I agree, to learn to program you need the compiler and a text editor. You are learning the concepts of programming, you don't need to learn programming projects, auto-complete of the API, etc. This type of programming is about implementing stuff from scratch, your own linked list implementation rather than an API based one. A folder full of 100 different code learning steps, etc.
And that day down the line, when you're SSHed into that remote computer, and you need to write a program there and then, is when these learned skills shine through, and you manage to write something using nano that saves the day.
Sometimes less is more. X11 running twm, with emacs, vi, or maybe a more friendly text editor (they're learning to program, and learning vi before that might be rather offputting), and some terminals for compiling, testing, etc. No distractions.
Of course, I ended up using Eclipse daily, and do appreciate all the benefits it brings. Very few of which would have benefitted a beginner, who has to see those compilation errors happen and fix syntax errors manually, rather than letting the IDE do that.
Damn right. Also it usually has its own bag which weighs a pound or two, so you are carrying two bags around with you - laptop and everyday/suitcase/luggage/etc. Also laptop bags always spin around and piss you off at annoying times. You can just sling the EeePC in the other bag - it comes with a protective sleeve - and it's there, if you need it, but you don't resent carrying it around if you don't actually use it.
ARM can get better but there's a reason Intel sold it. Intel has never owned ARM.
Intel acquired an ARM licence when it acquired Digital back in the day. Digital's StrongARM was revamped into XScale, but compared to ARM11 it isn't really a great design, nor should be it be considered a shining example of what ARM offers.
ARM is moving into multi-core capabilities, and more powerful CPUs, with the ARM Cortex A9 (and the older A8 which had some issues, or you could just use an ARM11 MPCore I guess - that's what nVidia use in the AXP2500). ARM is very competitive when coupled with offload engines (graphics, video, etc), and uses far less power than any x86 that Intel will release in the next few years. If the target usage of these small cheap devices matched the capabilities then you've saved yourself $50 and doubled your battery life by using ARM. It's a no-brainer.
Browsers on the ARM platform? Seen Safari on the iPhone? That's only a 400MHz ARM11, yet is smooth and fully featured. The Nokia N8x0 series also have a full browser based upon Gecko.
The odd thing is that it is a POWER instruction set CPU. Whilst I know that Apple are flexible, it seems an odd move.
Far more likely is that Apple want them to design a 2GHz dual-core ARM compatible CPU. Depending on the design of their current CPUs, it could be possible that this work could just affect a relatively small part of the overall CPU (although still a lot of work).
Then again, why not move to using POWER in Apple's mobile devices instead of ARM... hmm.
It's less than 2% of Apple's savings, and I believe the company already has clients and sales so it could just be a good investment in the long term.
Oh but the mistake there was starting with Oracle when it wasn't needed. Of course it may not be worth upgrading to the next version when it comes along down the line, but once paid for, it's usually a sunk cost so you might as well use it.
Yeah, I like PostgreSQL too, use it for all my personal projects. Stuck with Oracle at work though but it's not so bad.
And back in 2000 you'd have had the option of MySQL3 (in which I spent a lot of time, ugh in retrospect) as the free DB. PostgreSQL wasn't well known.
I guess you could say that the $10b database market didn't grow to that amount because of open source, but only if you're counting a loss of revenue per website hosted on MySQL (or each MySQL installation). However those websites wouldn't have existed if they had to pay for MySQL, or they would have used plain text databases, or some other technology.
A company moving from Oracle to MySQL should have its head examined.
On the other hand without MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc, Oracle and MSSQLServer could have far higher licensing costs that aren't actually a fair reflection of their value to the market. Oracle is still a stupidly high price, but there is OracleXE now.
It's survival of the fittest. Database costs were so high in the past, people felt it necessary to write alternatives, and over time those alternatives improved to be competitive because there was such a demand. This means that the market was never $10b in value, only in price for a short time until the unsustainable price created competition that brought the market down to its true value.
Oh, i'm wittering here now and someone who's studied finance and business will shoot me down anyway.
Ah, I remember the hell of school textbook carrying. And the days you had sports as well. Lockers weren't much use if you had to carry it all home for homework too. Generally though we can't lug such huge bags onto the tube daily, so space restrictions do apply!
