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Comment The suicidal tendency of GUIs (Score 1) 729

by gantry (#44954847) Attached to: Middle-Click Paste? Not For Long

GNOME, KDE and Windows desktops were great when they were in catch-up mode (with Mac OS).

Windows peaked at Windows 98 SE; every change since then has been negative; Windows 8 is its death rattle.

KDE peaked with v3.5; I haven't been a regular user of GNOME so I don't know when the rot set in, but it is not the highly usable system that it once was.

I no longer migrate non-technical friends to Linux; I recommend Windows 7 in "Classic" mode, which will not reach its EOL until 2020. For techies I still recommend KDE 4, which I use myself, but I have given up on kmail, which committed suicide when it gave up maildirs and switched to the temperamental Akonadi backend. Please! How do you explain to someone that they need to restart a database before they can read their email?

It is not that all the innovations have been bad; it is that, when a system is close to perfection, most changes will be downhill; and while amateurs can code as well as the professionals, the creative skill needed to imagine a new yet workable GUI/desktop paradigm is exceptionally rare. Therefore, many projects reach feature-completeness, and then commit suicide because their developers feel the need to innovate.

Comment Why it won't work (Score 1) 540

by gantry (#40571171) Attached to: Ask Bas Lansdorp About Going to Mars, One Way

1. $6 billion is nowhere near enough.

2. It's completely impractical. Try a practice run in Death Valley, but without outdoor agriculture, and without going outside unless you are wearing a spacesuit. How many years do you expect your spacesuits and other high-tech equipment to last, especially in the high-radiation environment of a planet with no magnetic field?

3. If the whole thing is media-driven for TV viewing, it's an invitation to do Capricorn One for real - with $500 million - and pocket the rest of the investors' money.

Perhaps this is the plan. If you can make a good film by mashing up Abraham Lincoln and Buffy, then this scheme is a mashup of Capricorn One and The Producers. It would be very funny - unless they actually try to do it.
Media

Submission + - UK Government Rejects Anti-DRM e-Petition

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "The UK government has rejected an e-Petition calling for a ban on DRM. In a response posted to the e-Petitions site, they claim that DRM gives users "unprecedented choice". BBC News reports on the response: "It said DRM acted as a policeman in that it protected digital content, but, it added, the technology also improved choice and the price consumers wished to pay." The response did, however, recognise that "the needs and rights of consumers must also be carefully safeguarded.""
Security

Submission + - Severe Google Desktop XSS Vulnerability

Submitted by
Tsudohnimh
Tsudohnimh writes: "A new research from Watchfire has revealed a serious vulnerability in Google Desktop.
The attack, which is fully presented in a new Watchfire research paper released today can allow a malicious individual to achieve not only remote, persistent access to sensitive data, but in some cases full system control as well.
The full paper can be found here (1).
A demonstration of the attack flow can be found here(2).
1. http://www.watchfire.com/resources/Overtaking-Goog le-Desktop.pdf
2. http://download.watchfire.com/googledesktopdemo/in dex.htm"
Programming

Submission + - A Universal Markup Storage Format

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Every blog, forum, or CMS has its own markup language for formatting posts. But when you start to mix and match markups, things go haywire. If you have a web-based platform and are looking to support multiple markup languages for posters/authors to use, then you need to start to use a universal markup storage format in your database to preserve formatting, extend flexibility, and allow users to switch from one markup language to another.
Microsoft

Microsoft Apologizes for Serving Malware 171

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the caught-sneaking-one-by dept.
dark_15 writes "Microsoft has apologized for serving malware via its websites and Windows Live Messenger software. APC reader Jackie Murphy reported the problem: 'With Microsoft launching Vista along with their Defender software to protect users from viruses and spyware, it seems therefore to be an oxymoron that they have started to putting paid changing banner advertisements for malware, on the popular MSN groups servers.'"
Software

Submission + - Six advanced-technology open source projects - Net

Submitted by Julie188
Julie188 writes: I'm always on the lookout for cool open-source technologies and I hadn't heard about several of the ones listed in this story before. Some of the projects are just beta code, but interesting all the same. The open-source projects in the article do automated server provisioning, intrusion detection, something called "grid storage" (hard to explain, you have to read about it), network-attached storage, a "messaging framework" for SOAs and secure telephony (interesting because it helps get around encryption laws that allow governments to spy on VoIP calls). http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2007/ndc1/021907- ndc-best-of-open-source-tools.html
Moon

Submission + - NASA's New Mission to the Moon

Submitted by mattnyc99
mattnyc99 writes: Popular Mechanics has a new, in-depth preview of NASA's Orion spacecraft, tracking the complex challenges facing the engineers of the CEV (which NASA chief Michael Griffin called "Apollo on steroids") as America shifts its focus away from the Space Shuttle and back toward returning to the moon by 2020. After yesterday's long op-ed in the New York Times concerning NASA's about-face, PopMech's interview with Buzz Aldrin and podcast with Transterrestrial.com's Rand Simberg raise perhaps the most pressing questions here: Is it worth going back to the lunar surface? And will we actually stay there?
Space

Submission + - ROCKET EXPLOSION

Submitted by PhreakOfTime
PhreakOfTime writes: http://www.spaceweather.com/ ROCKET EXPLOSION: What was it? It was a mystery for almost 24 hours until satellite expert Daniel Deak matched the trajectory of the plume in Palmer's photo with the orbit of a derelict rocket booster — "a Briz-M, catalog number 28944." One year ago, the Briz-M sat atop a Russian Proton rocket that left Earth on Feb. 28, 2006, carrying an Arabsat-4A communications satellite. Shortly after launch, the rocket malfunctioned, leaving the satellite in the wrong orbit and the Briz-M looping around Earth partially-filled with fuel. On Feb. 19, 2007, for reasons unknown, the fuel tanks ruptured over Australia.
Programming

Submission + - Demystify C's greatest difficulty memory debugging

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Memory errors in C and C++ programs are bad: they're common, and they can have serious consequences. Many of the gravest security notices from the Computer Emergency Response Team are simple memory errors. Many of today's C and C++ coders seem to regard memory errors as uncontrollable and mysterious afflictions from which one can only recover, not prevent. It's not so. This article shows that it's possible to understand all the essentials of good memory-related coding.

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