I've never understood what the financial benefits for a site joining the semantic web are supposed to me. Reuters may be one thing, but how would you sell this technology to Amazon? Or NewEgg? If commercial sites can't/won't use it, how is it supposed to gain critical mass?
I think that after spending man-months on getting the equipment installed in the first place,
What kind of hardware are you dealing with, exactly? We would just buy a couple boxes from Dell and screw them on the rack that was already setup, plugged into the switch that was already set up. Maybe 12 man-hours, and that includes the time it takes to find where we left the rack screws.
Even if you have to install the rack and switching, I don't see it taking more than a week. Multiple man-months? Seriously?
No, his point is that when the new version of Windows or IE comes out, you don't go back and re-evaluate whether it is, actually, the most secure version ever. IE7 is really good.
Holy shit, I didn't read most of that and I don't much care. Look:
And you wonder why Arabs and Muslims think the U.S. is out to get them.
No, I don't care *why* the Arabs and Muslims think the US is out to get them. What I care about is that they can't be "out to get us" without murdering innocent people. There's this thing called "diplomacy" that grown-up adults do, it's a way of resolving problems without randomly bombing yourself and others.
Look, even if I did think like you and sat here at my desk going, "well, gee whiz! We deserve to be attacked!" That wouldn't change my current position on the War on Terror. The position from people like you seems to be "well there's a valid history as to why we're attacked, therefore we shouldn't bother to defend ourselves because we 'deserve' it."
If people writing client software actually did what they were supposed to, this wouldn't be a problem. This is not a designed-in bug, this is caused by a minority of developers eschewing the specifications and standard practice out of either ignorance or apathy.
Wow, it just struck me... welcome to Microsoft's world.
Their security was so bad for so many years because they worked on the assumption that: 1) Programmers know what they're doing 2) Programmers aren't assholes
Of course, the success of malware vendors (and Real Networks) has proved those two assumptions wrong many years ago, and probably 90% of the development work on Vista was adding in safeties to protect against idiot programmers, and asshole programmers.
And now the W3C is getting their lesson on a golden platter.
In short, here's the lesson learned: 1) Some proportion of programmers don't know what they're doing and never will 2) Some proportion of programmers are assholes
Except someone that switched to Vista or IE7 would have no frickin' clue why the menus are missing. Doesn't MS have some usability testers that actually figure out if this shit makes sense to an actual user? Like, you know, the kind of person that might buy a computer at Circuit City?
Yes they do, and I wager they could show you research that only a very small proportion of users used those menus regularly. I'm a pretty power user, and hell I never used the damn thing... I used them once to set up Explorer Settings on a new account, then never touched any of them.
Yeah, because everybody in this world has a 4 or 5 button mouse. "See, we like usability so much we require 5 button mice and you must know the (hidden) functionality of every single button..."
It doesn't *require* a 5-button mouse. That's retarded. If you're not going to make rational arguments, just save all of Slashdot the time.
The only problem is that Vista doesn't come with SSH! Also, telnet is still useful for the exact purpose he mentioned: Troubleshooting TCP applications at the OS level, by telnetting directly to a port. Hell, I troubleshoot SMTP blockage and issues all the time by telnetting to port 25 on mail servers and doing a little HELO client/server handshaking.
People who know how to do what you do also know how to install Telnet. People who don't, don't. And when they learn one, they'll learn the other. This is another retarded argument.
They didn't take Telnet into a barn and shoot it. The 0.0005% of Vista users who need Telnet can go install it. I did it myself, it takes like 10 minutes. But there's no reason to have it available on the average user's computer where a piece of malware could potentially use it.
And can we skip all the crap about whose fault it is? Yes, Facebook screwed up. But if a leading OS can't access a leading web site, people need to know about it, and don't really care whose fucking fault it is.
Whoa whoa whoa, slow down...
ONE person couldn't access Facebook using Vista. The guy writing this article. Everybody he surveyed had no problems. I have no problems. None of my friends who use it quite often have any problems. And you blame Vista?
People would need to know about it, if it were an actual problem. It's not. Stop believing everything you read on the Internet.
Try opening up a directory on the desktop -- the folder is listed as the root directory. So you can't go up a level and select the files on your desktop in list or detail mode (useful when you save to your directory -- sort it by date, and all your recent saves are there).
