Either that or they just embrace the ODF spec, extend it in proprietary ways that won't work in other office suites, and then extinguish it. That way MS Office will read everything but still produce documents that only work properly in Office.
I'm routinely amazed at people who run linux and people who have never heard of it. I've sent away a laptop to be repaired and told that the hard drive has died when I knew it had a perfectly good linux install on it and that it was not the source of the problem. You'd think most electronics repair geeks would have some experience, but not this guy, even though he advertised his business on the web.
And then you get random blue collar workers running it because it can revive old hardware, it helps them get more from their tiny discretionary income, and it helps them do their job when they have management that will never give them approval to buy software.
Ahhh, proper journalism... I remember that era with such vivid nostalgia! How the unicorns pranced merrily in the fields, sun glinting from their horns. If you got up at dawn, you could see the shimmering of tooth fairies as they completed their morning errands. And back in those days, we were within a few dollars of actually ending third world poverty. I reckon it could have been solved if only we had donated the money we saved from our offices going paperless.
"I just don't get the hype about Apple's products."
Most people like easy. They believe what the television tells them to believe, they delegate the responsibility of raising their children to corporations and the government, they drive an automatic instead of a manual, and if they have the money, they might buy an iProduct. Because it's easy, and they like easy.
Given the choice between something that is powerful, and something just as powerful and easy to use, I'll take the latter, sure. But these days the usability gap between Open Source and everything else has closed. Where something like Ubuntu is now, and the rate it has gotten to that point, I see it getting there soon enough.
The closer that gap is, the more pointless the Mac fanaticism. I'd bet most of the fanboyism is confined to older Mac converts who are metaphorically speaking still stuck in the Phillipines, fighting for their emperor.
"That is a battle a parent can *never* win against a determined teenager. This is an intelligent human being who lives in your house."
I think that's what it comes down to. If your child is as smart as the parent or smarter, and the parent does a good job of educating, the child will win any security battles - he always has time up his sleeve. It might still be a good education for him though to break through any barricade you set up. And some healthy paranoia is always a good thing.
And with an intelligent child, you can put forward a defensible rationale for how you would like him to act. i.e. It's a good idea not to do x, because y will happen.
Linux on a thumb drive using TOR to browse. A slow way to get your pr0n, to be sure. Probably easier to just cadge pr0n from his classmates using thumb drives or DVDs.
You are correct, at least for a subset of corporate activities. For other things, Open Source (you say Linux, but I think you really mean FOSS) is superior for corporations. Getting rid of MS, bugs and eternal upgrade cycles improves your bottom line. Lowering barriers to entry means cheaper labor. Open Document Format means that you can be sure of reading and modifying company documents for eternity.
FOSS software also holds the promise of flexibility. Need a specific feature? Post a bounty on it with some of the money you are saving. It also buys some free advertising, because FOSS software is about freedom, people like freedom, and your company is funding it.
It's mainly the controlling institutions of media etc whose empires are being overthrown (to some extent - people will still play MMORPGs and other companies can still advertise in them, etc.) They aren't going quietly into that good night, but this genie is well and truly out of the bottle.
I'd love to get a comment from Theo de Raadt on the subject. This (with 3D drivers) is what he appears to be after, it would be good to hear confirmation from him. Maybe he's holding out the praise until they release the 3D specs.
"The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which 'automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release."
On the face of it, this is not that different from Amazon's Statistically Improbably Phrases, which have been around for at least several years now. Every brain is unique, and it's not surprising that each brain creates writings with some sort of statistically identifiable "signature". Especially intelligent people, who have a larger vocabulary and pose more threat to a state because of their leadership potential.
Surely organizations like NSA, with orders of magnitude more money to throw at such problems, have something better and tuned to identifying anonymous authors.
I'm curious - how exactly have the past few years been any different to the previous 50-100 years?
The main difference is that today the dirty laundry is aired, not that the dirty laundry didn't somehow exist a few years ago. It always was there if you knew where to look, it's just so much easier to find and so much harder for the authorities to bury thanks to the internet.
