I'm not sure you're making a valid comparison. If I choose any particular piece of Egyptian recorded information then there's a good chance that it is destroyed. The fact that some material survived several millennia is both impressive and interesting, but very much material survives from the 60s even if some has been lost.
I mean how many records of the ancient Egyptian space race survive to this day? I rest my case.
Yep, I'm sure that's right AC. Practically everyone rate themselves as above average drivers; personally, I'm more comfortable with the insurance companies statistics than your anonymous assertions.
Perhaps in the future you'll need to adjust your personal driving style while getting form A to B on the public roads, and save your enjoyment of more aggressive driving styles for leisure time on private race tracks.
There is no eventually about it. In the UK we already have a database of all vehicle license plates which is linked to data on which cars have insurance cover provided by the insurance industry. A few years ago it was made a legal requirement to make a declaration to the vehicle licensing authority if your car is "off the road", i.e. not being used on a public highway and therefore not requiring insurance.
There is already a list of the registered car owners without insurance (and also without having paid the road tax) who have not declared their car legally off the road. The database is already linked to license plate recognition systems so if a car which is declared off the road drives past it will be flagged and they can be prosecuted.
This state of affairs is largely supported by the population as there has been a significant increase in uninsured drivers who are involved in accidents (as insurance costs rose and recession bit people stopped renewing their cover). The cost of this ends up being born by the innocent drivers insurer, pushing up premiums for everyone else.
In the world of browser makers, six months is a long time ago. If your browser hasn't received a security update since March then it's not a supported browser. As the wikipedia page you link to documents, 3.6 is not currently a Mozilla supported browser, Firefox 14 and 10esr are. 3.6 was retired when Mozilla decided upon their enterprise support releases earlier in the year; these are supported for about 9 months rather than 6 weeks.
As a Firefox user, I see literally dozens of google Ads suggesting I install Chrome, or upgrade to a faster browsing experience, or other similar messages, every day. Google put popups to that effect on their search homepage. I'll hazard a guess that this bears some responsibility for market share decline. Some is no doubt due to perceptions that FF is slow/a memory hog in comparison to Chrome.
Neither of these factors will be affected by changing UI to copy your competitor. Firefox needs to carve out their own niche, and the seemingly deliberate activities to remove all discernible difference, and hence possible competitive advantage they have over their more highly resourced competitor, seems stupidly short sited.
There is no place in the USA with genuine at-will employment. If you fire someone, there's a chance you're going to get sued.
But then, there's very little that you can do at all (which might piss off someone else) which doesn't carry some risk of being sued, even if the suit is without merit.
I should add that I'm not suggesting Mozilla shouldn't automatically update their users by default. Getting updates is the only way to keep secure and those who don't know how to find the option setting to turn this off are definitely in need of security by default. I just think with this system comes responsibility and Mozilla don't care enough about supporting the features & experiences their current users have got used to.
That's the good. The bad is extensions silently failing; interface being suddenly reorganised without any explanation.
The Mozilla view seems to be that Web Apps can already act in this capricious fashion, so desktop applications should too. This just seems to be taking what is bad and unempowering about web applications and bringing it to the desktop.
The latest interface idea is to reorganise the address bar to remove the site icon, get rid of the blue https signifier and replace it with a greyed out padlock (once more it's a coincidence how similar this ends up being to Chrome). I understand the reasoning for removing the site icon, but developers seem to think it's OK to jump from telling users that they should ignore any lock in that position, and look for the blue text, to a new UI which is the exact opposite. And they wish to push these changes silently to users; I can only assume they don't work with actual end users in the real world.
Every UI change has a cost to users in adapting to it, and a cost to those who support end users (businesses using the browser or supporting end users of browser based software), this needs to be balanced against the value of the new UI. At the very least the experience for users moving from the old to the new system needs to be considered. Users are much less excited by new stuff than developers, and they're much more put out be needless change. One of the effects of Mozilla's open development process is being able to see this disregard across their bugzilla/maillists/wikis.
I'm guessing it's the fact a random hacker looking to "add some security" to their project has heard of OpenSSL and already has it on their system.
Most developers are not security experts so will assess a library on awareness, features, reputation etc.; assessing security is not easy so the choice is almost certainly made on the other factors, and it's rational not to trust a library you've not heard of before for security. The other libraries have their own limitations/missing features or other warts which might push you towards OpenSSL.
Personally, I'd trust GnuTLS over OpenSSL, but then not all projects are happy using an LGPL library.
