I completely agree that doctors are too quick to prescribe SSRIs. Quite often for milder cases of depression (like mine), a diet and exercise routine can work without all the risks/side effects of SSRIs. I now take 5-HTP (available at any drug store) and eat a more balanced diet and never really feel all that down anymore. Also, taking 5-HTP regularly has pretty much killed the sugar cravings I used to get all the time, so I've dropped a few pounds.
I have no doubt that for serious cases, SSRIs can be very effective, but they should be a last resort after milder treatments have failed.
how many terrorists do you know who are going to hire a lawyer to figure out a hole in an american law.
I don't think you're reallying thinking it through all the way. Laws can be useful in predicting behavior of security personel if they are assumed to follow those laws.
For instance, I imagine there was some new terrorism law that had a provision for frisking people. That law would also, naturally, have provisions to prevent misconduct on the part of the person doing the frisking. This might include areas of the body that someone is not allowed to touch. A terrorist, with access to the law, would then know where on his/her body to hide whatever he/she wanted to get past the search.
Like I said in my original post, I don't agree with the line of thinking that keeping the law secret makes us any safer, but I think that's the mindset of this administration.
I believe that in many cases, officers pull people over as a sort of sobriety check. I was pulled over at 4am once just after I got off the freeway.
They pulled me over and shined flashlights at me from both sides and asked me how fast I was going. I told them about 40mph since I remembered seeing the speed limit sign. They informed me that the speed limit was 25mph.
To that, I responded I'd be happy to go with them to check the sign 200m behind us if they'd like, but I was pretty sure they were incorrect. To this he said, "ok, you pass, have a nice night."
As long as this kind of thing is applied independant of car type or the driver's race/sex/age, I have no problems with them employing these kinds of tactics to get drunk drivers off the streets.
I think the idea behind keeping the law secret is that it would prevent a terrorist organization from analyzing it to figure out a weakness and exploit it. It's analogous to source code in that a law is essentially a script followed by civic employees. There's a reason why the word 'code' is used in both cases.
I don't agree with it, and judging by the general/. estimation of 'security through obscurity', I doubt many people here do either. But I think that's the theory behind the administration's stance on this.
FWIW, I seem to remember reading an article a few years ago about a study that correllated job satisfaction and over-all happiness of IT workers with their Meyers-Briggs classifications. IIRC, the study found that people are extremely unlikely to be happy in an IT career unless their Meyers-Briggs classification is xNxP (only the second and fourth were meaningful.)
Approximately 25% of males fall into that category while only 5% of females do.
I remember testing out their hypothesis by showing an online Meyers-Briggs test to a bunch of co-workers. The vast majority of my co-workers were INTPs, a few were INFPs and myself and another guy were ENTPs. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who enjoys working in IT and isn't xNxP.
No, I believe it...I speak 4 myself. But I still don't see any issue with checking ASCII domains first. Your internationalized domain would still work fine so long as you didn't register a domain that looks similar enough to confuse with an existing all-ASCII domain. If you did, that's tough.
Trademarks exist for a reason...to prevent confusion for consumers. You are from Canada, so answer me this: would the Canadian government grant two trademarks that were otherwise identical except for one had a 'ç' in place of a 'c'? I doubt they would.
Domains are analogous to trademarks and the primary goal should be to eliminate confusion on the part of the user. If you have a legitimate complaint (i.e. you owned your domain first or something of that nature) against the holder of the all-ASCII domain, the UDRP should be able to handle this.
Perhaps this should be enabled on a per tld basis where appropriate(i.e..com,.net,.org,.edu,.mil,.gov,.us,.uk, etc), but I still stand by my assertion.
It seems like you could pretty easily compile a mapping of foreign characters to the ASCII characters they could impersonate. Then, when a foreign url is entered, it could first be looked up with the ASCII replacements to see if a site exists. If it does, that site would be returned instead. If not, the internationalized URL would then be loaded. Results could be cached by the browser so that this check would only be needed the first time the site was loaded.
This way http://www.mïçrõft.com would bring up MS's site and the attempt to impersonate would fail. It would also have the added benefit of sending host headers to the real site which, combined with referer headers in the site's logs, could help them track down the scammers.
Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word 'literary' to describe journals, but I think my point is still valid. Libraries have, since antiquity, been just as concerned, if not moreso, with housing historical records as they are with housing artistic works. So for the head of the ALA to say what he said, he must believe that blogs have no merit in either category.
So while I'm not saying that the next Faulkner or Hemmingway will be found to be a blog author, I do believe that this era will be looked back on as a time when conventional media was corrupted by financial interests and grassroots media movements formed to fill the void. As such, I believe that some blogs will be important records for gaining historical perspective on our time. As such, they should be valuable additions to any librarian's collection.
