2,488 karma · joined September 14, 2008
I don't consider even IE 8 to be a burden any more. It doesn't get some CSS effects right, but stuff generally renders OK without modification. I can sort of understand blocking IE 8 if you really don't want people to see your site without border-radius or whatever, and if you don't feel like taking the time to patch it up with conditional code, and if all those lost visitors don't matter to you...
But so far I've found IE 9 to be spot-on. Are you experiencing a rendering glitch with the latest beta? If not for rendering issues, then what's to be gained by blocking potential visitors or users just because you don't like their choice of software?
You're wrong. It would be pretty much impossible for Microsoft to sue over Mono at this point, even if they wanted to. You gloss over the fact that Microsoft has issued a thorough, unrevokable, legally binding Community Promise to not assert patent claims over .NET implementations:
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx
The purpose and implications of the Community Promise are clear. Microsoft has sanctioned Mono, and no court in the world would let them take the CP back and say "nah, we were just kidding."
> What I am peddling here is FUD, but it's warranted FUD, there are too many unknowns for what amounts to a buggy C#.
Oh please. Ignoring the fact that you appear to be confusing C# and the CLR here, do you actually have any concrete complaints about mcs, or is this just more unwarranted FUD?
Many people seem to neglect or completely fail to understand the risk of increased perception of safety leading to an overall decreased safety in these systems. We can't have the best of both worlds – a machine's constant attention and reaction time coupled with a human driver's intuition – because the moment you give him an autopilot that he thinks will keep him out of trouble, the human sits back and stops paying attention to the road.
These automated systems may eventually become all-around better than any human driver, but it will be take many iterations to get there, and the first versions will certainly lack a human's ability to anticipate trouble before it arises. It will be a long while before an autopilot can say "hey, that car ahead is weaving unnervingly, the driver might be drunk so I should keep my distance" or "the cars ahead of me are curving slightly to the left, there might be a cyclist riding on the shoulder so I should slow down a bit and do likewise." And until we have that level of automation, I'm afraid our roads are about to become a lot more dangerous.
Granted, Apple has a lot of engineering to do before they turn all these disparate parts into a coherent, battle-tested runtime on the order of .NET or the JVM. But it will be interesting to see how this evolves...
http://groups.google.com/group/nitrodesk/browse_thread/threa...
The app doesn't have permission to wipe the entire phone even if it wanted to.
I'm trying to say this without sounding snarky, but why the heck would you need this on an operating system that already gives you apt-get, pacman, yum, portmaster, or what have you?
As for Windows, apparently there's a WinSparkle now: http://winsparkle.org/
Also the WiX people have been working on something along these lines, but I don't know how mature that project is or if it's even still a project any more.
EDIT: Looks like Google's made a separate open-source project of its update framework, Omaha, which is apparently how Chrome gets its updates. So I guess you can get Chrome-style auto updates in your own applications now. Don't know if Google's nifty binary diff compression algorithm is included.
If you're an Emacs user, as of version 23 or so GNU Emacs can transparently read and write GnuPG-encrypted .txt.gpg (or .org.gpg, or...) files. Not that there aren't plenty other ways to save encrypted text, but it's nice to have something that's integrated into the program you spend half your time in anyway...
If you use Windows but not Emacs, Steganos LockNote is a free, minimalist program offering symmetric AES encryption — it's a standalone .exe containing both the program and your data, so you just double-click on the .exe "document" to open your encrypted file in a Notepad-like interface. I doubt it has been vetted to the extent that GnuPG has, but it's surely enough to keep your average laptop thief from getting all your passwords.
I still think there's room for improving operating system security models, but I don't think it's possible to improve over OpenBSD in this particular dimension.
As far as I know there's no technological reason the same couldn't be done with the server or desktop, it would just be an enormous shift in momentum to get there from where we are now. But if we're willing to stomach shifts in momentum, we could even go further and consider other, more radically different approaches to security than what's commonly used now, such as Microsoft's Singularity.
I don't know enough to say whether an operating system startup could be successful, but I think if it were, it would be less about basic operating systems research than about getting what research we already have into the hands of the masses on the desktop or the server. Presumably by targeting sectors where customers care enough about security to make the difficult switch to a fundamentally incompatible system.
If the prospect of using the JVM bothers you that much, then why not try Scala .NET or Clojure-CLR?
