You should never come to Canada then. Around here folks are crazy. They use guns for hunting and axe handles are attached to axes that are used for chopping firewood. People don't use guns for shooting people and don't use axe handles for assaulting people. We're crrrrraaaaazzzzzyyyyy!!!
Doesn't have as much to do with the net as it does with people being violent. If the net didn't exist this guy would probably be interacting with people at the local bar and getting angry and assaulting people. If we shut down the bars then he'd go somewhere else and get angry and assault people.
thinking in industrialized countries... Africa is another story
I find it odd that you're arguing that people have all kinds of opportunities, but admit that "Africa is another story". You do realise that africans that are denied the opportunites that you have are people too, right?
You seem pretty quick to gloss over this, but its a major point. Most of the time speciation occurs when there is a geographic isolation. What you have to do to survive, reproduce, and care for your young is a hell of a lot different in Africa than it is in an affluent western city. Add in the geographic isolation and it will also be very rare for a person from the west to breed with a person in Africa.
We really are at a cross roads now. We can accept that with globalisation we are required to share wealth and encourage education around the world (a rising tide raises all boats). Or we can build higher walls so we can protect our hoarded wealth from people in other nations ("those mexicans are trying to take our jobs" or "those ragheads are terrorists"). It seems that right now the powers that be are working hard to build walls and restrict travel all without giving up the cheap labour available to them.
problem with that is that some people want to click on the folder and hold the button down and mouse down to a link in the folder and release the button and have it open that link. This is similar to how the menu works. But you can't have the folders behave like menus AND have them be draggable. Since a lot people expect the folders to behave like menus and its not often that you'll be reorganising your bookmarks, they chose to make the folders behave like menus.
You can still right click on the folder, select cut, then right click where you want it to go and select paste. A small inconvenience, but hopefully you are reorganising your bookmarks every day.
It's actually a good investment for Google. Right now they're way over valued and they know it. So they spend that money now on solar panels, then later on, when they might not have as much money, they still have the solar panels which will lower their operating costs.
How can they be carbon negative? Wouldn't that require them to be taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere?
Solar panels have to take up a lot of area. If instead of building fields of solar panels you built one nuclear power plant and planted a whole bunch of trees around it, now that would be carbon negative.
Not exactly. Google, Yahoo and MS have to scale up to be able to serve their customers.
The size of botnets are dependent on the number of clueless users out there. The number of clueless users is probably proportional to the total number of internet users. Google, Yahoo and MSs customer base is also proportional to the total number of internet users. So Google, Yahoo and MS are scaling up at the same rate as the botnets.
Besides no one would be stupid enough to attack a big corporation because a big corporation can get the FBI on the case and they might be able to track them down eventually and get the hackers extradited. They tend to attack the internet gambling sites because the sites are illegal in the US so no FBI. Now the hackers are still breaking the law, but the Costa Rican police force doesn't have the resources to go after them like the FBI does.
The problem with your subscription PC is there are all kinds of privacy issues when you have an admin poking around your machine. He has access to all your files since he is the admin. And of course people are going to go for the machine that is the cheapest which means that these admins aren't going to be paid very much (and possibly outsourced to India) and therefore won't really care about their job. There would be all kinds identity theft going on... not good at all.
Really its a little overkill to have a human admin secure your machine anyway. The Ubuntu/Debian system of having software repositories that you trust would work just as well. Just make it so that users can't execute scripts or executables anywhere under/home/ and then they can't just download and run stuff. The only way they can easily install a piece of software is if it is in one of their repositories. Then the maintainers of the repositories are the ones who decide whether or not software is safe and not the end users.
Really, the problem is that Windows relies so much on third party software to make it usable that users just get used to the idea of downloading stuff and running it. If you just break users of that habit then their systems will be much less likely to get infected.
Yeah but with wine its a little different. And older version might work with a particular piece of software while a newer version doesn't work at all. The whole of wine is a giant hack, which matches up pretty well with the original win32.
Well if you don't care about tabs and the huge number of extensions available, and you have no intention of ever doing anything under a non-MS OS, and you don't care about the Internet improving faster than the pace its improving now, then yeah I guess IE is fine.
But you are missing out on a lot of stuff. And installing firefox is insanely simply (I just installed it on a system today, it took less than 2 minutes) and it will keep itself up to date, so no worries there. And if you ever find yourself using a non-MS OS, lets say at a new job or on a public terminal or whatever, IE will not be available.