I think your analogy of a diary is particularly good. The vast majority of diaries never amount to anything. But some diaries become historical records that are truly valuable literary pieces. Anne Frank is the obvious example of this. Another would be all the diaries that constantly show up in shows on The History Channel. No librarian would ever think twice about having one of these works in their collection. Yet they make a big fuss about a form of media which isn't really intended to be archived. Maybe they should pay attention to the deterioration of forms of media that are supposed to be archived. The latest Grisham novel doesn't stack up too well against novels from past eras.
I think blogs will be treated similarly to diaries by history. 20 years from now, we may see collections of important bloggings as eBooks, or however "real literature" is published at that time. But the vast majority of blogs will have vanished into the/dev/null, as it were.
Because the majority of TiVos recieve their feed from a cable or satellite decoding box that has only one output. You'd need a second decoding box to decode the digital signal to utilize a second TiVo tuner. And as kludgy as the channel changing mechanism is currently, adding a second decoding box would make it even worse. The only reason it works in the DirecTiVo setup is that it has both the TiVo functionality and the satellite decoding in the same box.
That's why I said "TiVo needs to figure out a way"...they need to work out the legal angles of getting their boxes to do the decoding of the cable/satellite signal.
I think TiVo users take for granted the ability to pause shows while they're watching. Even when I'm watching a recorded program, I'll pause it to use the bathroom or go make some food or anything else I feel the need to do. It's still a great feature to those who haven't become accustomed to it.
Also, maybe I'm in the minority, but I've found that TiVo hasn't killed my interest in live TV. It's just changed the way that I watch live TV. Instead of melting down the remote searching for 2-3 minute snippets of something to watch on other channels while avoiding the commercials on the channel I'm watching, I simply pick out two shows to watch (I have DirecTiVo) and switch back and forth skipping the commercials for both.
If anything, TiVo needs to figure out a way to get 2 tuner support into its regular line of DVRs. People who've never used a DirecTiVo don't understand just how powerful that second tuner really is. Not only that, it's a feature that can be easily sold to customers without even seeing it in action. Just have some husband saying he doesn't miss his favorite show because his wife's show is on. Or some woman saying she can still watch the rose parade despite the fact that her boyfriend's bowl games are on at the same time.
...you might as well have been studying Old English.
Linguistics, but I'll give you points for being close.
The problem I have with Java is that it really IMO, doesn't have any specialty.
Ok, so what would you suggest for a large-scale, server-side programming environment. PHP/Perl just aren't able to allow you to tackle the complexity that Java allows..NET is still unproven, but might eventually prove to be a viable alternative on Windows servers (which I still just don't feel comfortable using in a production environment.) Like it or not, J2EE works really well in this context. There are so many frameworks and tools that are easy to integrate that building complex application logic becomes quite easy. For example, I just don't see how you'd easily emulate the functionality of something like the Spring Framework as an add-on library to C++. Don't get me wrong, it could be done, but it wouldn't be nearly as easy as it is in J2EE.
And before you pigeon-hole me as being a Java-only kind of programmer, I should tell you that I did plenty of programming in C while in college and I've had jobs where I programmed primarily in C++ and I'm fluent in Perl and PHP since I use them to program sites at hosting providers (Java and J2EE just don't work in a shared context like the one provided by most webhosting providers.) I like Java because I enjoy programming in it more than any other environment. It takes care of all the mundane details well leaving me to only have to worry about the logic I'm implementing. The only other language that comes close is Python, but it's really hard to find work as a Python programmer.
Wow...you know nothing about Java, do you? I'd be willing to bet that you've never done any significant development in Java. As others have said, there's plenty of valid critiques of Java to be made, and you've made none of them.
People hate Java because it's a language that was born of an advertising campaign and not a specific need in the technology field.
This couldn't be more wrong. Java was created as a means for allowing platform-independant application development. Sun was doing fine in the server arena, but wasn't able to break into the desktop market because of the inertia that Microsoft had when it came to developers. We (developers) built software that ran on their (users) computers, and that was DOS/Windows. When it launched, Sun marketed it like crazy for obvious reasons, but that doesn't in any way mean that it wasn't addressing a specific technical need.
People hate Java because the technology has been caught in the middle of several commercial interests and platform wars, which has crippled the promise of Java's stability and reliability.
No, people hate applets because of Microsoft's successful resonse to Sun's attempt to position its product between developers and MSIE. Microsoft's non-compliant JVM and the resultant incompatabilities essentially killed applets (which weren't the greatest idea to begin with), but they did nothing to kill Java's prospects as a whole.
People hate Java because it's a lie. Java promised a new generation language that was to be cross-platform compatible, but it's actually less cross-platform compatible than C/C++.
Really? I find that I rarely have to make *any* modifications to the wars I develop for them to be deployed on whatever platform I'm switching to. Far more often, the modifications I have to make are due to deploying on a different AppServer. When I develop desktop applications, it's trivial to make them work on any platform supported by Java. Oh, and I don't have a single #ifdef in my code. Since I can't think of a single type of program that would be difficult to program in way that the jar file would run unedited on any of Java's supported platforms, would you mind providing an example?
