Yeah, it seems to me that it was an oversight that networking wasn't encrypted in the first place. When lots of these protocols were being developed, security didn't seem to be much of a consideration.
When the protocols were being developed, CPU cycles were very expensive.
Encryption is an application that requires a lot of CPU cycles.
Today CPU cycles are trivially cheap, so we can casually think of things like encrypting all network traffic on the fly. But that wouldn't have been practical until relatively recently.
... has been the one that's been going on over the last few weeks on Twitter between "Fake John McCain" and "Fake Barack Obama". Mostly because the fake versions of the candidates are free to swear and say what they REALLY think, unlike the real ones.
Time was that you could get away with selling crapware because all the alternatives cost money, so it was harder for people to check them out. FOSS alternatives can be checked out for free, so when people hit a speed bump with your product they're likely to just go check them out. And if they're at least as good as what you're selling, people are liable to stay with them.
The lesson? If you want to make money selling software, evaluate the FOSS alternatives just like you would evaluate a competitor, and be sure that there is something about what you're selling that makes it better than what other people are giving away.
It might have something to do with Google parsing all your emails to serve you ads. If you wrote emails from your Gmail account to anyone complaining about the lack of group-chat, is it unrealistic to assume Google read them?
... the Model 100 is kinda the definition of the perfect portable:
Insane battery life on bog-standard AA batteries you can buy in any airport gift shop
Full size keyboard for easy typing
Screen you can read in sunlight
Case tough enough to take a serious beating without a flinch
Sure, it doesn't have the bells and whistles the kids are into like "color" or "graphics", but in a portable for writers none of that is really important -- which is why many journalists held on to their Model 100s long after they became ludicrously obsolete.
With the demise of products like the Psion Series 5 (another writer's portable), the niche that the Model 100 pioneered has basically been abandoned; the only thing close to it today is the EEE PC, which would be an ideal spiritual successor to the hardy 100 if the keyboard wasn't so danged small...
If moving to IE8 is going to "break" your site, it's already "broken" for anybody who views it in any browser other than IE. That's about 20% of the browsing population (and more every day).
If I was a corporation and my web development team had been shipping a site that flat didn't work for 1/5 of my customers, I'd have fired them long before this.
Sometimes I get a song stuck in my head and I only want to hear it once or twice, then forget about it for another few years.
What you want is last.fm -- you can listen to any song up to 3 times a day for free. Any more than that and you have to subscribe. Not great for heavy listening, but perfect for when you get a sudden jones.
(Note: not all songs are available for free listening on last.fm yet. They're in the process of moving their whole library to the free-play model, but it'll take some time to get everything moved over. In my experience about 70% of the tracks I search for are good to go.)
It's not that people won't pay for music, most people would happily pay for high quality DRM free music, but they don't want to offer that. They'd rather come up with stupid schemes like this.
1998 called, it wants its rant back.
Want high quality DRM free music? Here you go. Non-DRMed MP3 files, VBR-encoded with LAME (average bit rate 256kpbs), for $0.89 each. They even fill out the ID3 tags for you (including album art, for pete's sake) so you can just drop it into your music player of choice and go.
I agree Lala sucks, but the days when you could claim some moral legitimacy for leeching music torrents are over. There's really no justification for "getting it for free" anymore when there are completely legal, easy, and geek-friendly ways to get the music that also puts some money in the artist's pocket.
Or maybe they think AV is important to sell product to people (like corporate IT drones) who buy based on the number of checkboxes ticked off on the feature list.
In other words, they don't think the AV feature is really useful, but they can't sell a security product that doesn't have the "AV" checkbox ticked on the feature list. So they grab the cheapest possible option (an open source toolkit), roll it in, and now they can check that box.
(I have no idea if this is actually Sun's thinking or not, I'm just pointing out that there could be explanations for why they'd ship Clam that don't invalidate Stewart's assertion.)
Check the extension's listing on addons.mozilla.org. The site checks what version of FF you are using, so if you're browsing with FF3 and you look up an extension that hasn't been updated, it'll say "this add-on is for older versions of Firefox".
My suggestion is to slap a number on your standards. e.g. PC Gaming Score: 710 for this years Ultra, and 920 for next years. Every last mouth breather out there knows that higher numbers are usually better and will assume so, even when they aren't... The goal is to provide a single number that a user can look at and say: Okay, the required number on gameX is lower, so I can play it. No worries.