The abacus users had to walk to school, uphill both ways in the burning sun, towing a sizeable chunk of pyramid behind them!
I'd rather not lug an 8lb 17" laptop around with me on the tube everyday. Luckily I have a computer at work, so I don't need to do this. Maybe if you are a salesman, or a consultant that works on client premises, a large screen laptop is good.
But for other uses, casual uses especially, a small, light, chuck-it-in-the-bag device is far more appealing. Oh, it's cheap as well, so it won't be too precious.
Different people have different needs. You clearly need that 17" laptop on the train (if you get a seat, or have the space to open the lid because the seat in front is too close). My 12" iBook is a good size for my mobile needs, but most of what I use a 7" or 9" device would suffice.
I think that this is where they are heading, especially seeing as the Intel atom cpu they are scheduled to switch to has cell network capability built in. No it doesn't. Where did you read this?
I'm hoping that the next EeePC 9xx with Atom will have an ExpressCard/54 slot (even if it sticks out a bit when populated) for things like 3.5G modems and so on.
That £329 includes VAT. Take that off, and it's £280, which is $560 before adjusting for UK markup, so probably $499 US.
And the point is that it is small but nippy. The SSD provides the latter. I could throw this into my bag and use it on the train without needing to carry a dedicated laptop case, and a massive overall weight and volume difference.
If you don't need a small system, then it isn't for you.
Whilst using the Win2000 theme does save space, it looks dog ugly. However there are loads of theme hacks for XP, so there must be a clean, neat one that minimises used space, maybe using a vertically smaller font in addition to compacting UI elements by removing the odd pixel of padding and margin?
Also, the same goes for GTK for the Linux variants on the Eee.
Also a full screen editor, like WriteRoom for the Mac, would be a neat application on the Eee. Is there something like that available (yeah, I guess I could maximise a terminal window).
Also all applications should have a borderless full-screen mode, otherwise the title bar is using valuable vertical screen estate.
Yeah, it'll be the delivery person for my first home food delivery that'll pass on the disease. I'll have to leave a note on the door - "knock, deliver, and go away".
Prepare for H5N1 now! Grow your own veg. Just think of the money you'd have saved in 2007... 2006... 2005... whenever this end-of-humanity bird flu was meant to strike.
My point is that you can scroll anywhere on the trackpad, just by using two fingers.
You don't have to use a special area nor do you have to move the mouse cursor to the scroll bar.
You can scroll in any direction, not just vertically or horizontally.
This simple three-year-old multitouch is effective and works. I doubt there is any difference in the touchpad than on a standard one, it's just the software. Someone should write a driver for Linux:) I've found I prefer it to a mouse, for desktop work. Maybe I'm odd.
The MacBook Air does three fingers, I guess the hardware is different there.
I've certainly found that laptops have gone from 1024x768 14"/15" a few years back to 1280x800 14"/15" today, often with 1680x1050 upgrades, or even 1920x1200!
Sadly some manufacturers haven't refactored their laptop cases to cope with widescreens. Widescreens allow full size keyboards on smaller displays, for portability as well. I find them easier on the eye, but that's subjective. Putting in plastic strips is an appalling decision and to have 1.5"+ of plastic on the top and bottom of the display would have really annoyed me, it's not 1995 anymore. I'd have returned it.
However 1280x800 is barely big enough today, especially if you use Eclipse, unless you have set up some good small fonts on your system. To think I used Eclipse on a 1024x768 12" laptop screen as recently as two years ago!
5 years ago a big, bulky 32" Sony Trinitron CRT TV (PAL) would cost you about £800. Now you can get a 42" flat, decent LCD or Plasma display for the same, in HD (at least 720p) with integrated digital TV. Or you can get a 32" flat, decent LCD for £400, in HD, with integrated digital TV. 5 years ago I paid that for a 24" widescreen CRT.
So the features are far far far better - massively bigger, flatter screen, much thinner, higher resolution. Arguably the picture quality issue with regards to CRT vs LCD is an issue, but less so now than even a year ago.
