(no subject)

[roadrunnertwice]

Today's Cat and Girl brought me great joy, so I thought I'd share.

Also AWESOME: Read the customer reviews for this book. (Then you can go back to the original Schneier post. Unless you're on vacation from context.)

EDIT: Tim Bray makes an interesting point: there are incentives in place encouraging automakers to sell miscalibrated speedometers that report higher-than-actual speeds. Whether they respond to these incentives is an open question; he's just noting that they exist.

EDIT: Do you get mysterious evaporating Russian mystery robot pornmonger friends sometimes? It's a script. Irritating.

EDIT: Everything I see seems to indicate that Vista will be both the best OS Microsoft has produced and the absolute worst.

Comments

[kiplet.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've giggled so much at something that dry before. Wow.

[roadrunnertwice]

Man, you too? "...the other 99.999% of the book is filler in which those same ten digits are shamelessly reused!" And then I died.

[froborr.livejournal.com]

Saw the random digits thing weeks ago. Get with the times, man. =P

As for Vista, everything I've heard seems to indicate that it will be absolutely horrible, and I will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into upgrading. Intentional security flaws that only apply if you're using firewall and viruscan software not made by Microsoft? No registry access by users whatsoever, but programs can modify it freely? Reinstall limits? And, frankly, the question of why the fuck I'd want to buy a new OS when the current one, you know, works?

I'd be very interested to see any links you have suggesting that Vista actually improves anything. I have yet to hear about any features it possesses which will actually be of any benefit to anyone that doesn't work for Microsoft.

[roadrunnertwice]

Mostly, it looks like they've actually been thinking hard about user interface. And I'm not really talking about all the glass; I'm talking about making complicated decisions about workflow and completely rethinking ideas like the menu bar. (By all appearances, the Office 2007 "Ribbon" is amazing. And good on them for throwing away the classical menu bar in some places: there's only one way to do menu bars correctly, and Apple still has it patented for a while.)

But then there's the "decide which of seven versions you want" business, and all the ridiculous baked-in DRM bullshit. Anyway, I don't really have a dog in that fight; I already swore off Windows for good.