It's that simple. No worrying about whether uber-awesome is greater than mega-extreme, or whether it's last years mega-extreme or this year's mega-extreme. It's, "is the number on the box of this game less than the number on my machine".
A computer with a base score of 1.0 or 2.0 usually has sufficient performance to do most general computing tasks, such as run office productivity applications and search the Internet. However, a computer with this base score is generally not powerful enough to run Windows Aero, or the advanced multimedia experiences that are available with Windows Vista.
A computer with a base score of 3.0 is able to run Windows Aero and many new features of Windows Vista at a basic level. Some of the new Windows Vista advanced features might not have all of their functionality available. For example, a machine with a base score of 3.0 can display the Windows Vista theme at a resolution of 1280 × 1024, but might struggle to run the theme on multiple monitors. Or, it can play digital TV content but might struggle to play High Definition Television (HDTV) content.
A computer with a base score of 4.0 or 5.0 is able to run all new features of Windows Vista with full functionality, and it is able to support high-end, graphics-intensive experiences, such as multiplayer and 3 D gaming and recording and playback of HDTV content. Computers with a base score of 5.0 were the highest performing computers available when Windows Vista was released.
I'm surprised that nobody yet has mentioned the most obvious reason why Shuttleworth would want this.
Canonical shipped shipped their latest Ubuntu release, 8.04 ("Hardy Heron"), last month. Canonical wanted Hardy to include Firefox 3 instead of the getting-a-bit-long-in-the-tooth Firefox 2. However, since Mozilla's release target for FF3 was a month after the release target for Hardy, Ubuntu had three choices, none of them ideal: put off the move to FF3 for the next release (six months down the road), ship Hardy with a beta version of FF3, or delay shipping Hardy until FF3 had shipped. They ended up shipping with Firefox 3 Beta 5.
This matters because Hardy is a so-called "Long Term Support" (LTS) release, which Ubuntu commits to supporting for eighteen months instead of the standard six (for customers who don't want to be updating their OS every six months). So now Canonical is on the hook to support a beta release of Firefox until long after FF3 final is released and the betas are forgotten.
I would presume that Shuttleworth wants coordination in distro release cycles because it would give him more leverage with third parties in situations like this. If Canonical says to Mozilla "hurry up and finish FF3 so we can make our release date", that's easy to ignore because it's just one distro. If EVERY distro is saying that to Mozilla, they'd be more inclined to listen -- and probably more likely to orient their own release cycles to fit with those of the distros.
Regardless, the biggest reason there are all these conspiracy theories that the Governments aren't forthcoming with their secrets. Personally, I believe this is the worst thing possible in a democratic society in a peace time environment.
But they fixed that already! Now we're constantly at "war" with somebody, so there's no danger of a "peace time environment" ever breaking out again. Problem solved!
Slashdot Mirror
OpenSUSE does.
Well, you get some nifty "VTEC" stickers...
... would be: "Irrelevant game publisher finds way to become even less relevant."
When the protocols were being developed, CPU cycles were very expensive.
Encryption is an application that requires a lot of CPU cycles.
Today CPU cycles are trivially cheap, so we can casually think of things like encrypting all network traffic on the fly. But that wouldn't have been practical until relatively recently.
... has been the one that's been going on over the last few weeks on Twitter between "Fake John McCain" and "Fake Barack Obama". Mostly because the fake versions of the candidates are free to swear and say what they REALLY think, unlike the real ones.
Repeat after me: "space marines".
Someone actually did. And it's pretty fun to boot.
Meet Flock, which integrates with most popular webmail systems and most popular social networks.
... it's that people won't pay for bad software.
Time was that you could get away with selling crapware because all the alternatives cost money, so it was harder for people to check them out. FOSS alternatives can be checked out for free, so when people hit a speed bump with your product they're likely to just go check them out. And if they're at least as good as what you're selling, people are liable to stay with them.
The lesson? If you want to make money selling software, evaluate the FOSS alternatives just like you would evaluate a competitor, and be sure that there is something about what you're selling that makes it better than what other people are giving away.
It might have something to do with Google parsing all your emails to serve you ads. If you wrote emails from your Gmail account to anyone complaining about the lack of group-chat, is it unrealistic to assume Google read them?
