constraint: Do this without turning our society into something not worth defending.
I'm not sure how you do this. It's an ugly problem with a delicate balance. I'd argue that circumventing process when such process is sufficiently lenient to get the job done for domestic-only wiretapping is inexcusable. I'd also argue that holding people without charges is one of the reasons we were in such a hurry to dump colonial rule.
Can we save America while keeping it a place worth saving? (assuming you beleive it still is, which is up for debate in certain circles..)
In our society worth saving, we allegedly support religious freedom and tolernace. We try to avoid things like "racial profiling" or juding any individual based on a group affiliation. And we know the logical / mathematical rules about correlation vs. causation, and necessary vs sufficient and that the balance of favor must be given to assuming innocence.
At the same time, it seems very enticing to say things like "let's target brown-skinned muslims trying to board aircraft for extra security". It is undeniable that the set of "terrorists" is almost entirely contained in the intersection of "dark skinned" and "muslim". Even so, if we build a society that lets us act on that info and that info alone, tomorrow someone will decide that the set "serial killers" will fit into the sets "white" and "male".
I do beleive "we" have a real enemy - and that enemy is Islamofacism. I don't think there is any room in this country for people that want Sharia Law or want to change the laws of the US to fit their religion (that applies to Christians too - of which I count myself a member, and i'd be willing to concede that too many judeo-christian influences have been grandfathered into modern America ) - our law attempts to treat all as equals and _allegedly_ puts no religion over any other. If you don't want to play that way - fine, there are other countries for you.
However, the nature of this "enemy" and the antics of our government are setting off too many alarms in my head about how governments manipulate with fear for their own purposes. I don't want to be protected by a government that has so much power to eavesdrop and detain the people I don't like today that they can just as easily do it to me tomorrow when someone else decides they don't like me. Even if you beleive that the govt is trying to act benignly (I think they generally are - i think they beleive they're doing the right thing), the problem is building the machine that gives them this much power to begin with. even if they are acting in our best interests, the next crop of people or the set after them wont be, and by then it will be too late.
What the founding fathers understood is that to limit government tyrany, you limited government, not who could participate.
IE7 is available for windows XP. It's what I am using to write this comment:)
Note that the IE7 you get in Vista and in XP are slightly different; the Vista version has some extra features that are based on extra Vista functionaliy (mostly around security separation, iirc). That said, I browse with IE7 on XP and vista every day and they feel about the same to me.
I dumped firefox to go back to IE once the IE7 builds started getting stable (which was months ago).
F/OSS beta's are basically feature complete and are being error tested.
That's a bit disingenuous. Don't you suppose it depends on the F/OSS project in question? And isn't "feature complete" in many F/OSS projects "what the developer felt like writing", not "what should something do?"
I have been using Firefox since the 0.3 days of Phoneix. Since that time it has maybe crashed 2 dozen times. Can you say the same about ANY MSFT product?
You and I have had different experiences. I started using Firefox after it got pretty famous and allegedly stable. It has crashed more than IE6 ever did.. to the point that it would die once every day or two. I decided I wanted something stable and reasonable, but I missed tabs, and I didn't want to mess with Avant or whatever the IE6+tabs is.
So I started running IE7. First it was nightly builds on my XPSp2 machine. Then it was the IE7 that was built with Vista on my vista machine. At home on my home XP machine, i am also running IE7 beta.
The only time i use Firefox is when a site has browser version checking code in it that doesn't know what to do with IE7. I don't think IE7 has crashed _once_ in all of the crazy different builds I've used. It is much more likely to fail by doing a 100% cpu loop that it never returns from, but even that is rare. It still has some cpu-hogging situations but it usually gets out of them after 5-10s.
All of the browsing I do on my main machines - home or work - is on IE7. I like the tab features (which does offer one or two innovations over FF tabs), I like the RSS integration, and I like the speed/stability.
Emule is writing to a folder that doesn't exists (C:\program files\emule\incoming) but, when i try to open what i've downloaded from emule, it works misterously from the neverland! I still can't find the files.
There's a chance that one of the virtualization features is doing this (but i am only vaguely aware of what that system does).
Basically, program shouldn't write to system-wide file locations or registry hives (like Program files or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE). But, many programs do this anyway.
Vista introduces some "virtualization" of these assets so that old stupid software will still "work" but what happens under the covers gets redirected to user-specific locations.
The vista task manager has a column on the Processes tab called "virtualization" - you can see if it is turned on for the Emule client. I suspect that it is. If i had to guess, i would say that the virtualization is mapping your emule files to somewhere outside of the program files directory transparently (to emule). If i had to make an even longer guess, the files are somewhere under your user dir (c:\users\username).. maybe under Local Settings ?
You should take a peek at the book "A new kind of science", by Wolfram (yes, that Wolfram). I picked it up on the dollar shelf at B&N and it has been pretty interesting.
Wolfram's fundamental premise (so far -- it's a huge book that i've barely gotten into) is that science, and observational knowledge in general, seems to be filled with the idea that apparently complex behavior requires complexity in the underlying rules.
Wolfram uses analysis of cellular automata and other "programs" to show that this is grossly inaccurate - that certain systems with trivial rules generate tremendous complexity.. (others generate apparent "randomness" but the most interesting are neither random nor repetitive.. but somewhere inbetween.. a structure that you could't predictively determine without simply running the program to completion, and when you are done, the result has clear indications of intelligence or informational coding, but yet remains unpredictable)
I happen to be a religious person but my faith is not hinged on any particular version of a story about how the universe works. I beleive that we were given senses to learn about the world around us, and i beleive that while certain "scientists" may have anti-theistic motives and biases, that in aggregate, there is not a grand unified conspiracy to distort the truth in the name of non-theistic goals. If "evil", such as it is, had the power to aggregately distort all of mans senses, then axiomatically, nothing can be beleived in.