People hate Java because it's slow as molasses.
Umm...1999 called, they'd like their argument back. Seriously though, for most of the desktop apps I write, users have no idea that its written in Java. Swing is a bit slower than native widget calls since it renders each component itself. But Java GUI != Swing. SWT apps are almost indistinguishable from native apps speed wise. People who judge SWT by Eclipse's performance ignore the fact that Eclipse is a huge application which introduces a ton of bloat above the SWT level.
In the server arena, there's just nothing better suited for building large, enterprise-scale web applications..NET may emerge as a worthy competitor, but all the scripting languages are poor substitutes that perform significantly slower than Java.
Need an example? Take a look at Puzzle Pirates, a very clever multiplayer online game, that because the developers were foolish enough to use Java, runs ten times slower than it should and is painful to use as a result.
Ooh...a single example of a (probably) badly-coded java game. That really shows that Java is slow. I've got Azureus running right now and it doesn't seem slow. I must have just proved that Java is fast, right?
People hate Java because it sucks. I'm sorry to those of you who are Java programmers and are finding less jobs, but no sane company wants to use this technology when there are other systems available that offer better performance, reliability and longevity.
Ok, name one. Make the argument that it is better suited for a certain purpose than Java. Aside from game programming and perhaps AI or number crunching type applications, I can't see how you'd be all that successful. And if you want to believe th
Is it possible that this information could somehow be abused?
Unless uses of the information are clearly enumerated and limitted by law to only those uses, it will absolutely be abused.
I'll give you an example. Here in CA, like many states, our licenses have mag strips on the back that contain all the information printed on the front. A local bar began using card readers to check that people were 21 or older. They did it under the pretense that it was harder to get by with a fake ID. What they didn't tell people (and was leaked to the media by a bar employee) was that the card readers were also gathering name, age, sex, home address, and a few other pieces of information. This was all being sent to a database so that the bar could better target its advertising. From what I heard, the only reason they stopped was due to public outrage, not any law prohibiting what they were doing.
So we do need to be paranoid until it is explicitly stated *everything* that will be done with the information.
I think you're being a bit short-sighted. There are gauges on the dash that, while not life/death critical, are very important. What if the system crashed and you ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere? What if you weren't able to see that you had an oil leak and you ruined your engine.
Also, you'd have to take a lot of non-obvious considerations when attempting a project like this. For instance, one huge advantage to physical gauges is their ability to be seen in any lighting condition with a simple on/off backlight. With and LCD, you'd have to monitor not only whether the headlights were on, but also the the intensity of the sunlight so that you could adjust the brightness accordingly. It would suck to not be able to drive your car at night because the LCD is too bright for your eyes to adjust to the darker conditions outside the car.
These are just issues off the top of my head. Anyone attempting a project like this is sure to run into a ton of other considerations.
Umm...I don't give a rats ass about the searches (Google works fine for me), but the fact that they've chosen to be mostly standards compliant on one of their significant projects could signal their intent to make IE more standards compliant. If you've ever tried to create an XHTML/CSS website that's more complex than just swapping in new colors/fonts, you've also realized how annoying it is that you basically have to use hacks or separate stylesheets to get it to work correctly in IE. Them moving their browser platform closer to standards compliance would make the life of a web designer significantly easier.
Re:I love 'em, but they've missed the boat.
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Ok, if this is the feature comparison page that you were mentioning, I see nothing in it that would lead me to want to give up my second tuner. Having 2 tuners is even more of an evolutionary step forward than the original TiVo features (pause, rewind, easy record) were. Time-shifting is one thing, but being able to watch competing programs in a reasonably live fashion is far more useful to me. This becomes especially important when more than one person watches TV. There aren't arguments over who's season passes get ranked higher since we rarely have 3 shows in the same timeslot.
So before you label DirecTiVo the "ugly step-child", you should consider it to be superior to the regular TiVo. Something to the effect of, "Yes the regular TiVos have online scheduling, burning to DVD and the home media option, but they're more expensive and all but useless without their second tuner."
Exactly...truly intelligent people are able to grasp the context in which they're communicating. Whereas it's completely appropriate for someone to send an AIM message of "waddup dog?" to one of their friends, it's not appropriate to send to a boss. You need to consider the context of your situation in determining what kind of speech/text to use. I'd argue that it's not necessary to carefully proofread a/. post, but I make damn sure to proof all of my emails and documents at work.
This is what bothered me about the whole "Ebonics" debate (I attended middle school in Oakland around the time of that fiasco.) The way it was handled, it made it seem like Ebonics was a legitimate form of communication in contexts where it clearly wasn't. If the distinction had been clear that it absolutely wasn't appropriate in certain contexts (work, conversations with strangers, bureaucracracies, etc), I would have had no problem with them recognizing it as a valid form of communication.