A lot of people would like nothing more than to cling to the notion that wars before Viet Nam (or even Iraq) were a fought by heroes (sometimes even the greatest generation), who always fought completely fair against the most dastardly enemies (who would pull the most shameless tricks, killing babies) etc etc, the same way most of us would much rather just shut up and enjoy our hamburgers instead of taking a tour of the local slaughterhouse or factory farm.
I realize that, but the CPU industry is not a monopoly. And for at least one of Intel's competitors, the production of such a device would lead to increased profits, not decreased.
Make something with the equivalent power usage of Via's Eden 15000, but faster. Surely Intel has the research budget to accomplish it too.
I want a small, fanless computing appliance that is going to last 20 years or more with zero maintenance other than software. No dust, no noise, no ticking time bomb spinning parts and electrolytic capacitors. Something that will not require me buying a huge solar panel if I want to go that route. If I have data storage needs, USB, firewire or eSATA external hard drive enclosures will suffice.
The deal with this device is that it is intercepting the nerves that go to the larynx (from what I can tell from the article). I don't think that's much more than one channel.
Consider what your feet and hands do with driving. It's generally easier to control something with a bunch of different channels available to yourself, and you get more bandwidth. Kind of like hunting and pecking versus touch typing. Or playing an FPS with just the keyboard compared to mouse + keyboard. The brain will use as many channels as it can for control. May take longer to learn but the end result is more complete control, with less fatigue.
"Sure, it's always been there, but the stench seems to be getting stronger..."
The only difference is that the conduit by which that stench gets communicated to the public now has greater bandwidth, thanks to the internet. For now.
Re:Wine is essential to Windows-Linux transition
on
AMD To Open ATI Specs
·
· Score: 1
"he started WoW" and "It took some tweaking to get adequate framerates, but again, nothing my friend (a Mech. Eng. major) couldn't do himself."
Make sure you congratulate your friend when he graduates with an Economics degree in 2013 or so.
"Anyone else suspect that we might possibly be seeing the start of the slow decline of Microsoft's empire?"
Yes. I can almost taste it. From the moment I got Ubuntu installed and working in ways that I didn't expect linux to from my previous experience (detecting stuff, opening any document I cared to throw at it, etc), I've been of the opinion that linux will take over a lot sooner than most people expect, and when it happens, it will eat into M$' market share in a flood. After that, there will be minority holdouts who have legacy apps etc. The jump from 10% or so to 80% I'd expect to take place in 5 years or less.
The reason I think it will happen that way is that the bigger the user base, the better the software, including apps written specifically for the purposes of migration. Enough users, you get the best games being written in linux, and M$ compatibility for legacy games becomes way more profitable. You get hardware drivers and specs opened immediately, with a working driver for linux/BSD the moment it hits the streets.
With free software, the switching costs are approaching zero, and the benefits are immense. No malware (for now), no vendor lock-in, no crappy default applications like notepad.exe unless you pay $$$, download any software you want legally, easily, for free, and with a minimum of fear for spyware.
You also have a much larger army of backyard enthusiasts doing installs on other people's old computers just to hear "Thanks! My computer runs so much better now! You've saved me hundreds of dollars! I can't believe it's free!?!". I mean, that was how the old Doom shareware spread. "Here, check out this free game!", "Wow! That's the coolest thing I've ever seen on a PC!".
I can remember reading a magazine article around the year 2000 that Bill Gates was hiring someone to manage his investments as he slowly divested himself from Microsoft. Bill Gates is many things, but fool is not one of them. His challenge has been to keep the stock value high enough, long enough, that he doesn't collapse the price.
There is another interested party, although they would pay for/conduct such research in order to prove the opposite.
3. The same PC advocates who attempt to "prove" with fabricated research that men and women are the same, that nature has a small influence wrt nurture, the myth of the noble savage, etc etc. See Boaz, Mead, Freud, Gould et al.
Slashdot Mirror
Either that or they just embrace the ODF spec, extend it in proprietary ways that won't work in other office suites, and then extinguish it. That way MS Office will read everything but still produce documents that only work properly in Office.
Do not feed them natural oil!