Finally, where there lies an apparent contradiction beween observed science and biblical accounts of the same or related phenomena, i temper my own analysis with the following guiding principles:
- God designed our senses, and the rules of the universe - There is a high correlation between the importance of something and the frequency and non-subtlety with which its specific details show up in the religious text - Our observations, measuring devices, and theoretical models about our world are simply that - approximations, observaions, and models. They continue to converge on reality, but are never quite there. - I don't think God has stacked the deck against us - intentionally making things seem one way when they're really something quite different. - In the history of mankind's battle between "science" and "religious dogma", more harm has been commited on the side of those in religious power that claim to have the sole interpretation of scripture than those that claim to have the sole interpretation of physics. I'll continue to bet on the physicists.
It is not my life mission to resolve apparent contradictions between observational science and reading scripture. The number of human-perceivable-time-units over which the earth was formed has no bearing on how i live my life, so if I am a little confused about it taking 5 billion years, 6 days, or something else entirely, I figure I'll either die confused and my skin cells wont much care as thev're turned into worm food, or it will be "Standard Question #938230" on a poster in the waiting room outside of Heaven.
So, I'm not going to sweat it, and I'm not going to rely on a "God of the Gaps".
Yeah. 2 BMWs, actually. And an Audi. And a Volkswagen.
The BMWS and Audi are from 87, 88, and 88, respecively. The VW is a '00 and is my wife's car, and cost me more than the other 3 combined:) (And all of them are paid for, as you might expect with older cars)
I could make the same analgous argument about car maintenance. I do _all_ of the maintenance on all of our vehicles. There are a lot of times when i drive or work on my 88 Audi and think "supporting this outdated thing just isn't worth it any more". Fortuneately, car ownership or driving cars isn't my business, so I can afford to be more sentimental than financially rational in how I handle my automotive stable.
(to answer the eventual question, here's why i have 4 cars:) - one new, shiny, safe, reliable, comfortable car for my wife - one classic BMW M5 for a fair-weather driver, providing a driving experience like nothing else - one older, cheaper, Audi Quattro with snow tires, so the M5 can stay nice in the winter, and so I can have maximum fun and safety at the same time in the severe winters we get here - one dirt-cheap BMW 3 series, which i am rebuilding into a dedicated track car, so that I can retire the M5 from race track events (it's a rare car and hard to replace if i have a shunt)
Plus, I just like cars. Some people like watching sports, some people like building car stereos, some people like putting Neon lights in their PCs. I like the different driving experiences I can get from each of the above vehicles. I don't even put all that many miles on them, so when I do, I want them to be pleasurable, not functional.
What you say is true, but i am not sure it is unique to software or even closed source software.
I visited the Mercedes museum in Germany a while back. One thing that struck me was the display of old fashioned factory equipment that was based on the then-new Otto cycle engine. The machine would have a leather drive belt that went up to a rotating drive wheel hanging from the ceiling. It seemed that there'd be one engine turning a row of linked drive wheels and each separate machine would have a leather drive belt that powered it.
I am sure that at some point, that engine broke, or a leather drive belt broke, or a machine broke. Supposing that any of the companies involved had moved on (think about the rapid pace of engine development during the earliest years of internal combustion engine deployment into factories) and would no longer offer parts or replacement units for any of the peices of this big moving puzzle.
The factory would be in a position to - create the needed replacement parts themselves - pay the original creator to fix the problem - pay some new person to fix the problem - abandon some or all of the systems and retrofit something else in its place
Now, you might say "ok, but if the engine had failed, wouldn't any engine work as long as it had a shaft outout and spun the same direction at the same speed?"
Probably, with some work. I assure you, i cannot go and put my BMW's engine in my Audi and have it all just "work". Engine swaps even when you're taking an identical engine from an identical car are non-trivial. Once you have different interfaces, lots of custom work has to be done to make things work, and it is a painful laborious process.
This would tend to suggest that retrofittability is critical in selecting the components that make your business run, which, when taken to the software analogy would suggest "demand documented open interfaces with open source software".
Yet the question arises - are any of the machines I've described still in use? Is using a leather belt still the best way to transfer power to a factory machine? Or do thinigs become obsolete not because of abandonware, but because progress has truly taken place? Now power is distributed via electricity, not leather belts and drive wheels. And the power doesn't come from a gas engine installed on site, the production of power has been outsourced to the power company. every part of this original system has become obsolete, irrespective of the simplistic, logical, obvious interfaces and boundaries.
Sometimes, it makes sense to just throw the old stuff away because the cost of evolving outweighs the cost of leaping.
And often times, the cost of compatability is high. Everyone seems to understand that one big reason Microsoft gets into security trouble is due to the desire to maintain backward compatability... the need to maintain interfaces and expected behaviors. Compatability/retrofittability/ease of integration are sometimes at odds with innovation and progress.
As an aside, if you're interacting with Microsoft Application X and require the binary, it usually means COM. Newer versions of X often include a backward compatible COM interface. Have you tried App Y with App X+1? Or are you going off of what the vendor says -- that to use X+1 you need Y+1?
Maybe there should be a mechanism by which a post says "i disagree with the parent". Then, when reply posts become scored highly, and disagree with the parent, the parent gets modded down automagically.
Why? Because of posts like the parent.
Let's begin
Most of all, every piece of crap program is tied into the kernel, or needs kernel level privileges. Can anyone give a reasonable clue why of all things a webbrowser, something that by its very nature deals with insecure content of the worst kind, needs kernel level permissions?
What does this mean? I have a few basic questions i want to ask you 1) do you know what a kernel does? 2) What program do you think you have on your machine that doesn't "use" or "call" your "kernel"? 3) What do you mean by "kernel level priviledges"? 3a) how do you figure IE gets them, if it is running without admin rights? 3b) how did IE ever run on Win9x, (the same binary/version that ran on NT4) if it was so "tied" into the "kernel" ?
I mean, aside of being able to claim that you can't remove it from your system...
I wish people would figure this out.