There's no doubt that college degrees can be worthwhile and that those who obtain them are often intelligent and productive members of society. However there's a similar sentiment amongst college graduates towards those who do not have a degree. The idea that a degree somehow signifies superiority over those who don't have one is equally false.
College can be an important part of the maturation process. Immersing yourself in an environment filled with other intelligent people makes learning significantly easier. But it's also possible to glide through college without learning or maturing much at all. And it's also possible for people to mature and learn outside of a college environment.
In short, it matters what kind of person you are, not how you became that person.
Nonsense...the real pre-requisite for a German vacation is to burn off the top 4-6 layers of skin. While the Japanese require photographic evidence to prove that they actually went on vacation, Germans need merely show a severe sunburn to receive credit. Americans need some story about how rude some other culture was when they asked if anyone spoke "American" and Australians need only be gone for 5-10 years and return with somewhere in excess of 25 passport stamps. Every culture has their standard of proof.
Getting back to Germans, war (flamethrowers, bombs and the like) was just their initial attempt to achieve their standard burning. They've since figured out that spending copious amounts of time lying on a beach without using sunscreen accomplishes this in a much more controlled fashion while making the rest of the world slightly less annoyed at them. It would be considerably less were it not for their strict adherance to the "Speedo" dresscode.
I think these days you need to differentiate between web-app and html-based web app. Javascript makes traditional form-based web applications kludgy and awkward. But if you look at things like XUL, the situation changes a bit. While XUL is currently a pain to develop and there's currently no support for XUL outside of Moz, it's still a good indication of what kinds of apps can be programmed in it. While I wouldn't suggest it currently, with the advent of faster network connections, I see no reason why the application that users install on their computer has to be anything more than an XUL rendering client. The entire browser implementation could be served from an application service provider.
There's also a number of projects that, while not quite ready for primetime, look like they will eventually be able to deliver a mostly seamless user experience while still being web-based (request/response based such that they can be hosted on any of the application server environments.) And any of the multitudes of XML bindings for AWT/Swing (LuxorXML, XUI, etc...there's a ton of them) can be easily adapted to facilitate web applications.
I'm currently working on a project (which I won't call promising until it's past alpha) that is essentially a web-browser that uses SWT as its rendering engine and JavaScript as the glue that holds everything together. Even with my early versions, I can already create a user experience that is very difficult to differentiate from typical application. There's a number of types of applications for which this kind of thing isn't appropriate (Photoshop, 3-D games, music software, etc), but anything that relies heavily on the standard widget toolkits (word processor, IM client, p2p app, etc), shouldn't be too hard to adapt as a web application.
Wouldn't BitTorrent go a long way towards making the distribution process more secure? Each of the current mirrors could asked to seed instead so that the central Moz servers wouldn't be any more taxed than they are now.
The "more secure" part would come from the fact that every piece of the distributed file would be checked automatically against its SHA1 hash (part of the BitTorrent protocol). So given that everyone would be getting their installer from multiple mirror sites (and other downloaders as well), it would be harder for any one person to do anything malicious.
The "small installer" you mention could be a simple, self-contained bit-torrent client with the.torrent link hard-coded into it.
then clearly the problem lies with this 3rd party app.
As others have pointed out, the exe installer is a 7-Zip self extracting archive, so it is absolutely not clear that the problem lies with that 3rd-party app. However, as others posting to the blog in question, the errors the blogger got were consistant with a bug in McAfee VirusScan. So the download was most likely corrupted by VirusScan which caused 7-Zip to complain when it attempted to extract itself. It's a bit unfair to expect 7-Zip (or any program) to behave correctly or even fail nicely when parts of the executable code have been removed or changed.
He automatically figured it was FireFox's fault rather than suspect any of the proprietary software he had on his system. This pretty much proves he was biased to begin with.
You're lucky...you don't have non-tech-aware friends. I've taken every precaution with my email address. I have my own domain, so I don't get SPAM from dictionary attacks like you do at large providers. I've only given it to close friends and relatives and everytime I do, I give the lecture on never putting my address in the CC field (it's either *only* to me or my address goes in the BCC field).
Yet occasionally, I get some virus scare, joke or the like forwarded to me and 50 other people and I know that at least a few of those people are going to forward it on to their friends and eventually, it will make it into the wrong mailbox where it will be subjected to some perl regexp and added to a list.
So now my 5-year-old inbox gets > 30 SPAM messages a day. This was a huge problem until I enabled Thunderbird's "Junk Mail" features...now 1 or 2 get through each day and I can't even remember the last time I got a false positive (and I do check the SPAM folder...it doesn't take more than a couple of minutes to scan 200-300 SPAM messages for false positives.) It's also easier on my personal realationships since I no longer have to give paranoid lectures to my friends about the trust I'm placing in them by giving them my email address.
What you're talking about is like teaching abstinence in school. Sure...it works in theory, but, in reality, things go wrong and you need to have a more realistic plan.