And then there's the problem of IE halting improvements to the web. We'd all benefit if CSS was improved from the sorry state its in currently. But its pointless to make these improvements, because MS isn't implementing them. A more advanced CSS won't work for IE users (the majority of Internet users) so web developers can't use them. If less people use IE, MS has less influence over web standards and then improvements can be made. As it stands now web standards haven't moved an inch since IE became the dominant browser.
This issue seems like its a developer issue, not a user issue. But it is a user issue because users are being denied higher quality web content because of the suckiness of IE.
Unfortunately this is a Tragedy of the Commons type of situation. If you individually switch to firefox nothing changes. Its only if the majority of web users switch that will improve the net. And even then the improvements will take years. It's like pollution. Sure its easier for you as an individual to just hop in your car and drive to work than it is to use public transit. But we're all better off if more people use public transit.
Yeah, really. I seem to recall that there used to be a setting for memory cache along with disk cache. I think the default setting was 10MB. What they should do is put it back that way and have a checkbox below that says "Use all free memory" with the default setting being off. This way if web browsing is your highest priority you can let it use all your memory to speed things up. Otherwise Firefox behaves like a decent app and only uses a set amount of memory. Then everyone is happy.
If you write something on paper, after you write it once, you're done for the next 100 years or more, as long as you store it correctly. The cost of maintaining your paper data for a long time is much lower than it is for electronic data.
You have rent or maintain a building to store these paper records. This building can't be anywhere that's prone to floods. Then you also have ot consider the threat of fire. And you need a decent security system and maybe pay a few security guards.
And lets not forget that you need a some kind of filing system to find all the records. And people trained to use and maintain all your filing.
No matter how you store data there is going to be costs. The advantage of doing it electronically is that a search for a particular piece of information takes seconds as opposed to hours or even days with a paper filing system. Also copying stuff is a lot easier so you can keep multiple copies at different locations in case there is a flood or a fire.
Yes, you have to keep moving the data over to new media, but this costs a hell of a lot less than training new staff on use of your paper filing system. The likelihood of someone accidentally deleting a file is about the same as someone misfiling a document and the results are about the same.
You can maintain data into perpetuity just as easily electronically as on paper. And if civilization collapses, well there will be looting and fires that will destroy your paper records. Archeologists studying ancient parchments might make you think paper is durable, but for every scrap of paper that has survived over two centuries thousands have been lost. There are vast gaps in Roman history where we aren't even sure who was emperor. People were documenting stuff, but those records just didn't survive.
And who's to say that archeologists won't be able to read our DVDs? Yeah maybe after a decade they degrade to the point where our cheapo dvd drives can't read them, but there must still be evidence of 1s and 0s on there that a future archeologist can decipher. And plastic lasts a lot longer than paper.
XML isn't required. In fact most AJAX apps don't use XML because of the overhead required, as you mentioned. You can use JSON or plaintext or make up your own format.
It's not that big of a deal really. Look at how quickly can you move around in google maps. And if your document is just text it will be much quicker than that. You could buffer two pages before your current position and two pages (or more) after your current position and unless you're scrolling through extremely fast you aren't going to notice. And even if you do scroll through 5 pages a second you will just have to wait half a second for it to catch up.
ReiserFS v3 is a dead end. Hans has been pushing reiser4 for years now
and declared Reiser3 in maintenance mode. Any changes that aren't bug
fixes are met with violent resistance.
The problem with the oil sands is that its more expensive to refine, much dirtier to refine and produces more CO2 gas. I'd rather not see Canada turn into a toxic wasteland and increase CO2 emissions so that Americans can keep driving their SUVs.
A retailer is both a buyer and a seller. When selling goods there may be some competition (though that is dinimishing) but when they are buying its a whole other story. If you are a supplier and Walmart is selling a majority of your inventory, you are basically owned by Walmart, since if they decided to drop your product, you'll have to close up shop.
Now a monopsonistic buyer can cancel out the effects of a monopolistic supplier, but in this case the monopsonistic buyer is also a seller itself and that screws everything up. Given the power that these retailers have it is far more likely they will come to a deal with their suppliers to keep the prices high and share the profits. Furthermore, part of this deal will be to squeeze out any smaller retailers that aren't big enough to get to the negotiating table.