Suppose you've got a linux machine with X11. X11 is installed on 99% of linux machines, and I decide that it is unfairly locking out competitors like SDL. So, I wisely tell you "Get rid of X11.. and.. what is X11? Why, it's libX11.so.4 (or whatever they're up to now:)). SuSE, you must remove libX11.so.4 from the machine."
Now, if you're suse, what do you say?
1) "Sure, I'll just delete/usr/lib/X11/libX11.so.4 and do nothing else." 2) "Uh... but if I removed that, pretty much everything would stop working"
So it is with IE. IE supplies a few COM components, which you can think of like shared libraries, except that the coupling is even more anonymous than an LD registration in the consuming binary - COM activation happens via classname or classGUID. For every program we ship that needs it, we expect to be able to say "give me an HTML rendering canvas please", and we're going to be activating the IE renderer via COM. If that activation fails, my program doesn't work. "Fully" removing everything related to IE should make a number of things not work completely. Deleting the IE desktop icon (which is just one particular execution host for the IE rendering control) doesn't cause this mayhem, and is what was ultimately decided upon.
Why are (other) kernel level programs responsible for dealing with DNS and other network related issues? The whole system is flawed. Not because the code is buggy, but because the design has serious flaws that break it. Not at a code level, but at the level of the underlying design work.
What are kernel-level programs? And how are they related to "network related issues" ? Can you elaborate on the flaws, since you're apparently an expert on the design of Windows?
The actual maximum length depends on your definition of "maximum", unfortuneately.
PATH_MAX is supposed to be defined as the length of any single path segment. NT "the OS", and NTFS "the filesystem", support completely qualified path concatenations that are like 32k or so long.
You can, using CMD.EXE, create a directory 250ish chars long. Then you can go into that directory, and create child dirs with a similar length, and so on, for quite a while.
Now, what happens when you try and access that file you made?
It depends entirely on the appplication.
In XP and earlier, explorer.exe got pretty confused around 4096 chars. When you were viewing a DFS redirected share, explorer got confused even earlier.
in CLR 1.0, if you have relative directory traversal, you can access paths which are longer than 255 chars, but any of the "open by path" routines cap it at 255 chars (including filename!). I filed a bug on this that the CLR guys said "won't fix - we just do what Win32 does". (gosh guys, i thought.NET was going to free us all from Win32. Guess not.)
So, the NT native APIs support enormous paths, NTFS supports them, but depending on which libraries your application uses, you probably can't do much better than 250 chars total - path _and_ filename.
Alot of what makes Microsoft "good" is its commitment to backwards compatibility. And a lot of what makes Microsoft so lousy is it's commitment to backwards compatability:/
I'll just stop watching TV... oh wait, I already did.
No commericials, no annoying crap. I get more done, and if there is anything I want to watch, then I download it off of one of the many sources of free video.
Bingo.
Everything about my life has been better since I axed my TV service. Well, except when I hang out with other people at their place and they want to watch TV, I get cranky and belittle them, and eventually just go into another room or leave. I refuse to suffer the nonsense of American TV, even when I'm not the one paying for it.
Hopefully the entire TV/movie industry as we know it collapses completely. I'm doing my part.
Microsoft gets a surprisingly large percentage of its revenue from non-USA sources. "Shutting off Europe" would probably be a major impact to the bottom line, even if you ignore all of the contractual entanglements and legal problems it would cause.
The spiteful part of me wants it to happen anyway. My understanding is that the US anti-trust law attempts to protect individuals from harm, but that the EU rules attempt to protect businesses from "harm", as if every company has some intrinsic right to exist in-spite of non-performance.
I haven't found an article that really explains the EU position on the matter. It's easy to sit back and say "the EU won't stop until Microsoft never ships another feature again and discloses the sourcecode to everything it has shipped", but I'd like to think they have a more rational position than that.
Slashdot Mirror
We can see what indiscretion in choosing "targets" and/or having a binary opinion of who is or is not "guiltly", "part of the problem", or whatever leads to.
let's try another one:
I'd be happy to explain at length if you're truly curious about my employment decisions. There are many avenues for trying to change the world for the better, with varying degrees of personal comfort and ultimate effectiveness along a gradient that is at least 2 dimensional. There are those that think Microsoft is absolute evil and must be destroyed, and there are those that think that Microsoft has generally done more good than harm, and can be improved from within. I lean more towards the latter, but as I alluded to in my original post, sometimes I have doubtful days.
Only the maintainers of TeX/Metafont have the luxury of working on a perfect codebase
Speaking for myself only (but, I am a MS employee), I seriously hope that _never_ happens.
... dissatisfied with what we're doing in terms of DRM and content protection technologies for content we have no financial stake in.. would be an understatement. I've gotten in some pretty heated arguments with people closer to those groups internally and there are days I feel like looking for other employment options.
To say that I am
Imagine how awful things would be if MS owned a bunch of "traditional" content (besides software.. which has grown up with "piracy" and the market understands how to deal with it..and the providers have grown up figuring out how to stay alive inspite of it)
When one umbrella organization owns content and technology, the interests of one are going to suffer due to the other. Sony makes this plainly evident. I suspect that the content people at Sony are furious that the technology people haven't invented a remote "extort-money" button for the latest Sony-Style line of kitchen radios.. and the consumer electronics people are livid that they keep getting memos suggesting that they invent a TV that plays ONLY Sony Pictures movies from the content arm.
When I talk about stuff like the broadcast flag, etc at work, I can still posture the argument that it's not clear that we make money by playing well with that thing vs ignoring it or taking a more consumer friendly approach. If suddenly "we" benefited from crap like the broadcast flag, those arguments would be DOA.