I'd be even more happy if someone made the effort to provide a TLS implementation which was proved correct. Code proofs are a lot of work, but SSL/TLS is so widely used that it ought to repay the effort.
But, it's good enough that so far nobody's thought it's worth the effort to write a new SSL library from scratch.
Err, yes, apart from GnuTLS, Mozilla's NSS, Gutmann's cryptlib, yaSSL (there's enough to name one yet another
Well, it certainly isn't an exercise in teaching kids how to merely "program" because - well - we have every single deskop and laptop in the world for that. Nor is it an exercise in teaching kids how to electronically interface to the outside world - a dozen boards already provide that, as does a parallel/serial to USB interface. So what unique property do you think the Pi offers? Why exactly would anyone want a Pi, apart from "it seems hyped a lot so it must be good", please?
Assuming you're the same AC who's been posting similar comments up this thread then you seem to have paid plenty enough attention to Raspberry Pi to know that's not true. The rational of RPi has been pretty clearly laid out:
1) The is not the same supply of students arriving to universities with home programming experience as there were in recent decades.
2) The vast majority of kids no longer have access to devices for them to program:
2a) At home "the computer" is needed to do homework, and frequently for the family to access online services and retailers. It's too important to allow kids to potentially mess up programming. Kids may have access to a games console, but that's a sealed device.
2b) At school computers are reserved for ITC lessons and can't be used for programming as it "might mess up powerpoint".
(whereas in the 80s the home computer was just a recreational device and while you could use it to play games it started up to a BASIC interpretor inviting kids to try programming it).
3) These things are related and by solving (2) you can affect (1).
4) A computer that is priced at less than the cost of a textbook and can plug into a TV as display will be accessible to kids and school classrooms in a way more expensive devices are not.
5) It's possible to design, build and distribute a functioning device for less than $25/35.
You could reasonably argue that one or more of these assumptions don't hold, or that what they propose will fail, either for technical or sociological reasons to solve the problem. But saying that they are trying to do something other than teach kids how to program is silly.
As to why many people beyond educational charity supporters are interested in R-Pi: I guess because it offers a lower price point than the competitor hobbyist ARM boards; a more powerful and familiar option than microcontroller boards such as Arduino; and an easier route into projects using an embedded computer due to the mainstream distribution support.
Personally, it inspired me to want one for the picture viewer/programmable information display panel I've been meaning to build for ages. An R-Pi which runs at less than a watt will be perfect. My previous plan was to use the guts from a defunct netbook; I'd never considered ordering something like a beagle bone -- not only more expensive but needing an expansion board for video out.
Given the enthusiasm I've seen (among some) teachers and children for the device, I'm persuaded that it does serve a need not covered elsewhere. Whether slashdot readers should/should not like it, is only relevant to the degree that slashdot readers become involved in creating the software ecosystem that will be needed for this to be a success.
the company might be installing them just to get this kind of "look how much we care about your data" type of publicity
Do you think? Seeing as this has now made the BBC news, complete with image showing the interxion logo, I'd say the pods have paid for themselves already
Interxion have got their message about how seriously they take their customers uptime and how far they go to plan for eventualities out to readers of Data Center Knowledge (and now to Slashdot). I'd say money well spent, regardless of whether anyone will use the pods for more than publicity shots (or even if Interxion seriously expected them to).
That said, I'm not sure that Atlanta compares to London in terms of aging, and seriously creaking transport infrastructure. e.g. Atlanta has what is supposedly world's airport handling 90m travelers on its five runways; Heathrow handles 70m on just two runways both of which operate at over 98% capacity (plans to add a third were dropped when the current government was elected). The Victorian metro system is similarly overloaded having the distinction of being the oldest in the world while having to serve a population of almost 8 million.
It's not all that odd. Panasonic already do the same trick with some of their Lumix cameras. It makes a lot of sense as all lenses produce a circular image.
I can see your point, but that is the way the warranty tends to work. In other news, any software I've ever seen which actually comes with a warranty always covers only the cost of the software not the damage it failing might cost you.
We pay a small extra charge on the Dell kit we buy to be able to keep any failed HDD rather than return it if a drive is replaced under warranty. We have the old ones destroyed on site using one of these: http://www.edrsolutions.com/europe/solution.asp
Really, the cost of HDDs (even with post Thailand flood increases) is as nothing to the value of data on them.
On my home machines I don't bother. The bulk of MY storage for photographs, video, music, etc is hardly top secret and the relatively small proportion with my financial records etc are stored on an encrypted partition.
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.