Yeah, that's a little awkward. There's a very small right-arrow next to the name of the desktop folder you opened. Clicking it will bring up the "favorite folders" screen, with the Desktop in the top position, but it's not apparent what it does.
Instead they added a green circle-arrow thing. That does nothing.
A wha? You mean the Refresh button? It refreshes. And on my desktop it's blue. (Tip: next time when trying to describe a widget, find out what the tooltip calls it since the name's probably there.)
The removal of the menu is extremely annoying to anyone who's wanted to click "View Source". Sure, you can bring it back (go to the View menu to do it), but there's no question that the removal of the menu was not the best idea.
No, it was moved to the "Page" menu which is shown by default, and IMO quicker to use than in IE 6. Page->View Source. You can also right-click on the document to View Source, like before, which is especially handy when viewing the source of an iframe.
You have to give IE7 a chance for longer than 5 minutes. If you didn't even explore the new menus long enough to find where they moved View Source to, then you haven't given it a real chance. I'm not saying that IE7 is the second coming or anything, it just drives me nuts when people criticize a program that never even bothered to slightly attempt to use.
Except normal people using computers do things like:
Browsing the web Organizing and printing their photos Personal finance Play video games Check/write email
Only two of those things can be done at all in a CLI (personal finance and email), and the GUI option for both is much, much better. (Imagine something like Turbo Tax implemented as a CLI program... grauh.)
Your argument is that Linux is better for people who want to find every text file with more than 7 words where the second word begins with 'L' on a 45GB external HD over a cell modem. Fine, given. But that doesn't apply to anybody but... you.
Operating systems are ruled by the majority, and rightly so. You're stuck in the past, and the computer-using public has swarmed all around you.
For a long time, I would do it by hitting printscreen, pasting it into Paint, then cropping it.
Seriously? Last time I wanted to do that, I just selected the cells I wanted in Excel, then pasted them in Paint.net and it worked fine. That was like Windows 2000. I just tried it in both Paint.NET and Paint itself in Vista, and it still works fine. You were doing things the hard way, bub. Unlike in Linux, copy-and-paste works in Windows.
So where does Microsoft even go to find programmers this stupid? Elbonia? How do you screw up an operating system this badly and still make money with it?
Your friend is lying. Vista doesn't do that. I just tried it.
Also, when the time-out hit, they should produce a dialog saying (approx.) "Standard IPV6 connection timed out. Trying IPV4 connection." That would inform both the knowledgeable and the naive, at their appropriate levels of detail, would get the connection made, and would answer the (hypothetical) argument.
Wow, please tell me you're not a software usability consultant. It would be hard to come up with a dumber dialog.
The trouble is that I frequently give my directories extremely long and descriptive names like (this is a real example) "Flash-Player-8.5.0.246-beta2.downloaded-2006-03-20-from-labs.macromedia.com" so that I can keep track of where and when I got each piece of downloaded software, in case I ever need to go back to a previous version that the software maker no longer makes available because they're trying to steer me away from it
You know there's a "Comments" field, right? You don't have to put your entire life story in the damned filename.
Think about this. Microsoft recently bought the second (perhaps the first; there's no good metrics in this industry) largest ad-serving system in the world, Aquantive. Have you ever heard the word "Aquantive" before that purchase?
In any case, I agree with you, and as somebody who works for a company that competes somewhat with Google, it constantly bugs me when I hear people say things like "Google doesn't serve banner ads, just text links." ORLY!?
*** Many of the Windows/IE security issues can be traced back to the integration of IE into the operating system.
Yeah but, uh, didn't Microsoft turn out to be right? Is there a single OS (or distribution, whatever you want to call "the thing that goes in the box and runs my computer") that doesn't include a web browser as standard equipment? Microsoft was criticized for adding Active Desktop in Windows 98, but how does that differ from Apple's Dashboard app? It's also running a bunch of web browser instances in the file management application.
Shipping an OS without a web browser would be a stupid move in this day and age. Microsoft might have had a bad implementation, but they sure had the right idea when it comes right down to it.
Then, one day, some stupid company named 'Microsoft' comes around and releases a product called 'Windows', making ludicrous claims that the 'operating system' and the 'GUI' were the same thing!
Wow, somebody should introduce you to Macintosh. Windows 1.0 ran on top of DOS; it was quite clear that Windows and DOS were two separate layers. Windows didn't become an integrated OS until 95, and arguably not until 2000.