(Just like slashdot - there is not a singular hive-mind mentality inside Microsoft, and it should be clear that not everyone is 100% thrilled with everything that gets MS's name attributed to it. I can only imagine that there are good engineers at Sony as well that are upset with what has happened to their company.. )
For the sake of everyone, I hope China can rapidly catch up to the US in terms of national standard of living. The current "problems" people think exist in the US-China relationship are really just an indication of the disparity in labor costs and standard of living. Why is it cheaper to have materials shipped into china and products shipped out and back into the US? Because of the aggregately low cost of labour and the attendant low standard of living (taken en masse.. certainly there are luxurious lifestyles being led by the massively wealthy in China..)
:), but the point being that trade with the US has other less tangible benefits that "US CEOs getting richer" or the standard of living going up on the trade partner. Part of ones standard of living is unfetted exposure to outside ideas, individual voice in government, etc. It is undeniable that Americans and Chinese know more about each other today than they did in 1955. After trade and economic cooperation comes cultural cooperation and mutual understanding.
As China modernizes and the aggregate standard of living improves, the cost of labour will go up and the prospect of outsourcing manufacturing and all "lower" sectors of the economy to China will dry up. Then I'd expect these jobs to move to the next "up and coming" economy before we eventually reach some steady-state global economy where production happens at the ideally distributed points based on availability of resources and proximity to efficient distribution.
The real concern for the US is maintaining vertical industries in-house that are relevant from a national security perspective. As long as there aren't severe national security implications for a particular market segment or peice of the economic picture, globalization and outsourcing and "races" with other countries are just a part of economic development. For every 10 or 100 Americans that are no longer doing back-breaking agrarian labour because that is now being done in developing economies, at least one of them is doing work that is distcintly _impossible_ to do in the developing nation that "lower" work is happening in. The world moves ahead, and the developing nations can recapture what it took us years to do in a fraction of the time, thereby providing the potential for equalization to happen that much faster.
The so called "trade deficit" with China doesn't bother me one iota. We're pumping money into China's economy because that is an effective way for us to be spending that money, freeing up our resources to do other things. As the world economy flattens, the quality of life of _all_ people goes up, the mobility of all people goes up, etc etc.
Finally, while the #1 thing the US exports is money, and the #2 thing might be military influence... somewhere high on the list are "democracy", "work ethic", and "self deterministic attitude". To be fair, we've been exporting so much democracy lately we seem to be running a bit low on it here at home
Exposure to the US's money, ideas, "culture", etc, will lead to an increased demand for personal freedom and upward mobility in China and in everyone that we do business with.
The biggest issue seems to be US emissions and fuel laws. A secondary issue is the lasting sting the european manufacturers feel from trying to introduce diesels in the US in the 80s. That more or less bombed.
One issue is the cost of EPA certification for a new powertrain system. BMW only brings a handful of engine types to the US market because each additional one drastically increases their costs for a variety fo reasons - EPA regs, sales/service training, marketing material, dilution of other powertrains sales numbers, etc etc. There has to be a super compelling reason (like sales volume) for them to do this and so far its been questionable.
When you add to the fact that california basically makes it impossible to sell a diesel passenger car, and that many other states follow californias lead, that further complicates things. BMW hasn't sold "49 state" (i.e. not california) and "california" versions of cars since hte early 80s and that is a boat they intend to stay in.
The Germans are slowly bringing diesels back here - the MB 320CDi, the various VW products. BMW NA keeps saying "we're looking at it.. it depends on the new fuel laws / fuel quality".
Fwiw, if I could get something like an A4 1.9/2.5 TDi Avant Quattro Manual here, i'd have one. Maybe two. Unfortuneately, getting all 4 factors in one car (AWD, Manual Transmission, Station Wagon (Estate or Kombi to some of you cross-ponders), and Diesel) is essentially impossible in the US. Some people have started with the Passat Wagon 4Motion Automatic as a base and then (illegally) swapped in a complete european diesel manual AWD drivetrain + electronics package.
Actually a quote from a Toyota guy said that the expected battery life of the prius is 5-7 years. While that may be the life of the car to many people, I am driving a set of german cars made in the late 80s (which are still safer and more performant than many modern American cars, fwiw)
What is the real value of University Education?
:)) I remember back in highschool I asked the PGP guy (Phil Zimmerman?)about what was wrong with me using my 486's PRNG to create data for a one-time-pad, and he answered. That was a _novice_ level cryptography question and yet he answered me. I couldn't afford to go to a university where he taught, but I was able to ask _the man_ directly and get an answer (that was several years more advanced than I was able to fully understand at the time).
I sometimes hear about people that go to private liberal arts colleges and pay 30k+ in tuition to get a 4 year degree in art appreciation. And i say "you are a damn idiot.. you'll never pay off those student loans and you are utterly unemployable"
But, by the same token, I know I went to school with all those kids that heard CompSci was the degree to get to land a cushy computer job with a big salary. And I despised these kids for chasing money in a field they weren't interested in, dumbing down the industry, etc.
Hypocritical? Probably. (assuming that the 30k/yr art appreciation was done out of true love for the subject, which, isn't always the case)
As I am at the stage of life where I am thinking about children and how to financially plan for them.. the prospect of paying for 4 years of college education per child, in a system where prices seem to double every few years.. means that a 1m 4 year education in ~20 years is going to be common place. it seems like a 4% annual COLA increase in salary has you making 2.19* what you would today after 20 years, but the cost of university education is far outpacing that. So in real dollars, education is becoming rapidly more expensive to the point that one must consider paying for it in terms of investment value (putting me in the second camp, above)
For all of the effort I spent getting dual degrees (BS CS, BS Mathematics), I cannot say that I use _much_ of it in my day to day job. The CS work has given me excellent context and background in what I do, and I have a good sense for what is possible and what isn't, what is performant and what isn't, etc. But I am not sure the current scheme really "works".
I could just as well buy the Hennessey and Patterson book and read it myself. I still have my copy, and I remember at the time being interested enough in it that in addition to the assignments out of the book, I wrote a cache simulator to try and convince myself of something it said that I was unconvinced of. There were only a handful of us that were doing non-assignment work, and there was nothing about being at a university that was _condusive_ to doing extra work out of love of the field... it was easy to get burnt out doing the stuff you were "assigned" to do, and nevermind the distractions of learning how to become an adult, chasing girls, etc.