Whats happening here is that the big retailers see potential competition with this online video download stuff. They are using their buying power in one area (DVD sales) to squash potential competition from Apple.
The end result will not be that DVD prices will drop. Apple will have to offer iPod movies for sale at walmart and target. Apple will also be forced to raise the price of the downloads slightly and subsidize their sales to walmart and target so that walmart/target have the lowest prices.
A monopsonistic retailer doesn't lower prices. They just raise them for everyone else.
Sometimes an app you get off the internet or something someone has attached to an email can be useful. Sometimes it might be a virus. How do you tell the difference?
Is it an OS vulnerability if I run a script that contains "rm -rf/" ? Now I'd be pretty stupid to run that script (especially as root), but if everyone in the world used unix, don't you think there would be a significant percentage of those users that would run it if it was named nude_pics.jpg.sh? Wouldn't it be useful to pop up and say to the user "This is a virus" in no uncertain terms? This requires a virus scanner to distinguish nude_pics.jpg.sh from a shell script that does something useful.
Virus scanners solve two problems: insecure OSs and ignorant users. You can secure the OS, but there will always be ignorant users.
Well, then the hardware manufacturers can make a stable open source interface that will communicate between their closed source driver and the kernel. This is exactly what nvidia does. And their drivers still suck.
The problem isn't Linux, the problem is that hardware manufacturers don't see Linux as a priority. They can release the specs for their hardware and Linux hackers will make the drivers for them. But their intellectual property is more important to them than Linux support. They could write quality closed source Linux drivers themselves. But they don't want to hire extra programmers to do this. Linux just isn't a priority.
Walmart and Target are what's called monopsonistic buyers. Which is the exactly opposite of a free market.
In a free market the consumer has the power. This is negotiation between corporations. Whatever Walmart/Target and Disney/Apple finally agree to, the consumers just have to bend over and take it. The consumer has no say whatsoever in the price of anything here. That is not a free market.
This would be especially effective in a focused campaign to burn out the fever from certain regions. Simply make it known that certain groups are now outlawed and ANY overt support will bring terrible retribution. See a giant poster of a 'marytr' on a building? If the owner doesn't live in the building give him two hours to correct the problem or you blow the building. If the owner does live in the building, assume he approves and blow it with him inside. Big demonstration for Hamas? Blow it the hell up and don't listen to any carping about who was blown up. Bonus points if you get a camera crew, they should have read the memo about the danger inherent to being near terrorists.
Slashdot Mirror
You should never come to Canada then. Around here folks are crazy. They use guns for hunting and axe handles are attached to axes that are used for chopping firewood. People don't use guns for shooting people and don't use axe handles for assaulting people. We're crrrrraaaaazzzzzyyyyy!!!
Doesn't have as much to do with the net as it does with people being violent. If the net didn't exist this guy would probably be interacting with people at the local bar and getting angry and assaulting people. If we shut down the bars then he'd go somewhere else and get angry and assault people.
I find it odd that you're arguing that people have all kinds of opportunities, but admit that "Africa is another story". You do realise that africans that are denied the opportunites that you have are people too, right?
You seem pretty quick to gloss over this, but its a major point. Most of the time speciation occurs when there is a geographic isolation. What you have to do to survive, reproduce, and care for your young is a hell of a lot different in Africa than it is in an affluent western city. Add in the geographic isolation and it will also be very rare for a person from the west to breed with a person in Africa.
We really are at a cross roads now. We can accept that with globalisation we are required to share wealth and encourage education around the world (a rising tide raises all boats). Or we can build higher walls so we can protect our hoarded wealth from people in other nations ("those mexicans are trying to take our jobs" or "those ragheads are terrorists"). It seems that right now the powers that be are working hard to build walls and restrict travel all without giving up the cheap labour available to them.
problem with that is that some people want to click on the folder and hold the button down and mouse down to a link in the folder and release the button and have it open that link. This is similar to how the menu works. But you can't have the folders behave like menus AND have them be draggable. Since a lot people expect the folders to behave like menus and its not often that you'll be reorganising your bookmarks, they chose to make the folders behave like menus.
You can still right click on the folder, select cut, then right click where you want it to go and select paste. A small inconvenience, but hopefully you are reorganising your bookmarks every day.