And it may even be a great gateway drug to real programming. App Inventor looks a lot like MIT's Scratch, which I used to teach some fifth graders simple programming constructs last school year. As much as they enjoyed that, I think they'd love using the same building-block type program construction to make something for their phones (yes, apparently fifth graders have smartphones these days).
> Like David says, it’s still programming even if you’re dragging around blocks rather than hammering out code.
Yes, but it's _easier_ programming (you don't have to both learn the semantics and remember exactly what syntax to use at the same time), which makes it a wonderful way to start.
http://github.com/richhickey/clojure-clr/
Now porting your Clojure applications between VMs may or may not be a reasonable proposition depending on what kind of non-Clojure pure Java libraries you depend upon, but the fate of the Clojure language is thankfully not tied to the fate of the Java runtime.
I think Scala has a .NET port too, but I don't know if it's active.
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx
I was worried when Oracle acquired Sun, but I never thought I'd see them clamp down on Java to the extent that .NET is a significantly more open platform. But there it is.
Do you think anyone will still be able to open your documents in Adobe InDesign 200 years from now? This may not matter to everyone, but if it matters for your purposes, LaTeX has a clear advantage here.
EDIT: I'm not affiliated with the author of this article.
When I'm just cycling through the town (rather than exercising), the only time I really feel the heat is when I'm stopped at a light.
As for humidity, this is in south Florida—if we can manage it here, then we can handle the humidity pretty much anywhere in the US.
Now I'm not saying everyone can or should bike a 52-mile round trip to work. But the point of this article is that this little experimental suburb has 5,500 people within a single square mile; biking or walking is a perfectly reasonable way to traverse such a small area at nearly any level of fitness, especially when you don't have to worry about automotive traffic, and for the few people who can't manage that there's the public transport option. Even on our hottest days here in south Florida, one can easily bike a mile, fully dressed, without breaking a sweat.
[citation needed]
Accepting that for the sake of argument — suppose I'm sterile, then. Or I just don't plan on having any kids. Do I still have a right to all the benefits that heterosexual couples obtain from legally recognized marriage? If so, then on what basis are those rights granted to me, but not to my gay neighbors next door? (I'm seriously curious whether you'll say no, sterile couples don't deserve those rights, or whether you'll just engage in more special pleading toward the prescribed end of denying marriage rights to gay couples.)
But back in reality, those of my friends who've gotten married already had many reasons for doing so, and "giving protections to the woman who bears a greater liability in childbearing" certainly wasn't at the top of their lists.
And dismissing discussion of crucial benefits such as the right to visit your husband or wife in the hospital as "appeals to emotion" is nothing short of absurd.
But the law does not say they're equal, as has already been pointed out to you. And yes, pointing to civil unions — which embody a subset of the legal rights granted to legally married couples — as a justification for not granting full marriage rights to homosexual couples is a perfect demonstration of the fallacy of "separate but equal" institutions.
If civil unions really were a perfectly fine substitute for legally recognized marriage, do you think the civil rights movement would have been so up in arms about Proposition 8?
In that case I might as well give a shout-out to my current VPS host, ARP Networks:
http://www.arpnetworks.com/vps
They virtualize using KVM rather than Xen, so you can run any variety of OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, or Linux without worrying about Xen support in your guest OS. Their performance seems as good as any other VPS host I've used (Xen or otherwise), I think the price is pretty good, and I haven't had any downtime to speak of so far. So I recommend giving them a try if you're looking.
> But comparing iPhone sales to Android sales is comparing an apple to a bushel of oranges.
No it isn't. The real story is mobile OS market share trends, and how that relates to third-party application development. From that perspective the underlying hardware manufacturers and cellular carriers are largely irrelevant.
However, this particular report doesn't take into account the iPhone 4 sales numbers, so take it with a grain of salt...
Check out this paper for a discussion of these issues in a real world Haskell application:
Why should state officials ever be allowed to interrogate U.S. citizens' political opinions, regardless of whether those citizens happen to be standing in an airport?
It makes perfect sense that Customs be allowed to inspect physical items passengers bring through the airport, but what rationale says they should look through your computer files, especially in a post-Internet world? (I.e., there's no sense in claiming that you'll stop child pornography or other hot-topic illegal data entering the U.S. in an age where the Internet exists.)