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I completely agree that doctors are too quick to prescribe SSRIs. Quite often for milder cases of depression (like mine), a diet and exercise routine can work without all the risks/side effects of SSRIs. I now take 5-HTP (available at any drug store) and eat a more balanced diet and never really feel all that down anymore. Also, taking 5-HTP regularly has pretty much killed the sugar cravings I used to get all the time, so I've dropped a few pounds.
I have no doubt that for serious cases, SSRIs can be very effective, but they should be a last resort after milder treatments have failed.
how many terrorists do you know who are going to hire a lawyer to figure out a hole in an american law.
I don't think you're reallying thinking it through all the way. Laws can be useful in predicting behavior of security personel if they are assumed to follow those laws.
For instance, I imagine there was some new terrorism law that had a provision for frisking people. That law would also, naturally, have provisions to prevent misconduct on the part of the person doing the frisking. This might include areas of the body that someone is not allowed to touch. A terrorist, with access to the law, would then know where on his/her body to hide whatever he/she wanted to get past the search.
Like I said in my original post, I don't agree with the line of thinking that keeping the law secret makes us any safer, but I think that's the mindset of this administration.
I believe that in many cases, officers pull people over as a sort of sobriety check. I was pulled over at 4am once just after I got off the freeway.
They pulled me over and shined flashlights at me from both sides and asked me how fast I was going. I told them about 40mph since I remembered seeing the speed limit sign. They informed me that the speed limit was 25mph.
To that, I responded I'd be happy to go with them to check the sign 200m behind us if they'd like, but I was pretty sure they were incorrect. To this he said, "ok, you pass, have a nice night."
As long as this kind of thing is applied independant of car type or the driver's race/sex/age, I have no problems with them employing these kinds of tactics to get drunk drivers off the streets.
I think the idea behind keeping the law secret is that it would prevent a terrorist organization from analyzing it to figure out a weakness and exploit it. It's analogous to source code in that a law is essentially a script followed by civic employees. There's a reason why the word 'code' is used in both cases.
/. estimation of 'security through obscurity', I doubt many people here do either. But I think that's the theory behind the administration's stance on this.
I don't agree with it, and judging by the general
FWIW, I seem to remember reading an article a few years ago about a study that correllated job satisfaction and over-all happiness of IT workers with their Meyers-Briggs classifications. IIRC, the study found that people are extremely unlikely to be happy in an IT career unless their Meyers-Briggs classification is xNxP (only the second and fourth were meaningful.)
Approximately 25% of males fall into that category while only 5% of females do.
I remember testing out their hypothesis by showing an online Meyers-Briggs test to a bunch of co-workers. The vast majority of my co-workers were INTPs, a few were INFPs and myself and another guy were ENTPs. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who enjoys working in IT and isn't xNxP.
No, I believe it...I speak 4 myself. But I still don't see any issue with checking ASCII domains first. Your internationalized domain would still work fine so long as you didn't register a domain that looks similar enough to confuse with an existing all-ASCII domain. If you did, that's tough.
.com, .net, .org, .edu, .mil, .gov, .us, .uk, etc), but I still stand by my assertion.
Trademarks exist for a reason...to prevent confusion for consumers. You are from Canada, so answer me this: would the Canadian government grant two trademarks that were otherwise identical except for one had a 'ç' in place of a 'c'? I doubt they would.
Domains are analogous to trademarks and the primary goal should be to eliminate confusion on the part of the user. If you have a legitimate complaint (i.e. you owned your domain first or something of that nature) against the holder of the all-ASCII domain, the UDRP should be able to handle this.
Perhaps this should be enabled on a per tld basis where appropriate(i.e.
It seems like you could pretty easily compile a mapping of foreign characters to the ASCII characters they could impersonate. Then, when a foreign url is entered, it could first be looked up with the ASCII replacements to see if a site exists. If it does, that site would be returned instead. If not, the internationalized URL would then be loaded. Results could be cached by the browser so that this check would only be needed the first time the site was loaded.
This way http://www.mïçrõft.com would bring up MS's site and the attempt to impersonate would fail. It would also have the added benefit of sending host headers to the real site which, combined with referer headers in the site's logs, could help them track down the scammers.
Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word 'literary' to describe journals, but I think my point is still valid. Libraries have, since antiquity, been just as concerned, if not moreso, with housing historical records as they are with housing artistic works. So for the head of the ALA to say what he said, he must believe that blogs have no merit in either category.
So while I'm not saying that the next Faulkner or Hemmingway will be found to be a blog author, I do believe that this era will be looked back on as a time when conventional media was corrupted by financial interests and grassroots media movements formed to fill the void. As such, I believe that some blogs will be important records for gaining historical perspective on our time. As such, they should be valuable additions to any librarian's collection.
I think your analogy of a diary is particularly good. The vast majority of diaries never amount to anything. But some diaries become historical records that are truly valuable literary pieces. Anne Frank is the obvious example of this. Another would be all the diaries that constantly show up in shows on The History Channel. No librarian would ever think twice about having one of these works in their collection. Yet they make a big fuss about a form of media which isn't really intended to be archived. Maybe they should pay attention to the deterioration of forms of media that are supposed to be archived. The latest Grisham novel doesn't stack up too well against novels from past eras.