I'm routinely amazed at people who run linux and people who have never heard of it. I've sent away a laptop to be repaired and told that the hard drive has died when I knew it had a perfectly good linux install on it and that it was not the source of the problem. You'd think most electronics repair geeks would have some experience, but not this guy, even though he advertised his business on the web.
And then you get random blue collar workers running it because it can revive old hardware, it helps them get more from their tiny discretionary income, and it helps them do their job when they have management that will never give them approval to buy software.
Ahhh, proper journalism... I remember that era with such vivid nostalgia! How the unicorns pranced merrily in the fields, sun glinting from their horns. If you got up at dawn, you could see the shimmering of tooth fairies as they completed their morning errands. And back in those days, we were within a few dollars of actually ending third world poverty. I reckon it could have been solved if only we had donated the money we saved from our offices going paperless.
I'm curious how he might manage to cram 300lbs of ash into the ashtray of a Volkswagen beetle.
"I just don't get the hype about Apple's products."
Most people like easy. They believe what the television tells them to believe, they delegate the responsibility of raising their children to corporations and the government, they drive an automatic instead of a manual, and if they have the money, they might buy an iProduct. Because it's easy, and they like easy.
Given the choice between something that is powerful, and something just as powerful and easy to use, I'll take the latter, sure. But these days the usability gap between Open Source and everything else has closed. Where something like Ubuntu is now, and the rate it has gotten to that point, I see it getting there soon enough.
The closer that gap is, the more pointless the Mac fanaticism. I'd bet most of the fanboyism is confined to older Mac converts who are metaphorically speaking still stuck in the Phillipines, fighting for their emperor.
"That is a battle a parent can *never* win against a determined teenager. This is an intelligent human being who lives in your house."
I think that's what it comes down to. If your child is as smart as the parent or smarter, and the parent does a good job of educating, the child will win any security battles - he always has time up his sleeve. It might still be a good education for him though to break through any barricade you set up. And some healthy paranoia is always a good thing.
And with an intelligent child, you can put forward a defensible rationale for how you would like him to act. i.e. It's a good idea not to do x, because y will happen.
Linux on a thumb drive using TOR to browse. A slow way to get your pr0n, to be sure. Probably easier to just cadge pr0n from his classmates using thumb drives or DVDs.
As long as there is a safe mode to boot into, it shouldn't be an issue. But yeah, better that it be an option.
You are correct, at least for a subset of corporate activities. For other things, Open Source (you say Linux, but I think you really mean FOSS) is superior for corporations. Getting rid of MS, bugs and eternal upgrade cycles improves your bottom line. Lowering barriers to entry means cheaper labor. Open Document Format means that you can be sure of reading and modifying company documents for eternity.
FOSS software also holds the promise of flexibility. Need a specific feature? Post a bounty on it with some of the money you are saving. It also buys some free advertising, because FOSS software is about freedom, people like freedom, and your company is funding it.
It's mainly the controlling institutions of media etc whose empires are being overthrown (to some extent - people will still play MMORPGs and other companies can still advertise in them, etc.) They aren't going quietly into that good night, but this genie is well and truly out of the bottle.
"and be airborne in minutes."
Oh come now. Surely it has to take at least an hour or two to charge up the Thetan deflector shields. A clear can't be too careful these days.
the brazen bull http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazen_bull has got to be up there.
I'd love to get a comment from Theo de Raadt on the subject. This (with 3D drivers) is what he appears to be after, it would be good to hear confirmation from him. Maybe he's holding out the praise until they release the 3D specs.
"The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which 'automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release."
On the face of it, this is not that different from Amazon's Statistically Improbably Phrases, which have been around for at least several years now. Every brain is unique, and it's not surprising that each brain creates writings with some sort of statistically identifiable "signature". Especially intelligent people, who have a larger vocabulary and pose more threat to a state because of their leadership potential.
Surely organizations like NSA, with orders of magnitude more money to throw at such problems, have something better and tuned to identifying anonymous authors.
"the past few years have been shameful."
I'm curious - how exactly have the past few years been any different to the previous 50-100 years?
The main difference is that today the dirty laundry is aired, not that the dirty laundry didn't somehow exist a few years ago. It always was there if you knew where to look, it's just so much easier to find and so much harder for the authorities to bury thanks to the internet.