So I don't see what your point is. Prices have gone down massively, and feature sets have gone up. Of course, the dollar has gone down a lot in the past 5 years too, if you're viewing this from a US-centric view.
Windows trackpads that set the right hand side for vertical scrolling, the bottom for horizontal scrolling, and special zones for other actions?
Yeah, unusable, primitive and pointless.
It works far better on the Mac, two finger scrolling is the best and that came out three years ago. I don't know why PC laptops are so far behind. Honestly. Then again I don't understand people who like that nipple laptop controller, how do you do any sort of scrolling or clicking with that? Who moves their mouse to the scrollbar these days!
Yeah, hopefully in the next year or two the technology will all shake out and things will be sane without too big a cost to the ISPs or to BT.
Someone might have to come up with a provider agnostic distribution platform eventually, as more iPlayer like services become available. A single server providing Channel 4 on demand, ITV on demand, BBC iPlayer, Dave Yet Again, and so on, via a single bittorrent network within the ISP. Ah, this will never happen:p
Doubt that Virgin Media will actually have a problem, as they will be providing iPlayer as a native service on their set top boxes soon anyway.
I think it is quite likely with iPlayer, if not now, then in the near future.
Except that most people access it via Flash in a webbrowser apparently, or via H.264 from their iPhone/iPod Touch, so there's no background bittorrent network in operation.
As someone else suggested, the client could order requests by latency, and I think the BBC should add this, as surely it would reduce the cost to the ISP, indeed it is best for the ISP to encourage the bittorrent option within its network, as that reduces the people using the non-bittorrent option which incurs extra-network fees for the ISP.
Yeah, and you're paying £2 on top of that for your phone line rental because of Virgin's 2 for £20, or 3 for £30, or 4 for £40 plan.
Fact is, up in Cambridge at least, Virgin Media / NTL have a very good network for the most part that achieves its advertised rates.
The throttling at peak hours is perfectly understandable in order to guarantee bandwidth to all their customers, instead of having a few bittorrenters grab it all to the detriment of all. This is perfectly fair. Just set your bittorrents to come down overnight.
They're also the only network rolling out 50mbps cable.
iPlayer is something they will have to deal with however. Even in its H.264 form it is only some 512kbps, so in an hour that is 225MB/hr. Under their throttling limit by far.
The sensible solution is for the BBC to set up media caching servers within each ISP, which will save the ISP's bandwidth fees, and also the BBC's uplink. After that it is all within the ISP's network, so it's up to them to ensure that there's enough bandwidth to go around.
There is zero argument at all for the BBC to pay the ISPs. A core concept of the Internet is that you connect to it, and make services available, or connect to services other people have made available. The BBC pays for their connection. The subscribers pay the ISP to pay for its connection. That's it. If the ISP is selling cheap services, then maybe they should look at their offerings and remove the lies about unlimited use, because clearly they don't want that.
the worst combination of colors to use is blue text on a contrasting blue background Watch out, you'll have rabid C64 fans after your soul for saying that!
(who decided on that awful colour scheme at Commodore?!)
"Putty defaults to white on black, so when I'm stuck in Windows land, that's it."
Odd, Putty has settings for colours (and the font, so you can use something that isn't the vile Courier New), on a per-connection basis. I usually go for a pale pastel colour foreground on a dark version of the same. Pastel green? That's machine X, Pastel blue? That's Y. etc.
You'd think that 500,000 spam emails, at 2KB each say, would be noticeable. It's 1GB of data transfer from the user.
ISPs can scan for this at the network level, they have the technology ("ooh, used a lot of bandwidth between 4pm and 10pm have we, enjoy your 64kbps internet for the next 8 hours!", "hmm, bittorrent traffic, let's limit that eh!"). Even if these bots could only send 5000 a day that would be a hundred-fold decrease in the spam they could send as a whole. Rate limiting should be a feature (enabled by default with reasonable settings) of every SMTP server, and Exchange. Rate limit by number of emails per day, number of recipients per day and number of MB per day.
The problem is that Windows hides file extensions to make filenames look prettier.
Of course, the user should think "hmm, why does this filename have.jpg still?", but let's ignore the user for now and assume them to be a moron that will do the worst possible action.