/dev/null, as it were.
I think blogs will be treated similarly to diaries by history. 20 years from now, we may see collections of important bloggings as eBooks, or however "real literature" is published at that time. But the vast majority of blogs will have vanished into the
Why weren't two tuners to begin with?
Because the majority of TiVos recieve their feed from a cable or satellite decoding box that has only one output. You'd need a second decoding box to decode the digital signal to utilize a second TiVo tuner. And as kludgy as the channel changing mechanism is currently, adding a second decoding box would make it even worse. The only reason it works in the DirecTiVo setup is that it has both the TiVo functionality and the satellite decoding in the same box.
That's why I said "TiVo needs to figure out a way"...they need to work out the legal angles of getting their boxes to do the decoding of the cable/satellite signal.
I think TiVo users take for granted the ability to pause shows while they're watching. Even when I'm watching a recorded program, I'll pause it to use the bathroom or go make some food or anything else I feel the need to do. It's still a great feature to those who haven't become accustomed to it.
Also, maybe I'm in the minority, but I've found that TiVo hasn't killed my interest in live TV. It's just changed the way that I watch live TV. Instead of melting down the remote searching for 2-3 minute snippets of something to watch on other channels while avoiding the commercials on the channel I'm watching, I simply pick out two shows to watch (I have DirecTiVo) and switch back and forth skipping the commercials for both.
If anything, TiVo needs to figure out a way to get 2 tuner support into its regular line of DVRs. People who've never used a DirecTiVo don't understand just how powerful that second tuner really is. Not only that, it's a feature that can be easily sold to customers without even seeing it in action. Just have some husband saying he doesn't miss his favorite show because his wife's show is on. Or some woman saying she can still watch the rose parade despite the fact that her boyfriend's bowl games are on at the same time.
...you might as well have been studying Old English.
.NET is still unproven, but might eventually prove to be a viable alternative on Windows servers (which I still just don't feel comfortable using in a production environment.) Like it or not, J2EE works really well in this context. There are so many frameworks and tools that are easy to integrate that building complex application logic becomes quite easy. For example, I just don't see how you'd easily emulate the functionality of something like the Spring Framework as an add-on library to C++. Don't get me wrong, it could be done, but it wouldn't be nearly as easy as it is in J2EE.
Linguistics, but I'll give you points for being close.
The problem I have with Java is that it really IMO, doesn't have any specialty.
Ok, so what would you suggest for a large-scale, server-side programming environment. PHP/Perl just aren't able to allow you to tackle the complexity that Java allows.
And before you pigeon-hole me as being a Java-only kind of programmer, I should tell you that I did plenty of programming in C while in college and I've had jobs where I programmed primarily in C++ and I'm fluent in Perl and PHP since I use them to program sites at hosting providers (Java and J2EE just don't work in a shared context like the one provided by most webhosting providers.) I like Java because I enjoy programming in it more than any other environment. It takes care of all the mundane details well leaving me to only have to worry about the logic I'm implementing. The only other language that comes close is Python, but it's really hard to find work as a Python programmer.
Wow...you know nothing about Java, do you? I'd be willing to bet that you've never done any significant development in Java. As others have said, there's plenty of valid critiques of Java to be made, and you've made none of them.
.NET may emerge as a worthy competitor, but all the scripting languages are poor substitutes that perform significantly slower than Java.
People hate Java because it's a language that was born of an advertising campaign and not a specific need in the technology field.
This couldn't be more wrong. Java was created as a means for allowing platform-independant application development. Sun was doing fine in the server arena, but wasn't able to break into the desktop market because of the inertia that Microsoft had when it came to developers. We (developers) built software that ran on their (users) computers, and that was DOS/Windows. When it launched, Sun marketed it like crazy for obvious reasons, but that doesn't in any way mean that it wasn't addressing a specific technical need.
People hate Java because the technology has been caught in the middle of several commercial interests and platform wars, which has crippled the promise of Java's stability and reliability.
No, people hate applets because of Microsoft's successful resonse to Sun's attempt to position its product between developers and MSIE. Microsoft's non-compliant JVM and the resultant incompatabilities essentially killed applets (which weren't the greatest idea to begin with), but they did nothing to kill Java's prospects as a whole.
People hate Java because it's a lie. Java promised a new generation language that was to be cross-platform compatible, but it's actually less cross-platform compatible than C/C++.
Really? I find that I rarely have to make *any* modifications to the wars I develop for them to be deployed on whatever platform I'm switching to. Far more often, the modifications I have to make are due to deploying on a different AppServer. When I develop desktop applications, it's trivial to make them work on any platform supported by Java. Oh, and I don't have a single #ifdef in my code. Since I can't think of a single type of program that would be difficult to program in way that the jar file would run unedited on any of Java's supported platforms, would you mind providing an example?