EXXON GREEN IS PEOPLE!!
It's actually a good investment for Google. Right now they're way over valued and they know it. So they spend that money now on solar panels, then later on, when they might not have as much money, they still have the solar panels which will lower their operating costs.
How can they be carbon negative? Wouldn't that require them to be taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere?
Solar panels have to take up a lot of area. If instead of building fields of solar panels you built one nuclear power plant and planted a whole bunch of trees around it, now that would be carbon negative.
The size of botnets are dependent on the number of clueless users out there. The number of clueless users is probably proportional to the total number of internet users. Google, Yahoo and MSs customer base is also proportional to the total number of internet users. So Google, Yahoo and MS are scaling up at the same rate as the botnets.
Besides no one would be stupid enough to attack a big corporation because a big corporation can get the FBI on the case and they might be able to track them down eventually and get the hackers extradited. They tend to attack the internet gambling sites because the sites are illegal in the US so no FBI. Now the hackers are still breaking the law, but the Costa Rican police force doesn't have the resources to go after them like the FBI does.
The problem with your subscription PC is there are all kinds of privacy issues when you have an admin poking around your machine. He has access to all your files since he is the admin. And of course people are going to go for the machine that is the cheapest which means that these admins aren't going to be paid very much (and possibly outsourced to India) and therefore won't really care about their job. There would be all kinds identity theft going on... not good at all.
Really its a little overkill to have a human admin secure your machine anyway. The Ubuntu/Debian system of having software repositories that you trust would work just as well. Just make it so that users can't execute scripts or executables anywhere under /home/ and then they can't just download and run stuff. The only way they can easily install a piece of software is if it is in one of their repositories. Then the maintainers of the repositories are the ones who decide whether or not software is safe and not the end users.
Really, the problem is that Windows relies so much on third party software to make it usable that users just get used to the idea of downloading stuff and running it. If you just break users of that habit then their systems will be much less likely to get infected.
Yeah but with wine its a little different. And older version might work with a particular piece of software while a newer version doesn't work at all. The whole of wine is a giant hack, which matches up pretty well with the original win32.
What do they call them in India?
a twig?
Well if you don't care about tabs and the huge number of extensions available, and you have no intention of ever doing anything under a non-MS OS, and you don't care about the Internet improving faster than the pace its improving now, then yeah I guess IE is fine.
But you are missing out on a lot of stuff. And installing firefox is insanely simply (I just installed it on a system today, it took less than 2 minutes) and it will keep itself up to date, so no worries there. And if you ever find yourself using a non-MS OS, lets say at a new job or on a public terminal or whatever, IE will not be available.
And then there's the problem of IE halting improvements to the web. We'd all benefit if CSS was improved from the sorry state its in currently. But its pointless to make these improvements, because MS isn't implementing them. A more advanced CSS won't work for IE users (the majority of Internet users) so web developers can't use them. If less people use IE, MS has less influence over web standards and then improvements can be made. As it stands now web standards haven't moved an inch since IE became the dominant browser.
This issue seems like its a developer issue, not a user issue. But it is a user issue because users are being denied higher quality web content because of the suckiness of IE.
Unfortunately this is a Tragedy of the Commons type of situation. If you individually switch to firefox nothing changes. Its only if the majority of web users switch that will improve the net. And even then the improvements will take years. It's like pollution. Sure its easier for you as an individual to just hop in your car and drive to work than it is to use public transit. But we're all better off if more people use public transit.
Yeah, really. I seem to recall that there used to be a setting for memory cache along with disk cache. I think the default setting was 10MB. What they should do is put it back that way and have a checkbox below that says "Use all free memory" with the default setting being off. This way if web browsing is your highest priority you can let it use all your memory to speed things up. Otherwise Firefox behaves like a decent app and only uses a set amount of memory. Then everyone is happy.
You have rent or maintain a building to store these paper records. This building can't be anywhere that's prone to floods. Then you also have ot consider the threat of fire. And you need a decent security system and maybe pay a few security guards.
And lets not forget that you need a some kind of filing system to find all the records. And people trained to use and maintain all your filing.
No matter how you store data there is going to be costs. The advantage of doing it electronically is that a search for a particular piece of information takes seconds as opposed to hours or even days with a paper filing system. Also copying stuff is a lot easier so you can keep multiple copies at different locations in case there is a flood or a fire.