Windows could do a lot more itself. It could have a set of very basic rules to run on files when they are downloaded or double clicked.
e.g.,: Filename has two extensions, last of which is exe - mark as highly probably virus/trojan/spyware. Alert the user to this fact, with the disabled "Continue" button for 10 seconds, or never enabled to force the user to rename (Also only use the extension as a hint to the action that will be undertaken when double clicked. Perform analysis of file contents to check that it actually appears to be that type of file.)
Don't run downloaded.exes (in fact, any.exe that hasn't been run before) until there has been a warning, with a delay so the user can't just click Continue. The warning window shouldn't be bland non-exciting 9pt Calibri either, there should be something to make the user pay attention and think. "Why is Aunt Mavis sending me a cool dancing sheep screensaver?!" I think that Vista does this already?
Self-extracting zip archives should be identified and de-archived by the OS Zip extraction function, and the.exe part should never be run. Indeed, self-extracting zips should be banned, simply because they're a useless format nowadays.
But in the end, there will be idiot-user ways around these rules, there will be flaws in the rules (I'm not spending all day tweaking them for a mere Slashdot post), and the malware will adapt.
On a Mac I imagine you could just give you malware the system image icon in the application package, and it would fool most users. Apart from user education (hahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa) it's going to be difficult to eradicate the malware problem.
Of course every time an image file format, or Office file format, etc, has a buffer overrun issue on an OS, exploits will be made. Parsers should be stricter, and peer reviewed for good secure programming practices.
I am exactly the same with visual/spatial stuff and navigation. If KDE4's menu is indeed like that I am going to be seriously miffed.
I wouldn't mind if it expanded to the right when you click on something, until it hit the screen width where it could start scrolling like Mac OS X's Finder. But there is really no need for such a core desktop function to be so squeezed. I don't want the mess that is Window's start button still, but I do like being able to get to my applications quickly. Some people call the Dock in Mac OS X rubbish, but I know where the things are on it, and I have the Applications folder there as a direct link to a menu of all the applications. Perfect.
I'm sure that feedback will come back as more and more people try KDE4.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, to learn to program you need the compiler and a text editor. You are learning the concepts of programming, you don't need to learn programming projects, auto-complete of the API, etc. This type of programming is about implementing stuff from scratch, your own linked list implementation rather than an API based one. A folder full of 100 different code learning steps, etc.
And that day down the line, when you're SSHed into that remote computer, and you need to write a program there and then, is when these learned skills shine through, and you manage to write something using nano that saves the day.
Sometimes less is more. X11 running twm, with emacs, vi, or maybe a more friendly text editor (they're learning to program, and learning vi before that might be rather offputting), and some terminals for compiling, testing, etc. No distractions.
Of course, I ended up using Eclipse daily, and do appreciate all the benefits it brings. Very few of which would have benefitted a beginner, who has to see those compilation errors happen and fix syntax errors manually, rather than letting the IDE do that.
Damn right. Also it usually has its own bag which weighs a pound or two, so you are carrying two bags around with you - laptop and everyday/suitcase/luggage/etc. Also laptop bags always spin around and piss you off at annoying times. You can just sling the EeePC in the other bag - it comes with a protective sleeve - and it's there, if you need it, but you don't resent carrying it around if you don't actually use it.
Intel acquired an ARM licence when it acquired Digital back in the day. Digital's StrongARM was revamped into XScale, but compared to ARM11 it isn't really a great design, nor should be it be considered a shining example of what ARM offers.
ARM is moving into multi-core capabilities, and more powerful CPUs, with the ARM Cortex A9 (and the older A8 which had some issues, or you could just use an ARM11 MPCore I guess - that's what nVidia use in the AXP2500). ARM is very competitive when coupled with offload engines (graphics, video, etc), and uses far less power than any x86 that Intel will release in the next few years. If the target usage of these small cheap devices matched the capabilities then you've saved yourself $50 and doubled your battery life by using ARM. It's a no-brainer.
Browsers on the ARM platform? Seen Safari on the iPhone? That's only a 400MHz ARM11, yet is smooth and fully featured. The Nokia N8x0 series also have a full browser based upon Gecko.