So what is the value of a university education? What makes it worthwhile?
Is it more than a booklist? Is it a booklist + assignments? A booklist + assignments + access to experts? Is it merely that it is a societally accepted way for kids to move out of their parents house but not have any real responsibilities for a few years.. which ostensibly they use to fill their heads with an education?
Could I replicate a CS education by asking questions to sci.* and comp.* on usenet? (1st year project - write a filter that drops any replies about mortgages, genitals, or medicines
Since college, I've moved to a town with lots of blue collar work and where University education and professional jobs aren't as prevalent. I've got some good friends where the wife has a (professionally useless) 4 year degree and a desk job she hates, and the husband dropped out and has a blue collar (litterally - he wears mechanics coveralls) job he really likes.
He comes into contact with lots of other non-university-graduates. One story he was telling me is how he ran into a 40s-50s year old career welder (welding is somewhere between an art and a skilled trade if you've
Wow! How did the immediate parent get modded Flamebait? I'd think it would either be "Informative" - he basically offers a factual contradiction of the original post. Unless the guy is just plain wrong, in which case a response along the lines of "wrong:" with a citation would be the better approach.
Which, on the topic of the OP - IMO it should have been flamebait, troll, or off-topic - it adds nothing to the discussion at hand, is begging for negative reactions, or is purposefully taking a point of view to incite heated response.
Modding someone down that disagrees with a particular world view is damn hypocritical in an article about the FCC destroying inconvenient evidence.
For a group of people so intent on having their message heard, they are awfully resistant to hearing the message that the TV viewing public is sending back.
You know. The message that says "get fucked, TV advertisers. Your commercials suck, piss us off, and we're never buying your shit products. The more you make bad commercials and show them every 7 minutes, the more we hate you, and will do anything to avoid you and your products"
I cancelled TV service completely. It has had a generally positive effect on my life. Borrowing DVDs from the library and bittorrent have filled in any gaps in our household.
None other than "the" John Carmack has an enlightening rebuttal to the Register article. This is the John Carmack that has "a bit" of experience in turning easy to acquire checmicals into rocket fuels.
a rmack
The link is here: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail428.html#C
Oh, and this should remind people that the register cannot even be taken seriously as a source for IT news.. much less anything important. When will people learn?
Bingo.
My wife was going to start a business in an older classic home in our neighborhood. It was already commercially zoned (previously, a yarn store had been there). She wanted to open a teahouse that would feature the special blends of teas she makes and several baked items of her own design (whole wheat flour, no added sugar.. amazing food really.. )
The problems with this were many. The rules around food preparation were intense - food ahd to be prepared on site in a kitchen that met lots of standards. Ok, i can see that. Since preparing the food involved _heat_, there had to be a sprinkler system. Ok, I can see that also. Naturally, only a registiered-with-the-government person can install a sprinkler system. Grrr. Also, any place that serves food needs to have a bathroom. Fine, this is a 100 year old house, it already has a bathroom. The ADA says that any bathroom has to be accessible. Lovely. The bathroom is on the 2nd floor. We are NOT putting in an elevator, NOT knocking out walls to enlarge the bathroom, and NOT covering the whole damn building with ramps.
Oh, and because we'd be tenants of the property and not the owner, we wouldn't be allowed to do any of the improvements ourselves, even witht he land owners permission. No, a 3rd party contractor would need to do all of the work.
We were prepared to curtail the menu in such a way that we could scale back our kitchen and fire requirements. We got some bids from professional contractors on how to do the remaining work that we wouldn't be allowed to do, and it seemed like we'd be able to pull it off.
The ADA regulations are what really made the whole thing infeasible. I've done multiple kitchen and bathroom remodels before so I know what it takes even if you DIY everything. Satisfying the bathroom requirements would have completely destroyed the space and/or the budget.
So, once again, government gets in the way of entreprenuership. Given that the potential market here likely includes the elderly, there's little doubt that given time and business sustainability, we'd have worked to make the place more accessible. But we never got the chance to start. So now nobody will have the opportunity to benefit from our desire to improve the community, improve the property, improve the economy, restore an older building, etc.
The building has sat for over a year with no tenants, by the way.
It is clear that if you are a man in the United States, and your soon-to-be-ex-wife starts working the system to work you over, your best option is to kill your soon-to-be ex-wife, do the time, and then start over a few years down the road.
Study up on the law so you know what to do / say to make sure it seems non-premeditated (to reduce the degree of the offense), and if you can swing it, do something where it's plausible manslaughter instead of murder.
Men get completely shafted by the legal system in divorce/custody proceedings unless the wife is still in a good mood and no lawyers get to her before its all said and done. You'll lose all your money, your kids, your respect, probably your job, your house, any of your possessions that you actually liked. You'll spend the next 1-18 years paying for children you dont get to see only to have the money spent by your ex wifes new boyfriend, the two of which just tell your kids what a shithead you are.
When you consider the wasted money, feelings of helplessness, and complete waste of your own years, a more satisfying and expedient route than the ridiculous divorce climate here is a well planned murder early on in the proceedings.
You're probably thinking -- this seems _ridiculous_, criminal, inhumane, and so on. A perversion of the legal system, a gross manipulation of justice...
I agree. Which is why I suggested murder as the best way out of the situation..
Agreed
This is not only incorrect, but provably false.
The speed limit on many sections of road has an arbitrary or politicized aspect to it.
Suppose that I am willing to accept your premise that "driving over the limit decreases my control". Let's say the limit is 30, i am driving 40, so i have "n" units of decreased control.
Scenario 1: municipality changes the limit from 30 to 25. I am now going 50% "more" over the limit than I used to be. Has my amount of control over the vehicle changed? I claim that it has not.
Scenario 2: municipality elects some non-panties-wadded libertarian candidates to office; draconianly low speed limit revoked and changed to 40mph.