A lot of people would like nothing more than to cling to the notion that wars before Viet Nam (or even Iraq) were a fought by heroes (sometimes even the greatest generation), who always fought completely fair against the most dastardly enemies (who would pull the most shameless tricks, killing babies) etc etc, the same way most of us would much rather just shut up and enjoy our hamburgers instead of taking a tour of the local slaughterhouse or factory farm.
I realize that, but the CPU industry is not a monopoly. And for at least one of Intel's competitors, the production of such a device would lead to increased profits, not decreased.
Make something with the equivalent power usage of Via's Eden 15000, but faster. Surely Intel has the research budget to accomplish it too.
I want a small, fanless computing appliance that is going to last 20 years or more with zero maintenance other than software. No dust, no noise, no ticking time bomb spinning parts and electrolytic capacitors. Something that will not require me buying a huge solar panel if I want to go that route. If I have data storage needs, USB, firewire or eSATA external hard drive enclosures will suffice.
Slayer's lead singer was even born until 16 years after the war ended.
The deal with this device is that it is intercepting the nerves that go to the larynx (from what I can tell from the article). I don't think that's much more than one channel.
Consider what your feet and hands do with driving. It's generally easier to control something with a bunch of different channels available to yourself, and you get more bandwidth. Kind of like hunting and pecking versus touch typing. Or playing an FPS with just the keyboard compared to mouse + keyboard. The brain will use as many channels as it can for control. May take longer to learn but the end result is more complete control, with less fatigue.
"Sure, it's always been there, but the stench seems to be getting stronger..."
The only difference is that the conduit by which that stench gets communicated to the public now has greater bandwidth, thanks to the internet. For now.
"he started WoW" and "It took some tweaking to get adequate framerates, but again, nothing my friend (a Mech. Eng. major) couldn't do himself."
Make sure you congratulate your friend when he graduates with an Economics degree in 2013 or so.
"Anyone else suspect that we might possibly be seeing the start of the slow decline of Microsoft's empire?"
Yes. I can almost taste it. From the moment I got Ubuntu installed and working in ways that I didn't expect linux to from my previous experience (detecting stuff, opening any document I cared to throw at it, etc), I've been of the opinion that linux will take over a lot sooner than most people expect, and when it happens, it will eat into M$' market share in a flood. After that, there will be minority holdouts who have legacy apps etc. The jump from 10% or so to 80% I'd expect to take place in 5 years or less.
The reason I think it will happen that way is that the bigger the user base, the better the software, including apps written specifically for the purposes of migration. Enough users, you get the best games being written in linux, and M$ compatibility for legacy games becomes way more profitable. You get hardware drivers and specs opened immediately, with a working driver for linux/BSD the moment it hits the streets.
With free software, the switching costs are approaching zero, and the benefits are immense. No malware (for now), no vendor lock-in, no crappy default applications like notepad.exe unless you pay $$$, download any software you want legally, easily, for free, and with a minimum of fear for spyware.
You also have a much larger army of backyard enthusiasts doing installs on other people's old computers just to hear "Thanks! My computer runs so much better now! You've saved me hundreds of dollars! I can't believe it's free!?!". I mean, that was how the old Doom shareware spread. "Here, check out this free game!", "Wow! That's the coolest thing I've ever seen on a PC!".
I can remember reading a magazine article around the year 2000 that Bill Gates was hiring someone to manage his investments as he slowly divested himself from Microsoft. Bill Gates is many things, but fool is not one of them. His challenge has been to keep the stock value high enough, long enough, that he doesn't collapse the price.
I thought we were getting a new RPN graphing calculator. Doh.
There is another interested party, although they would pay for/conduct such research in order to prove the opposite.
3. The same PC advocates who attempt to "prove" with fabricated research that men and women are the same, that nature has a small influence wrt nurture, the myth of the noble savage, etc etc. See Boaz, Mead, Freud, Gould et al.
with a 21 inch monitor (nice big text by default), OpenBSD, no X, just a terminal. What's not to like?
"These folks don't need any sophistication. and they need only the most basic options."