The odd thing is that it is a POWER instruction set CPU. Whilst I know that Apple are flexible, it seems an odd move.
Far more likely is that Apple want them to design a 2GHz dual-core ARM compatible CPU. Depending on the design of their current CPUs, it could be possible that this work could just affect a relatively small part of the overall CPU (although still a lot of work).
Then again, why not move to using POWER in Apple's mobile devices instead of ARM... hmm.
It's less than 2% of Apple's savings, and I believe the company already has clients and sales so it could just be a good investment in the long term.
Oh but the mistake there was starting with Oracle when it wasn't needed. Of course it may not be worth upgrading to the next version when it comes along down the line, but once paid for, it's usually a sunk cost so you might as well use it.
Yeah, I like PostgreSQL too, use it for all my personal projects. Stuck with Oracle at work though but it's not so bad.
And back in 2000 you'd have had the option of MySQL3 (in which I spent a lot of time, ugh in retrospect) as the free DB. PostgreSQL wasn't well known.
I guess you could say that the $10b database market didn't grow to that amount because of open source, but only if you're counting a loss of revenue per website hosted on MySQL (or each MySQL installation). However those websites wouldn't have existed if they had to pay for MySQL, or they would have used plain text databases, or some other technology.
A company moving from Oracle to MySQL should have its head examined.
On the other hand without MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc, Oracle and MSSQLServer could have far higher licensing costs that aren't actually a fair reflection of their value to the market. Oracle is still a stupidly high price, but there is OracleXE now.
It's survival of the fittest. Database costs were so high in the past, people felt it necessary to write alternatives, and over time those alternatives improved to be competitive because there was such a demand. This means that the market was never $10b in value, only in price for a short time until the unsustainable price created competition that brought the market down to its true value.
Oh, i'm wittering here now and someone who's studied finance and business will shoot me down anyway.
Ah, I remember the hell of school textbook carrying. And the days you had sports as well. Lockers weren't much use if you had to carry it all home for homework too. Generally though we can't lug such huge bags onto the tube daily, so space restrictions do apply!
The abacus users had to walk to school, uphill both ways in the burning sun, towing a sizeable chunk of pyramid behind them!
I'd rather not lug an 8lb 17" laptop around with me on the tube everyday. Luckily I have a computer at work, so I don't need to do this. Maybe if you are a salesman, or a consultant that works on client premises, a large screen laptop is good.
But for other uses, casual uses especially, a small, light, chuck-it-in-the-bag device is far more appealing. Oh, it's cheap as well, so it won't be too precious.
Different people have different needs. You clearly need that 17" laptop on the train (if you get a seat, or have the space to open the lid because the seat in front is too close). My 12" iBook is a good size for my mobile needs, but most of what I use a 7" or 9" device would suffice.
I'm hoping that the next EeePC 9xx with Atom will have an ExpressCard/54 slot (even if it sticks out a bit when populated) for things like 3.5G modems and so on.
That £329 includes VAT. Take that off, and it's £280, which is $560 before adjusting for UK markup, so probably $499 US.
And the point is that it is small but nippy. The SSD provides the latter. I could throw this into my bag and use it on the train without needing to carry a dedicated laptop case, and a massive overall weight and volume difference.
If you don't need a small system, then it isn't for you.
Whilst using the Win2000 theme does save space, it looks dog ugly. However there are loads of theme hacks for XP, so there must be a clean, neat one that minimises used space, maybe using a vertically smaller font in addition to compacting UI elements by removing the odd pixel of padding and margin?
Also, the same goes for GTK for the Linux variants on the Eee.
Also a full screen editor, like WriteRoom for the Mac, would be a neat application on the Eee. Is there something like that available (yeah, I guess I could maximise a terminal window).
Also all applications should have a borderless full-screen mode, otherwise the title bar is using valuable vertical screen estate.
Yeah, it'll be the delivery person for my first home food delivery that'll pass on the disease. I'll have to leave a note on the door - "knock, deliver, and go away".
... 2006 ... 2005 ... whenever this end-of-humanity bird flu was meant to strike.