... the Model 100 is kinda the definition of the perfect portable:
Sure, it doesn't have the bells and whistles the kids are into like "color" or "graphics", but in a portable for writers none of that is really important -- which is why many journalists held on to their Model 100s long after they became ludicrously obsolete.
With the demise of products like the Psion Series 5 (another writer's portable), the niche that the Model 100 pioneered has basically been abandoned; the only thing close to it today is the EEE PC, which would be an ideal spiritual successor to the hardy 100 if the keyboard wasn't so danged small...
If moving to IE8 is going to "break" your site, it's already "broken" for anybody who views it in any browser other than IE. That's about 20% of the browsing population (and more every day).
If I was a corporation and my web development team had been shipping a site that flat didn't work for 1/5 of my customers, I'd have fired them long before this.
KDE 4.1 has completely removed the ability to put files or icons on the desktop. That doesn't really sound like "You can do it this way, but you can also configure your own way" to me...
What you want is last.fm -- you can listen to any song up to 3 times a day for free. Any more than that and you have to subscribe. Not great for heavy listening, but perfect for when you get a sudden jones.
(Note: not all songs are available for free listening on last.fm yet. They're in the process of moving their whole library to the free-play model, but it'll take some time to get everything moved over. In my experience about 70% of the tracks I search for are good to go.)
1998 called, it wants its rant back.
Want high quality DRM free music? Here you go. Non-DRMed MP3 files, VBR-encoded with LAME (average bit rate 256kpbs), for $0.89 each. They even fill out the ID3 tags for you (including album art, for pete's sake) so you can just drop it into your music player of choice and go.
I agree Lala sucks, but the days when you could claim some moral legitimacy for leeching music torrents are over. There's really no justification for "getting it for free" anymore when there are completely legal, easy, and geek-friendly ways to get the music that also puts some money in the artist's pocket.
... and if they require me to pipe my mail through Google, I'll take my business somewhere that doesn't.
Because memory costs practically nothing and my time is expensive?
Or maybe they think AV is important to sell product to people (like corporate IT drones) who buy based on the number of checkboxes ticked off on the feature list. In other words, they don't think the AV feature is really useful, but they can't sell a security product that doesn't have the "AV" checkbox ticked on the feature list. So they grab the cheapest possible option (an open source toolkit), roll it in, and now they can check that box. (I have no idea if this is actually Sun's thinking or not, I'm just pointing out that there could be explanations for why they'd ship Clam that don't invalidate Stewart's assertion.)
Check the extension's listing on addons.mozilla.org. The site checks what version of FF you are using, so if you're browsing with FF3 and you look up an extension that hasn't been updated, it'll say "this add-on is for older versions of Firefox".
Congratulations, you just (re)invented the Windows Experience Index:
Am I the only one struck by the irony of talking about how "apt" the name is of a new distribution featuring Yet Another Packaging System?
I'm surprised that nobody yet has mentioned the most obvious reason why Shuttleworth would want this.
Canonical shipped shipped their latest Ubuntu release, 8.04 ("Hardy Heron"), last month. Canonical wanted Hardy to include Firefox 3 instead of the getting-a-bit-long-in-the-tooth Firefox 2. However, since Mozilla's release target for FF3 was a month after the release target for Hardy, Ubuntu had three choices, none of them ideal: put off the move to FF3 for the next release (six months down the road), ship Hardy with a beta version of FF3, or delay shipping Hardy until FF3 had shipped. They ended up shipping with Firefox 3 Beta 5.
This matters because Hardy is a so-called "Long Term Support" (LTS) release, which Ubuntu commits to supporting for eighteen months instead of the standard six (for customers who don't want to be updating their OS every six months). So now Canonical is on the hook to support a beta release of Firefox until long after FF3 final is released and the betas are forgotten.
I would presume that Shuttleworth wants coordination in distro release cycles because it would give him more leverage with third parties in situations like this. If Canonical says to Mozilla "hurry up and finish FF3 so we can make our release date", that's easy to ignore because it's just one distro. If EVERY distro is saying that to Mozilla, they'd be more inclined to listen -- and probably more likely to orient their own release cycles to fit with those of the distros.
But they fixed that already! Now we're constantly at "war" with somebody, so there's no danger of a "peace time environment" ever breaking out again. Problem solved!
Six months after Microsoft's CTO declares WinForms dead, Mono supports it. That's timing, baby!
Considering this is from the people who brought you Java, naming it after a dog might not be particularly inappropriate ;-)