On the other hand, Mac OS, which came out before Windows, *is* the operating system. It didn't run atop some text-mode GUI; it had no text-mode at all! (Until OS X in 2001.) I don't see why Microsoft gets the credit/blame when Apple was clearly the first company to say the GUI and "operating system" are an integrated whole.
The real problem is that someone needs to figure out the vocabulary. When people say "Linux" they mean the "operating environment" (by your definition) and not the kernel 99% of the time. Unless someone's criticizing "Linux", then they magically mean the kernel so that the snarky Linux fan can reply: "that's not a problem with Linux, that's a problem with Ubuntu!!!"
My pet terrorist attack has always been to dynamite high-tension power lines. Most of them go through un-patrolled forested areas, and it would be trivial to hide a cell phone-triggered bomb in the foundation or supports. You could set it off any time you wanted, black out entire states, and you don't even have to kill yourself to pull it off. Plus you'd end up killing as many people in the long run and virtually destroying the economy. I really wish about a tenth of the resources spent towards making airports safe went towards patrolling high tension lines and inspecting them once every couple days.
Nope. Literally nothing worked on my gf's Shuttle bare-bones PC when she installed XP on it (with its text-based installer, yes). No video except 640x480 VGA, no sound, no network, nothing except keyboard and mouse. Everything had to be painstakingly installed from third-party driver disks.
That's probably the result of the XP CD being extremely old which, as I said above, is a perfectly valid criticism, unlike most criticisms of Microsoft made on this site.
But I still don't buy only 640x480 VGA. I've booted XP on all kinds of shitty hardware, and I've never been unable to set it to 1024x768. In fact, XP's minimum supported is 800x600, so I don't even know how it booted in 640x480 in the first place.
That's just plain dishonest BS. There's no reason for me to bother with your nonsense any further. If this were Usenet I'd killfile you, here the enemies list will have to do.
Oh no! An enemy on the Internets! I'll seppuku myself immediately!
Slashdot Mirror
I've never understood what the financial benefits for a site joining the semantic web are supposed to me. Reuters may be one thing, but how would you sell this technology to Amazon? Or NewEgg? If commercial sites can't/won't use it, how is it supposed to gain critical mass?
I think that after spending man-months on getting the equipment installed in the first place,
What kind of hardware are you dealing with, exactly? We would just buy a couple boxes from Dell and screw them on the rack that was already setup, plugged into the switch that was already set up. Maybe 12 man-hours, and that includes the time it takes to find where we left the rack screws.
Even if you have to install the rack and switching, I don't see it taking more than a week. Multiple man-months? Seriously?
If you agree with Ron Paul's policies, why would you go to *Canada* of all places? Go to Liberia, they're pretty close to Paul's desired state.
No matter who wins this race, it is NOT the same old entrenched politics.
I think you might have overlooked that Hillary Clinton is running.
Could $30 million possibly have been used to achieve less?
Have you seen the film "Chronicles of Riddick?" The answer is: yes. At least Ron Paul was entertaining.
No, his point is that when the new version of Windows or IE comes out, you don't go back and re-evaluate whether it is, actually, the most secure version ever. IE7 is really good.
Holy shit, I didn't read most of that and I don't much care. Look:
And you wonder why Arabs and Muslims think the U.S. is out to get them.
No, I don't care *why* the Arabs and Muslims think the US is out to get them. What I care about is that they can't be "out to get us" without murdering innocent people. There's this thing called "diplomacy" that grown-up adults do, it's a way of resolving problems without randomly bombing yourself and others.
Look, even if I did think like you and sat here at my desk going, "well, gee whiz! We deserve to be attacked!" That wouldn't change my current position on the War on Terror. The position from people like you seems to be "well there's a valid history as to why we're attacked, therefore we shouldn't bother to defend ourselves because we 'deserve' it."
If people writing client software actually did what they were supposed to, this wouldn't be a problem. This is not a designed-in bug, this is caused by a minority of developers eschewing the specifications and standard practice out of either ignorance or apathy.
Wow, it just struck me... welcome to Microsoft's world.
Their security was so bad for so many years because they worked on the assumption that:
1) Programmers know what they're doing
2) Programmers aren't assholes
Of course, the success of malware vendors (and Real Networks) has proved those two assumptions wrong many years ago, and probably 90% of the development work on Vista was adding in safeties to protect against idiot programmers, and asshole programmers.
And now the W3C is getting their lesson on a golden platter.