Yes, you have to keep moving the data over to new media, but this costs a hell of a lot less than training new staff on use of your paper filing system. The likelihood of someone accidentally deleting a file is about the same as someone misfiling a document and the results are about the same.
You can maintain data into perpetuity just as easily electronically as on paper. And if civilization collapses, well there will be looting and fires that will destroy your paper records. Archeologists studying ancient parchments might make you think paper is durable, but for every scrap of paper that has survived over two centuries thousands have been lost. There are vast gaps in Roman history where we aren't even sure who was emperor. People were documenting stuff, but those records just didn't survive.
And who's to say that archeologists won't be able to read our DVDs? Yeah maybe after a decade they degrade to the point where our cheapo dvd drives can't read them, but there must still be evidence of 1s and 0s on there that a future archeologist can decipher. And plastic lasts a lot longer than paper.
XML isn't required. In fact most AJAX apps don't use XML because of the overhead required, as you mentioned. You can use JSON or plaintext or make up your own format.
It's not that big of a deal really. Look at how quickly can you move around in google maps. And if your document is just text it will be much quicker than that. You could buffer two pages before your current position and two pages (or more) after your current position and unless you're scrolling through extremely fast you aren't going to notice. And even if you do scroll through 5 pages a second you will just have to wait half a second for it to catch up.
Funny how things can take on a whole new meaning.
The problem with the oil sands is that its more expensive to refine, much dirtier to refine and produces more CO2 gas. I'd rather not see Canada turn into a toxic wasteland and increase CO2 emissions so that Americans can keep driving their SUVs.
A retailer is both a buyer and a seller. When selling goods there may be some competition (though that is dinimishing) but when they are buying its a whole other story. If you are a supplier and Walmart is selling a majority of your inventory, you are basically owned by Walmart, since if they decided to drop your product, you'll have to close up shop.
Now a monopsonistic buyer can cancel out the effects of a monopolistic supplier, but in this case the monopsonistic buyer is also a seller itself and that screws everything up. Given the power that these retailers have it is far more likely they will come to a deal with their suppliers to keep the prices high and share the profits. Furthermore, part of this deal will be to squeeze out any smaller retailers that aren't big enough to get to the negotiating table.
Whats happening here is that the big retailers see potential competition with this online video download stuff. They are using their buying power in one area (DVD sales) to squash potential competition from Apple.
The end result will not be that DVD prices will drop. Apple will have to offer iPod movies for sale at walmart and target. Apple will also be forced to raise the price of the downloads slightly and subsidize their sales to walmart and target so that walmart/target have the lowest prices.
A monopsonistic retailer doesn't lower prices. They just raise them for everyone else.
Sometimes an app you get off the internet or something someone has attached to an email can be useful. Sometimes it might be a virus. How do you tell the difference?
Is it an OS vulnerability if I run a script that contains "rm -rf /" ? Now I'd be pretty stupid to run that script (especially as root), but if everyone in the world used unix, don't you think there would be a significant percentage of those users that would run it if it was named nude_pics.jpg.sh? Wouldn't it be useful to pop up and say to the user "This is a virus" in no uncertain terms? This requires a virus scanner to distinguish nude_pics.jpg.sh from a shell script that does something useful.
Virus scanners solve two problems: insecure OSs and ignorant users. You can secure the OS, but there will always be ignorant users.
Well, then the hardware manufacturers can make a stable open source interface that will communicate between their closed source driver and the kernel. This is exactly what nvidia does. And their drivers still suck.
The problem isn't Linux, the problem is that hardware manufacturers don't see Linux as a priority. They can release the specs for their hardware and Linux hackers will make the drivers for them. But their intellectual property is more important to them than Linux support. They could write quality closed source Linux drivers themselves. But they don't want to hire extra programmers to do this. Linux just isn't a priority.
Walmart and Target are what's called monopsonistic buyers. Which is the exactly opposite of a free market.
In a free market the consumer has the power. This is negotiation between corporations. Whatever Walmart/Target and Disney/Apple finally agree to, the consumers just have to bend over and take it. The consumer has no say whatsoever in the price of anything here. That is not a free market.
Without products to sell the retailers are dead in the water.
Yeah! That'll teach how to be a stable democracy.