People hate Java because it's slow as molasses.
Umm...1999 called, they'd like their argument back. Seriously though, for most of the desktop apps I write, users have no idea that its written in Java. Swing is a bit slower than native widget calls since it renders each component itself. But Java GUI != Swing. SWT apps are almost indistinguishable from native apps speed wise. People who judge SWT by Eclipse's performance ignore the fact that Eclipse is a huge application which introduces a ton of bloat above the SWT level.
In the server arena, there's just nothing better suited for building large, enterprise-scale web applications.
Need an example? Take a look at Puzzle Pirates, a very clever multiplayer online game, that because the developers were foolish enough to use Java, runs ten times slower than it should and is painful to use as a result.
Ooh...a single example of a (probably) badly-coded java game. That really shows that Java is slow. I've got Azureus running right now and it doesn't seem slow. I must have just proved that Java is fast, right?
People hate Java because it sucks. I'm sorry to those of you who are Java programmers and are finding less jobs, but no sane company wants to use this technology when there are other systems available that offer better performance, reliability and longevity.
Ok, name one. Make the argument that it is better suited for a certain purpose than Java. Aside from game programming and perhaps AI or number crunching type applications, I can't see how you'd be all that successful. And if you want to believe th
"...trying to make water not wet."
Ummm...the definition of 'wet' specifically mentions liquids. Water ceases to be a liquid at 32 degrees fahrenheit.
Comming Soon: Frozen DVDs!
Is it possible that this information could somehow be abused?
Unless uses of the information are clearly enumerated and limitted by law to only those uses, it will absolutely be abused.
I'll give you an example. Here in CA, like many states, our licenses have mag strips on the back that contain all the information printed on the front. A local bar began using card readers to check that people were 21 or older. They did it under the pretense that it was harder to get by with a fake ID. What they didn't tell people (and was leaked to the media by a bar employee) was that the card readers were also gathering name, age, sex, home address, and a few other pieces of information. This was all being sent to a database so that the bar could better target its advertising. From what I heard, the only reason they stopped was due to public outrage, not any law prohibiting what they were doing.
So we do need to be paranoid until it is explicitly stated *everything* that will be done with the information.
I think you're being a bit short-sighted. There are gauges on the dash that, while not life/death critical, are very important. What if the system crashed and you ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere? What if you weren't able to see that you had an oil leak and you ruined your engine.
Also, you'd have to take a lot of non-obvious considerations when attempting a project like this. For instance, one huge advantage to physical gauges is their ability to be seen in any lighting condition with a simple on/off backlight. With and LCD, you'd have to monitor not only whether the headlights were on, but also the the intensity of the sunlight so that you could adjust the brightness accordingly. It would suck to not be able to drive your car at night because the LCD is too bright for your eyes to adjust to the darker conditions outside the car.
These are just issues off the top of my head. Anyone attempting a project like this is sure to run into a ton of other considerations.
Umm...I don't give a rats ass about the searches (Google works fine for me), but the fact that they've chosen to be mostly standards compliant on one of their significant projects could signal their intent to make IE more standards compliant. If you've ever tried to create an XHTML/CSS website that's more complex than just swapping in new colors/fonts, you've also realized how annoying it is that you basically have to use hacks or separate stylesheets to get it to work correctly in IE. Them moving their browser platform closer to standards compliance would make the life of a web designer significantly easier.
Ok, if this is the feature comparison page that you were mentioning, I see nothing in it that would lead me to want to give up my second tuner. Having 2 tuners is even more of an evolutionary step forward than the original TiVo features (pause, rewind, easy record) were. Time-shifting is one thing, but being able to watch competing programs in a reasonably live fashion is far more useful to me. This becomes especially important when more than one person watches TV. There aren't arguments over who's season passes get ranked higher since we rarely have 3 shows in the same timeslot.
So before you label DirecTiVo the "ugly step-child", you should consider it to be superior to the regular TiVo. Something to the effect of, "Yes the regular TiVos have online scheduling, burning to DVD and the home media option, but they're more expensive and all but useless without their second tuner."
Exactly...truly intelligent people are able to grasp the context in which they're communicating. Whereas it's completely appropriate for someone to send an AIM message of "waddup dog?" to one of their friends, it's not appropriate to send to a boss. You need to consider the context of your situation in determining what kind of speech/text to use. I'd argue that it's not necessary to carefully proofread a /. post, but I make damn sure to proof all of my emails and documents at work.
This is what bothered me about the whole "Ebonics" debate (I attended middle school in Oakland around the time of that fiasco.) The way it was handled, it made it seem like Ebonics was a legitimate form of communication in contexts where it clearly wasn't. If the distinction had been clear that it absolutely wasn't appropriate in certain contexts (work, conversations with strangers, bureaucracracies, etc), I would have had no problem with them recognizing it as a valid form of communication.