I am now not exceeding the speed limit at all. Has my control over my vehicle improved?
The point here is - the speed limit is not _the_ determinant factor regarding the safety of a particular driving profile, mostly because the speed limit is often poorly chosen.
Bonus question: what is the relationship between having _no_ speed limit and vehicle control.. as we see on about 30% of Germany's Autobahn system? Are those vehicles being operated in infinite or perfect safety? (as an aside, i've driven on this road system with vehicles at Vmax for extended periods of time.. IME, it's much safer than setting cruise control on a US interstate's posted speed limit.. due to factor #1 and #4 below)
The key determinants in what constitutes a "safe" speed are:
driver awareness
driver capability
vehicle capability
environment issues (visibility corridor, etc)
You would have been correct if you had approached this from a physics perspective (small increases in speed cause sigificant increases in stopping distance; small increases in speed cause significant increases in KE, and thus damage imparted in a collision) but your post, as worded, is simply incorrect and confuses the issues.
I donno - I haven't heard of anything rotten done by them in a long time. And a few things I've never heard of them doing is destroying skyscrapers using passenger aircraft, releasing gas in subways, bombing subways, sinking military ships, blowing up nightclubs, killing an entire olympic team, and so on.
Now, I'm not the best informed person, and I don't mind being corrected when I'm seeing things incorectly, so if you think you can make the "Islamist terrorists aren't any worse than ${group}" argument convincing this time around (b/c I've heard it made poorly on countless occasions), by all means, give it a shot.
Are you being pedantic or actually trying to debate this point? Note that I allowed for non-Islamist terrorists, and yes, I remember the examples you mention.
I also remember that all of them (except the IRA, who are not the problem of the US, and so not specifically something I am worried about addressing for the purposes of this discussion) are lone actors and who had some specific beef with the government or specific people and were targeting those individuals or representatives of same.
What those people did is awful, but I think it is a little different than an organized group with the stated goal of the destruction of the US, democracy, etc, trying to kill as many uninvolved civilians as possible.
Problem: Defend our society from those hell bent on destroying it
Constraint: Do this without turning our society into something not worth defending.
I'm not sure how you do this. It's an ugly problem with a delicate balance. I'd argue that circumventing process when such process is sufficiently lenient to get the job done for domestic-only wiretapping is inexcusable. I'd also argue that holding people without charges is one of the reasons we were in such a hurry to dump colonial rule.
Can we save America while keeping it a place worth saving? (assuming you beleive it still is, which is up for debate in certain circles..)
In our society worth saving, we allegedly support religious freedom and tolernace. We try to avoid things like "racial profiling" or juding any individual based on a group affiliation. And we know the logical / mathematical rules about correlation vs. causation, and necessary vs sufficient and that the balance of favor must be given to assuming innocence.
At the same time, it seems very enticing to say things like "let's target brown-skinned muslims trying to board aircraft for extra security". It is undeniable that the set of "terrorists" is almost entirely contained in the intersection of "dark skinned" and "muslim". Even so, if we build a society that lets us act on that info and that info alone, tomorrow someone will decide that the set "serial killers" will fit into the sets "white" and "male".
I do beleive "we" have a real enemy - and that enemy is Islamofacism. I don't think there is any room in this country for people that want Sharia Law or want to change the laws of the US to fit their religion (that applies to Christians too - of which I count myself a member, and i'd be willing to concede that too many judeo-christian influences have been grandfathered into modern America ) - our law attempts to treat all as equals and _allegedly_ puts no religion over any other. If you don't want to play that way - fine, there are other countries for you.
However, the nature of this "enemy" and the antics of our government are setting off too many alarms in my head about how governments manipulate with fear for their own purposes. I don't want to be protected by a government that has so much power to eavesdrop and detain the people I don't like today that they can just as easily do it to me tomorrow when someone else decides they don't like me. Even if you beleive that the govt is trying to act benignly (I think they generally are - i think they beleive they're doing the right thing), the problem is building the machine that gives them this much power to begin with. even if they are acting in our best interests, the next crop of people or the set after them wont be, and by then it will be too late.
What the founding fathers understood is that to limit government tyrany, you limited government, not who could participate.
IE7 is available for windows XP. It's what I am using to write this comment :)
Note that the IE7 you get in Vista and in XP are slightly different; the Vista version has some extra features that are based on extra Vista functionaliy (mostly around security separation, iirc). That said, I browse with IE7 on XP and vista every day and they feel about the same to me.
I dumped firefox to go back to IE once the IE7 builds started getting stable (which was months ago).
F/OSS beta's are basically feature complete and are being error tested.
That's a bit disingenuous. Don't you suppose it depends on the F/OSS project in question? And isn't "feature complete" in many F/OSS projects "what the developer felt like writing", not "what should something do?"
I have been using Firefox since the 0.3 days of Phoneix. Since that time it has maybe crashed 2 dozen times. Can you say the same about ANY MSFT product?
You and I have had different experiences. I started using Firefox after it got pretty famous and allegedly stable. It has crashed more than IE6 ever did.. to the point that it would die once every day or two. I decided I wanted something stable and reasonable, but I missed tabs, and I didn't want to mess with Avant or whatever the IE6+tabs is.
So I started running IE7. First it was nightly builds on my XPSp2 machine. Then it was the IE7 that was built with Vista on my vista machine. At home on my home XP machine, i am also running IE7 beta.
The only time i use Firefox is when a site has browser version checking code in it that doesn't know what to do with IE7. I don't think IE7 has crashed _once_ in all of the crazy different builds I've used. It is much more likely to fail by doing a 100% cpu loop that it never returns from, but even that is rare. It still has some cpu-hogging situations but it usually gets out of them after 5-10s.
All of the browsing I do on my main machines - home or work - is on IE7. I like the tab features (which does offer one or two innovations over FF tabs), I like the RSS integration, and I like the speed/stability.