In short, here's the lesson learned:
1) Some proportion of programmers don't know what they're doing and never will
2) Some proportion of programmers are assholes
Except someone that switched to Vista or IE7 would have no frickin' clue why the menus are missing. Doesn't MS have some usability testers that actually figure out if this shit makes sense to an actual user? Like, you know, the kind of person that might buy a computer at Circuit City?
Yes they do, and I wager they could show you research that only a very small proportion of users used those menus regularly. I'm a pretty power user, and hell I never used the damn thing... I used them once to set up Explorer Settings on a new account, then never touched any of them.
Yeah, because everybody in this world has a 4 or 5 button mouse. "See, we like usability so much we require 5 button mice and you must know the (hidden) functionality of every single button..."
It doesn't *require* a 5-button mouse. That's retarded. If you're not going to make rational arguments, just save all of Slashdot the time.
The only problem is that Vista doesn't come with SSH! Also, telnet is still useful for the exact purpose he mentioned: Troubleshooting TCP applications at the OS level, by telnetting directly to a port. Hell, I troubleshoot SMTP blockage and issues all the time by telnetting to port 25 on mail servers and doing a little HELO client/server handshaking.
People who know how to do what you do also know how to install Telnet. People who don't, don't. And when they learn one, they'll learn the other. This is another retarded argument.
They didn't take Telnet into a barn and shoot it. The 0.0005% of Vista users who need Telnet can go install it. I did it myself, it takes like 10 minutes. But there's no reason to have it available on the average user's computer where a piece of malware could potentially use it.
And can we skip all the crap about whose fault it is? Yes, Facebook screwed up. But if a leading OS can't access a leading web site, people need to know about it, and don't really care whose fucking fault it is.
Whoa whoa whoa, slow down...
ONE person couldn't access Facebook using Vista. The guy writing this article. Everybody he surveyed had no problems. I have no problems. None of my friends who use it quite often have any problems. And you blame Vista?
People would need to know about it, if it were an actual problem. It's not. Stop believing everything you read on the Internet.
Try opening up a directory on the desktop -- the folder is listed as the root directory. So you can't go up a level and select the files on your desktop in list or detail mode (useful when you save to your directory -- sort it by date, and all your recent saves are there).
Yeah, that's a little awkward. There's a very small right-arrow next to the name of the desktop folder you opened. Clicking it will bring up the "favorite folders" screen, with the Desktop in the top position, but it's not apparent what it does.
Instead they added a green circle-arrow thing. That does nothing.
A wha? You mean the Refresh button? It refreshes. And on my desktop it's blue. (Tip: next time when trying to describe a widget, find out what the tooltip calls it since the name's probably there.)
The removal of the menu is extremely annoying to anyone who's wanted to click "View Source". Sure, you can bring it back (go to the View menu to do it), but there's no question that the removal of the menu was not the best idea.
No, it was moved to the "Page" menu which is shown by default, and IMO quicker to use than in IE 6. Page->View Source. You can also right-click on the document to View Source, like before, which is especially handy when viewing the source of an iframe.
You have to give IE7 a chance for longer than 5 minutes. If you didn't even explore the new menus long enough to find where they moved View Source to, then you haven't given it a real chance. I'm not saying that IE7 is the second coming or anything, it just drives me nuts when people criticize a program that never even bothered to slightly attempt to use.
Except normal people using computers do things like:
Browsing the web
Organizing and printing their photos
Personal finance
Play video games
Check/write email
Only two of those things can be done at all in a CLI (personal finance and email), and the GUI option for both is much, much better. (Imagine something like Turbo Tax implemented as a CLI program... grauh.)
Your argument is that Linux is better for people who want to find every text file with more than 7 words where the second word begins with 'L' on a 45GB external HD over a cell modem. Fine, given. But that doesn't apply to anybody but... you.
Operating systems are ruled by the majority, and rightly so. You're stuck in the past, and the computer-using public has swarmed all around you.
For a long time, I would do it by hitting printscreen, pasting it into Paint, then cropping it.
Seriously? Last time I wanted to do that, I just selected the cells I wanted in Excel, then pasted them in Paint.net and it worked fine. That was like Windows 2000. I just tried it in both Paint.NET and Paint itself in Vista, and it still works fine. You were doing things the hard way, bub. Unlike in Linux, copy-and-paste works in Windows.
So where does Microsoft even go to find programmers this stupid? Elbonia? How do you screw up an operating system this badly and still make money with it?