There's no doubt that college degrees can be worthwhile and that those who obtain them are often intelligent and productive members of society. However there's a similar sentiment amongst college graduates towards those who do not have a degree. The idea that a degree somehow signifies superiority over those who don't have one is equally false.
College can be an important part of the maturation process. Immersing yourself in an environment filled with other intelligent people makes learning significantly easier. But it's also possible to glide through college without learning or maturing much at all. And it's also possible for people to mature and learn outside of a college environment.
In short, it matters what kind of person you are, not how you became that person.
Nonsense...the real pre-requisite for a German vacation is to burn off the top 4-6 layers of skin. While the Japanese require photographic evidence to prove that they actually went on vacation, Germans need merely show a severe sunburn to receive credit. Americans need some story about how rude some other culture was when they asked if anyone spoke "American" and Australians need only be gone for 5-10 years and return with somewhere in excess of 25 passport stamps. Every culture has their standard of proof.
Getting back to Germans, war (flamethrowers, bombs and the like) was just their initial attempt to achieve their standard burning. They've since figured out that spending copious amounts of time lying on a beach without using sunscreen accomplishes this in a much more controlled fashion while making the rest of the world slightly less annoyed at them. It would be considerably less were it not for their strict adherance to the "Speedo" dresscode.
I think these days you need to differentiate between web-app and html-based web app. Javascript makes traditional form-based web applications kludgy and awkward. But if you look at things like XUL, the situation changes a bit. While XUL is currently a pain to develop and there's currently no support for XUL outside of Moz, it's still a good indication of what kinds of apps can be programmed in it. While I wouldn't suggest it currently, with the advent of faster network connections, I see no reason why the application that users install on their computer has to be anything more than an XUL rendering client. The entire browser implementation could be served from an application service provider.
There's also a number of projects that, while not quite ready for primetime, look like they will eventually be able to deliver a mostly seamless user experience while still being web-based (request/response based such that they can be hosted on any of the application server environments.) And any of the multitudes of XML bindings for AWT/Swing (LuxorXML, XUI, etc...there's a ton of them) can be easily adapted to facilitate web applications.
I'm currently working on a project (which I won't call promising until it's past alpha) that is essentially a web-browser that uses SWT as its rendering engine and JavaScript as the glue that holds everything together. Even with my early versions, I can already create a user experience that is very difficult to differentiate from typical application. There's a number of types of applications for which this kind of thing isn't appropriate (Photoshop, 3-D games, music software, etc), but anything that relies heavily on the standard widget toolkits (word processor, IM client, p2p app, etc), shouldn't be too hard to adapt as a web application.
Wouldn't BitTorrent go a long way towards making the distribution process more secure? Each of the current mirrors could asked to seed instead so that the central Moz servers wouldn't be any more taxed than they are now.
.torrent link hard-coded into it.
The "more secure" part would come from the fact that every piece of the distributed file would be checked automatically against its SHA1 hash (part of the BitTorrent protocol). So given that everyone would be getting their installer from multiple mirror sites (and other downloaders as well), it would be harder for any one person to do anything malicious.
The "small installer" you mention could be a simple, self-contained bit-torrent client with the
then clearly the problem lies with this 3rd party app.
As others have pointed out, the exe installer is a 7-Zip self extracting archive, so it is absolutely not clear that the problem lies with that 3rd-party app. However, as others posting to the blog in question, the errors the blogger got were consistant with a bug in McAfee VirusScan. So the download was most likely corrupted by VirusScan which caused 7-Zip to complain when it attempted to extract itself. It's a bit unfair to expect 7-Zip (or any program) to behave correctly or even fail nicely when parts of the executable code have been removed or changed.
He automatically figured it was FireFox's fault rather than suspect any of the proprietary software he had on his system. This pretty much proves he was biased to begin with.
You're lucky...you don't have non-tech-aware friends. I've taken every precaution with my email address. I have my own domain, so I don't get SPAM from dictionary attacks like you do at large providers. I've only given it to close friends and relatives and everytime I do, I give the lecture on never putting my address in the CC field (it's either *only* to me or my address goes in the BCC field).
Yet occasionally, I get some virus scare, joke or the like forwarded to me and 50 other people and I know that at least a few of those people are going to forward it on to their friends and eventually, it will make it into the wrong mailbox where it will be subjected to some perl regexp and added to a list.
So now my 5-year-old inbox gets > 30 SPAM messages a day. This was a huge problem until I enabled Thunderbird's "Junk Mail" features...now 1 or 2 get through each day and I can't even remember the last time I got a false positive (and I do check the SPAM folder...it doesn't take more than a couple of minutes to scan 200-300 SPAM messages for false positives.) It's also easier on my personal realationships since I no longer have to give paranoid lectures to my friends about the trust I'm placing in them by giving them my email address.
What you're talking about is like teaching abstinence in school. Sure...it works in theory, but, in reality, things go wrong and you need to have a more realistic plan.