Emule is writing to a folder that doesn't exists (C:\program files\emule\incoming) but, when i try to open what i've downloaded from emule, it works misterously from the neverland! I still can't find the files.
There's a chance that one of the virtualization features is doing this (but i am only vaguely aware of what that system does).
Basically, program shouldn't write to system-wide file locations or registry hives (like Program files or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE). But, many programs do this anyway.
Vista introduces some "virtualization" of these assets so that old stupid software will still "work" but what happens under the covers gets redirected to user-specific locations.
The vista task manager has a column on the Processes tab called "virtualization" - you can see if it is turned on for the Emule client. I suspect that it is. If i had to guess, i would say that the virtualization is mapping your emule files to somewhere outside of the program files directory transparently (to emule). If i had to make an even longer guess, the files are somewhere under your user dir (c:\users\username).. maybe under Local Settings ?
You should take a peek at the book "A new kind of science", by Wolfram (yes, that Wolfram). I picked it up on the dollar shelf at B&N and it has been pretty interesting.
Wolfram's fundamental premise (so far -- it's a huge book that i've barely gotten into) is that science, and observational knowledge in general, seems to be filled with the idea that apparently complex behavior requires complexity in the underlying rules.
Wolfram uses analysis of cellular automata and other "programs" to show that this is grossly inaccurate - that certain systems with trivial rules generate tremendous complexity.. (others generate apparent "randomness" but the most interesting are neither random nor repetitive.. but somewhere inbetween.. a structure that you could't predictively determine without simply running the program to completion, and when you are done, the result has clear indications of intelligence or informational coding, but yet remains unpredictable)
I happen to be a religious person but my faith is not hinged on any particular version of a story about how the universe works. I beleive that we were given senses to learn about the world around us, and i beleive that while certain "scientists" may have anti-theistic motives and biases, that in aggregate, there is not a grand unified conspiracy to distort the truth in the name of non-theistic goals. If "evil", such as it is, had the power to aggregately distort all of mans senses, then axiomatically, nothing can be beleived in.
Finally, where there lies an apparent contradiction beween observed science and biblical accounts of the same or related phenomena, i temper my own analysis with the following guiding principles:
- God designed our senses, and the rules of the universe
- There is a high correlation between the importance of something and the frequency and non-subtlety with which its specific details show up in the religious text
- Our observations, measuring devices, and theoretical models about our world are simply that - approximations, observaions, and models. They continue to converge on reality, but are never quite there.
- I don't think God has stacked the deck against us - intentionally making things seem one way when they're really something quite different.
- In the history of mankind's battle between "science" and "religious dogma", more harm has been commited on the side of those in religious power that claim to have the sole interpretation of scripture than those that claim to have the sole interpretation of physics. I'll continue to bet on the physicists.
It is not my life mission to resolve apparent contradictions between observational science and reading scripture. The number of human-perceivable-time-units over which the earth was formed has no bearing on how i live my life, so if I am a little confused about it taking 5 billion years, 6 days, or something else entirely, I figure I'll either die confused and my skin cells wont much care as thev're turned into worm food, or it will be "Standard Question #938230" on a poster in the waiting room outside of Heaven.
So, I'm not going to sweat it, and I'm not going to rely on a "God of the Gaps".
Yeah. 2 BMWs, actually. And an Audi. And a Volkswagen.
:) (And all of them are paid for, as you might expect with older cars)
The BMWS and Audi are from 87, 88, and 88, respecively. The VW is a '00 and is my wife's car, and cost me more than the other 3 combined
I could make the same analgous argument about car maintenance. I do _all_ of the maintenance on all of our vehicles. There are a lot of times when i drive or work on my 88 Audi and think "supporting this outdated thing just isn't worth it any more". Fortuneately, car ownership or driving cars isn't my business, so I can afford to be more sentimental than financially rational in how I handle my automotive stable.
(to answer the eventual question, here's why i have 4 cars:)
- one new, shiny, safe, reliable, comfortable car for my wife
- one classic BMW M5 for a fair-weather driver, providing a driving experience like nothing else
- one older, cheaper, Audi Quattro with snow tires, so the M5 can stay nice in the winter, and so I can have maximum fun and safety at the same time in the severe winters we get here
- one dirt-cheap BMW 3 series, which i am rebuilding into a dedicated track car, so that I can retire the M5 from race track events (it's a rare car and hard to replace if i have a shunt)
Plus, I just like cars. Some people like watching sports, some people like building car stereos, some people like putting Neon lights in their PCs. I like the different driving experiences I can get from each of the above vehicles. I don't even put all that many miles on them, so when I do, I want them to be pleasurable, not functional.
What you say is true, but i am not sure it is unique to software or even closed source software.
I visited the Mercedes museum in Germany a while back. One thing that struck me was the display of old fashioned factory equipment that was based on the then-new Otto cycle engine. The machine would have a leather drive belt that went up to a rotating drive wheel hanging from the ceiling. It seemed that there'd be one engine turning a row of linked drive wheels and each separate machine would have a leather drive belt that powered it.
I am sure that at some point, that engine broke, or a leather drive belt broke, or a machine broke. Supposing that any of the companies involved had moved on (think about the rapid pace of engine development during the earliest years of internal combustion engine deployment into factories) and would no longer offer parts or replacement units for any of the peices of this big moving puzzle.
The factory would be in a position to
- create the needed replacement parts themselves
- pay the original creator to fix the problem
- pay some new person to fix the problem
- abandon some or all of the systems and retrofit something else in its place
Now, you might say "ok, but if the engine had failed, wouldn't any engine work as long as it had a shaft outout and spun the same direction at the same speed?"
Probably, with some work. I assure you, i cannot go and put my BMW's engine in my Audi and have it all just "work". Engine swaps even when you're taking an identical engine from an identical car are non-trivial. Once you have different interfaces, lots of custom work has to be done to make things work, and it is a painful laborious process.