Prepare for H5N1 now! Grow your own veg. Just think of the money you'd have saved in 2007
My point is that you can scroll anywhere on the trackpad, just by using two fingers.
:) I've found I prefer it to a mouse, for desktop work. Maybe I'm odd.
You don't have to use a special area nor do you have to move the mouse cursor to the scroll bar.
You can scroll in any direction, not just vertically or horizontally.
This simple three-year-old multitouch is effective and works. I doubt there is any difference in the touchpad than on a standard one, it's just the software. Someone should write a driver for Linux
The MacBook Air does three fingers, I guess the hardware is different there.
I've certainly found that laptops have gone from 1024x768 14"/15" a few years back to 1280x800 14"/15" today, often with 1680x1050 upgrades, or even 1920x1200!
Sadly some manufacturers haven't refactored their laptop cases to cope with widescreens. Widescreens allow full size keyboards on smaller displays, for portability as well. I find them easier on the eye, but that's subjective. Putting in plastic strips is an appalling decision and to have 1.5"+ of plastic on the top and bottom of the display would have really annoyed me, it's not 1995 anymore. I'd have returned it.
However 1280x800 is barely big enough today, especially if you use Eclipse, unless you have set up some good small fonts on your system. To think I used Eclipse on a 1024x768 12" laptop screen as recently as two years ago!
5 years ago a big, bulky 32" Sony Trinitron CRT TV (PAL) would cost you about £800.
Now you can get a 42" flat, decent LCD or Plasma display for the same, in HD (at least 720p) with integrated digital TV.
Or you can get a 32" flat, decent LCD for £400, in HD, with integrated digital TV. 5 years ago I paid that for a 24" widescreen CRT.
So the features are far far far better - massively bigger, flatter screen, much thinner, higher resolution. Arguably the picture quality issue with regards to CRT vs LCD is an issue, but less so now than even a year ago.
So I don't see what your point is. Prices have gone down massively, and feature sets have gone up.
Of course, the dollar has gone down a lot in the past 5 years too, if you're viewing this from a US-centric view.
Windows trackpads that set the right hand side for vertical scrolling, the bottom for horizontal scrolling, and special zones for other actions?
Yeah, unusable, primitive and pointless.
It works far better on the Mac, two finger scrolling is the best and that came out three years ago. I don't know why PC laptops are so far behind. Honestly. Then again I don't understand people who like that nipple laptop controller, how do you do any sort of scrolling or clicking with that? Who moves their mouse to the scrollbar these days!
Yeah, hopefully in the next year or two the technology will all shake out and things will be sane without too big a cost to the ISPs or to BT.
:p
Someone might have to come up with a provider agnostic distribution platform eventually, as more iPlayer like services become available. A single server providing Channel 4 on demand, ITV on demand, BBC iPlayer, Dave Yet Again, and so on, via a single bittorrent network within the ISP. Ah, this will never happen
Doubt that Virgin Media will actually have a problem, as they will be providing iPlayer as a native service on their set top boxes soon anyway.
I have to use edlin to create ASCII art movies!
:(
In real time. With a ZX80 membrane keyboard. And because we've moved to video on demand, I have to do it for 50 users at the same time!
Think about the ASCII art movie writers
It's been 13 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment. orly.
I think it is quite likely with iPlayer, if not now, then in the near future.
Except that most people access it via Flash in a webbrowser apparently, or via H.264 from their iPhone/iPod Touch, so there's no background bittorrent network in operation.
As someone else suggested, the client could order requests by latency, and I think the BBC should add this, as surely it would reduce the cost to the ISP, indeed it is best for the ISP to encourage the bittorrent option within its network, as that reduces the people using the non-bittorrent option which incurs extra-network fees for the ISP.
Yeah, and you're paying £2 on top of that for your phone line rental because of Virgin's 2 for £20, or 3 for £30, or 4 for £40 plan.
Fact is, up in Cambridge at least, Virgin Media / NTL have a very good network for the most part that achieves its advertised rates.
The throttling at peak hours is perfectly understandable in order to guarantee bandwidth to all their customers, instead of having a few bittorrenters grab it all to the detriment of all. This is perfectly fair. Just set your bittorrents to come down overnight.
