Methinks you don't know what you're talking about. Java is nothing to do with JavaScript, beyond the name which was something that came from Sun's marketing department.

No Linux version here in Australia. If it's accounting for 1/3 of sales, why the hell isn't it available?

I certainly won't buy the Windows version, but I'd definitely consider the Linux version.

Actually, there's ways you can make this scale. Your blacklist does a DNS lookup periodically, and modify the ISP routing table so that any IP that matches an entry in the blacklist is routed via the filter. So that means only IPs on the blacklist need the filtering logic.

A massive host using thousands of sites per IP is going to be slower, because somewhere on that host is bad stuff. But if you want to ensure you're fast, make sure you get your own IP for your host.

Not advocating for the plan, just that any technical problem, given enough resources, can be solved. We need to stop arguing that it's impossible in case someone makes it possible. We need to be arguing it's something we don't want.

Everyone knows that mattresses flollop in swamps. Not many of those in the Sahara!

advertisements will not be displayed on most people's browsers

Which definition of 'most' are you using?

An openly documented office file format is a step in the right direction.

But I think the bigger problem with MS Office is that the file format itself is horrid. From what I can gather, it's a cross between a raw object dump and a virtual memory cache.

This would explain why even MS Office can't reliably read its own documents, and why reverse engineering has been so slow and difficult.

In Microsoft Word 2.0, if you were editing a file on a floppy disk, and you swapped the floppy for another one (e.g. to copy text out of another file) without closing Word, then Word crashed and your doc file was trashed. I reckon the reason the file was trashed is that Word was using it as a swap file.

The same bug exists in Word 2002, released 10 years later. It happened to me when a network drive disconnected.

The fact that so many people rely on such a fragile file format is holding a lot of things back. How can anyone build on shifting sand? The sooner its replaced with something decent the better.

Imagine if digital cameras all used a closed image file format. A lossy format like JPEG, except that instead of discarding details humans don't notice, the format loses information that humans really care about. And instead of compressing data, it expands it.

I think a lot fewer people would enjoy using digital cameras if they worked that way.

Of course the file format is only the tip of the iceberg. There are substantial features in Word that are so broken that users quickly learn it's not worth using them. Other features are so unpredictable that they effectively discourage editing and experimentation. Expert users subconciously avoid features that cause problems.

I reckon the overall productive uptime with Word is about 90% - 95%, depending on the job at hand and the user. That's not too bad until you multiply 5% downtime by several hundred million daily users.

The quandry is that people won't be motivated to switch until something comes along that is both compatible and yet significantly improved. It's hard to be compatible with a dodgy file format, and projects like OpenOffice.org seem to be more of the same but open. It reminds me of the ponderous Mozilla browser. Mozilla and OOo are excellent projects, but what's needed is something like Firefox that strips off the barnacles, is open source so people can build on it, works roughly the way that people are used to, and yet simpler, faster and more reliable.

There are 5 billion literate people in the world. Isn't it time we had a writing tool that doesn't suck?

I am a Merchant, and American Express almost always does full validation for me. Especially if it's a large amount. They will validate the card id, and validate the delivery address and name.

Some countries operate as "franchises" and I have often had Amex even RING the local franchise in that country to validate the cards for me.

So all in all, Im pretty happy with Amex.

Mastercard, and Visa on the otherhand, suck.

I can only hope that the Verified by Visa system will have more takeup. But again, it's still only a hack on a flawed trust system.

As a female who is a programmer, and who is
involved in the open source/free software/geek
community on a day to day basis, I have to say
I'm getting kind of sick of seeing the same
things over and over again. One of the things
I see most often is ill-conceived affirmative
action intended to encourage women into technical
fields, often doing more harm than good. I mention this because I think CMU's
efforts in this case are *not* ill-conceived and
I want to make it clear that I'm not just saying
that because I'm female yada yada yada. As far
as I can tell from the very short and shallow
article, CMU seem to be doing the right things.
They're not setting arbitrary quotas, they're
just getting out there and selling the course in
places where women happen to be listening. They're not changing to course to fit the women,
but rather are pointing out the applicability of
the subject matter to a wide range of fields
(many of which just happen to appeal more to women). So it will be interesting to see how it
all turns out. I suppose it's unlikely that
they'll post followup stories, though :(

If anyone's interested, there's an article I wrote
a few weeks ago which you can read at
http://netizen.com.au/~skud/articles/c hick2/
about female geeks, how to encourage them, and
whether we actually want more of them in the
Open Source/Free Software community.

K.