This would tend to suggest that retrofittability is critical in selecting the components that make your business run, which, when taken to the software analogy would suggest "demand documented open interfaces with open source software".
Yet the question arises - are any of the machines I've described still in use? Is using a leather belt still the best way to transfer power to a factory machine? Or do thinigs become obsolete not because of abandonware, but because progress has truly taken place? Now power is distributed via electricity, not leather belts and drive wheels. And the power doesn't come from a gas engine installed on site, the production of power has been outsourced to the power company. every part of this original system has become obsolete, irrespective of the simplistic, logical, obvious interfaces and boundaries.
Sometimes, it makes sense to just throw the old stuff away because the cost of evolving outweighs the cost of leaping.
And often times, the cost of compatability is high. Everyone seems to understand that one big reason Microsoft gets into security trouble is due to the desire to maintain backward compatability... the need to maintain interfaces and expected behaviors. Compatability/retrofittability/ease of integration are sometimes at odds with innovation and progress.
As an aside, if you're interacting with Microsoft Application X and require the binary, it usually means COM. Newer versions of X often include a backward compatible COM interface. Have you tried App Y with App X+1? Or are you going off of what the vendor says -- that to use X+1 you need Y+1?
Maybe there should be a mechanism by which a post says "i disagree with the parent". Then, when reply posts become scored highly, and disagree with the parent, the parent gets modded down automagically.
:)). SuSE, you must remove libX11.so.4 from the machine."
/usr/lib/X11/libX11.so.4 and do nothing else."
Why? Because of posts like the parent.
Let's begin
Most of all, every piece of crap program is tied into the kernel, or needs kernel level privileges. Can anyone give a reasonable clue why of all things a webbrowser, something that by its very nature deals with insecure content of the worst kind, needs kernel level permissions?
What does this mean? I have a few basic questions i want to ask you
1) do you know what a kernel does?
2) What program do you think you have on your machine that doesn't "use" or "call" your "kernel"?
3) What do you mean by "kernel level priviledges"?
3a) how do you figure IE gets them, if it is running without admin rights?
3b) how did IE ever run on Win9x, (the same binary/version that ran on NT4) if it was so "tied" into the "kernel" ?
I mean, aside of being able to claim that you can't remove it from your system...
I wish people would figure this out.
Suppose you've got a linux machine with X11. X11 is installed on 99% of linux machines, and I decide that it is unfairly locking out competitors like SDL. So, I wisely tell you "Get rid of X11.. and.. what is X11? Why, it's libX11.so.4 (or whatever they're up to now
Now, if you're suse, what do you say?
1) "Sure, I'll just delete
2) "Uh... but if I removed that, pretty much everything would stop working"
So it is with IE. IE supplies a few COM components, which you can think of like shared libraries, except that the coupling is even more anonymous than an LD registration in the consuming binary - COM activation happens via classname or classGUID. For every program we ship that needs it, we expect to be able to say "give me an HTML rendering canvas please", and we're going to be activating the IE renderer via COM. If that activation fails, my program doesn't work. "Fully" removing everything related to IE should make a number of things not work completely. Deleting the IE desktop icon (which is just one particular execution host for the IE rendering control) doesn't cause this mayhem, and is what was ultimately decided upon.
Why are (other) kernel level programs responsible for dealing with DNS and other network related issues? The whole system is flawed. Not because the code is buggy, but because the design has serious flaws that break it. Not at a code level, but at the level of the underlying design work.
What are kernel-level programs? And how are they related to "network related issues" ? Can you elaborate on the flaws, since you're apparently an expert on the design of Windows?
The actual maximum length depends on your definition of "maximum", unfortuneately.
.NET was going to free us all from Win32. Guess not.)
:/
PATH_MAX is supposed to be defined as the length of any single path segment. NT "the OS", and NTFS "the filesystem", support completely qualified path concatenations that are like 32k or so long.
You can, using CMD.EXE, create a directory 250ish chars long. Then you can go into that directory, and create child dirs with a similar length, and so on, for quite a while.
Now, what happens when you try and access that file you made?
It depends entirely on the appplication.
In XP and earlier, explorer.exe got pretty confused around 4096 chars. When you were viewing a DFS redirected share, explorer got confused even earlier.
in CLR 1.0, if you have relative directory traversal, you can access paths which are longer than 255 chars, but any of the "open by path" routines cap it at 255 chars (including filename!). I filed a bug on this that the CLR guys said "won't fix - we just do what Win32 does". (gosh guys, i thought
So, the NT native APIs support enormous paths, NTFS supports them, but depending on which libraries your application uses, you probably can't do much better than 250 chars total - path _and_ filename.
Alot of what makes Microsoft "good" is its commitment to backwards compatibility. And a lot of what makes Microsoft so lousy is it's commitment to backwards compatability
I'll just stop watching TV... oh wait, I already did.
No commericials, no annoying crap. I get more done, and if there is anything I want to watch, then I download it off of one of the many sources of free video.
Bingo.
Everything about my life has been better since I axed my TV service. Well, except when I hang out with other people at their place and they want to watch TV, I get cranky and belittle them, and eventually just go into another room or leave. I refuse to suffer the nonsense of American TV, even when I'm not the one paying for it.
Hopefully the entire TV/movie industry as we know it collapses completely. I'm doing my part.
Microsoft gets a surprisingly large percentage of its revenue from non-USA sources. "Shutting off Europe" would probably be a major impact to the bottom line, even if you ignore all of the contractual entanglements and legal problems it would cause.
The spiteful part of me wants it to happen anyway. My understanding is that the US anti-trust law attempts to protect individuals from harm, but that the EU rules attempt to protect businesses from "harm", as if every company has some intrinsic right to exist in-spite of non-performance.
I haven't found an article that really explains the EU position on the matter. It's easy to sit back and say "the EU won't stop until Microsoft never ships another feature again and discloses the sourcecode to everything it has shipped", but I'd like to think they have a more rational position than that.