They're also the only network rolling out 50mbps cable.
iPlayer is something they will have to deal with however. Even in its H.264 form it is only some 512kbps, so in an hour that is 225MB/hr. Under their throttling limit by far.
The sensible solution is for the BBC to set up media caching servers within each ISP, which will save the ISP's bandwidth fees, and also the BBC's uplink. After that it is all within the ISP's network, so it's up to them to ensure that there's enough bandwidth to go around.
There is zero argument at all for the BBC to pay the ISPs. A core concept of the Internet is that you connect to it, and make services available, or connect to services other people have made available. The BBC pays for their connection. The subscribers pay the ISP to pay for its connection. That's it. If the ISP is selling cheap services, then maybe they should look at their offerings and remove the lies about unlimited use, because clearly they don't want that.
(who decided on that awful colour scheme at Commodore?!)
"Putty defaults to white on black, so when I'm stuck in Windows land, that's it."
Odd, Putty has settings for colours (and the font, so you can use something that isn't the vile Courier New), on a per-connection basis.
I usually go for a pale pastel colour foreground on a dark version of the same. Pastel green? That's machine X, Pastel blue? That's Y. etc.
You'd think that 500,000 spam emails, at 2KB each say, would be noticeable. It's 1GB of data transfer from the user.
ISPs can scan for this at the network level, they have the technology ("ooh, used a lot of bandwidth between 4pm and 10pm have we, enjoy your 64kbps internet for the next 8 hours!", "hmm, bittorrent traffic, let's limit that eh!"). Even if these bots could only send 5000 a day that would be a hundred-fold decrease in the spam they could send as a whole. Rate limiting should be a feature (enabled by default with reasonable settings) of every SMTP server, and Exchange. Rate limit by number of emails per day, number of recipients per day and number of MB per day.
The problem is that Windows hides file extensions to make filenames look prettier.
.jpg still?", but let's ignore the user for now and assume them to be a moron that will do the worst possible action.
.exes (in fact, any .exe that hasn't been run before) until there has been a warning, with a delay so the user can't just click Continue. The warning window shouldn't be bland non-exciting 9pt Calibri either, there should be something to make the user pay attention and think. "Why is Aunt Mavis sending me a cool dancing sheep screensaver?!" I think that Vista does this already?
.exe part should never be run. Indeed, self-extracting zips should be banned, simply because they're a useless format nowadays.
Of course, the user should think "hmm, why does this filename have
Windows could do a lot more itself. It could have a set of very basic rules to run on files when they are downloaded or double clicked.
e.g.,: Filename has two extensions, last of which is exe - mark as highly probably virus/trojan/spyware. Alert the user to this fact, with the disabled "Continue" button for 10 seconds, or never enabled to force the user to rename (Also only use the extension as a hint to the action that will be undertaken when double clicked. Perform analysis of file contents to check that it actually appears to be that type of file.)
Don't run downloaded
Self-extracting zip archives should be identified and de-archived by the OS Zip extraction function, and the
But in the end, there will be idiot-user ways around these rules, there will be flaws in the rules (I'm not spending all day tweaking them for a mere Slashdot post), and the malware will adapt.
On a Mac I imagine you could just give you malware the system image icon in the application package, and it would fool most users. Apart from user education (hahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa) it's going to be difficult to eradicate the malware problem.
Of course every time an image file format, or Office file format, etc, has a buffer overrun issue on an OS, exploits will be made. Parsers should be stricter, and peer reviewed for good secure programming practices.
I am exactly the same with visual/spatial stuff and navigation. If KDE4's menu is indeed like that I am going to be seriously miffed.
I wouldn't mind if it expanded to the right when you click on something, until it hit the screen width where it could start scrolling like Mac OS X's Finder. But there is really no need for such a core desktop function to be so squeezed. I don't want the mess that is Window's start button still, but I do like being able to get to my applications quickly. Some people call the Dock in Mac OS X rubbish, but I know where the things are on it, and I have the Applications folder there as a direct link to a menu of all the applications. Perfect.
I'm sure that feedback will come back as more and more people try KDE4.