Your friend is lying. Vista doesn't do that. I just tried it.
Also, when the time-out hit, they should produce a dialog saying (approx.) "Standard IPV6 connection timed out. Trying IPV4 connection." That would inform both the knowledgeable and the naive, at their appropriate levels of detail, would get the connection made, and would answer the (hypothetical) argument.
Wow, please tell me you're not a software usability consultant. It would be hard to come up with a dumber dialog.
The trouble is that I frequently give my directories extremely long and descriptive names like (this is a real example) "Flash-Player-8.5.0.246-beta2.downloaded-2006-03-20-from-labs.macromedia.com" so that I can keep track of where and when I got each piece of downloaded software, in case I ever need to go back to a previous version that the software maker no longer makes available because they're trying to steer me away from it
You know there's a "Comments" field, right? You don't have to put your entire life story in the damned filename.
Think about this. Microsoft recently bought the second (perhaps the first; there's no good metrics in this industry) largest ad-serving system in the world, Aquantive. Have you ever heard the word "Aquantive" before that purchase?
In any case, I agree with you, and as somebody who works for a company that competes somewhat with Google, it constantly bugs me when I hear people say things like "Google doesn't serve banner ads, just text links." ORLY!?
I got about three paragraphs in. Anybody beat that?
(I'm guessing the +5 moderation is supposed to actually read "+5 Long And Pointless")
*** Many of the Windows/IE security issues can be traced back to the integration of IE into the operating system.
Yeah but, uh, didn't Microsoft turn out to be right? Is there a single OS (or distribution, whatever you want to call "the thing that goes in the box and runs my computer") that doesn't include a web browser as standard equipment? Microsoft was criticized for adding Active Desktop in Windows 98, but how does that differ from Apple's Dashboard app? It's also running a bunch of web browser instances in the file management application.
Shipping an OS without a web browser would be a stupid move in this day and age. Microsoft might have had a bad implementation, but they sure had the right idea when it comes right down to it.
Then, one day, some stupid company named 'Microsoft' comes around and releases a product called 'Windows', making ludicrous claims that the 'operating system' and the 'GUI' were the same thing!
Wow, somebody should introduce you to Macintosh. Windows 1.0 ran on top of DOS; it was quite clear that Windows and DOS were two separate layers. Windows didn't become an integrated OS until 95, and arguably not until 2000.
On the other hand, Mac OS, which came out before Windows, *is* the operating system. It didn't run atop some text-mode GUI; it had no text-mode at all! (Until OS X in 2001.) I don't see why Microsoft gets the credit/blame when Apple was clearly the first company to say the GUI and "operating system" are an integrated whole.
The real problem is that someone needs to figure out the vocabulary. When people say "Linux" they mean the "operating environment" (by your definition) and not the kernel 99% of the time. Unless someone's criticizing "Linux", then they magically mean the kernel so that the snarky Linux fan can reply: "that's not a problem with Linux, that's a problem with Ubuntu!!!"
Drag&drop, another great example, and something Microsoft and Apple have had perfected for decades now.
My pet terrorist attack has always been to dynamite high-tension power lines. Most of them go through un-patrolled forested areas, and it would be trivial to hide a cell phone-triggered bomb in the foundation or supports. You could set it off any time you wanted, black out entire states, and you don't even have to kill yourself to pull it off. Plus you'd end up killing as many people in the long run and virtually destroying the economy. I really wish about a tenth of the resources spent towards making airports safe went towards patrolling high tension lines and inspecting them once every couple days.
Nope. Literally nothing worked on my gf's Shuttle bare-bones PC when she installed XP on it (with its text-based installer, yes). No video except 640x480 VGA, no sound, no network, nothing except keyboard and mouse. Everything had to be painstakingly installed from third-party driver disks.
That's probably the result of the XP CD being extremely old which, as I said above, is a perfectly valid criticism, unlike most criticisms of Microsoft made on this site.
But I still don't buy only 640x480 VGA. I've booted XP on all kinds of shitty hardware, and I've never been unable to set it to 1024x768. In fact, XP's minimum supported is 800x600, so I don't even know how it booted in 640x480 in the first place.
That's just plain dishonest BS. There's no reason for me to bother with your nonsense any further. If this were Usenet I'd killfile you, here the enemies list will have to do.
Oh no! An enemy on the Internets! I'll seppuku myself immediately!