Dr. Udo Erasmus wrote a book: Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill. He is an advocate for Omega 3. As far as I can tell, he seems to be a reasonable authority; when I have discussed his ideas with doctors they haven't contradicted anything.
According to Udo Erasmus, the human body cannot make Omega 3 but can convert Omega 3 from one form to another as needed. Thus you should be able to fill all your body's needs for Omega 3 from flax oil alone; while fish oil contains other forms of Omega 3 that are missing from flax, your body should be able to deal with it.
However, he says that some older people have a reduced ability to convert Omega 3 from one form to another, and those people might benefit from eating multiple types of Omega 3.
He recommends eating fresh fish such as salmon, or eating flax oil, but he is not a fan of fish oil capsules; he says those are often rancid and/or heavily processed to keep them stable.
If you are interested in Omega 3, it's worth taking five or ten minutes and reading through his FAQ.
I'm not thrilled with the security checkpoints at airports, but I do understand that an airplane can be turned into a giant guided missile that can take down a skyscraper. It may be that extreme measures are appropriate for security at an airport.
But how does it make sense to send a VIPR team to search people getting on or off a train? How do you justify that? Are they going to drive the train off the tracks and blow up a building?
"Oh maybe someone has a bomb in his luggage." How often do trains get blown up in America? What are the odds here? And even if the security becomes 100% effective on trains, what about bombs set on the train tracks? Searching train luggage seems completely futile to me.
Has a VIPR team ever caught a terrorist or found a bomb, ever?
Remember, we send people to prison for not paying taxes, or maybe take their homes away. Should we really be using tax dollars for VIPR teams?
Oh, you don't just disagree with my opinion; I'm wrong. Duly noted.
When Jobs came back and saved Apple, he didn't take your approach. In fact, he killed the Mac clone.
Please note that I never said the Microsoft licensing model was the only possible route to success. Please note that I picked 1989 as a good year to try this; Steve Jobs killed off the Mac clones in 1997. Please also note that I said "Apple does quite well as the BMW of the computer industry."
So Steve Jobs killed off the clones, embraced the premium computers concept, and made it work. I never said that was impossible. That would have been a stupid thing for me to say, since the actual history is that he did make it work.
And he cut Apple's endless confusing product line down to four.
I agree; that was one of the good things Jobs did. The endless confusing product line was a bad thing and he was right on that issue.
But Jobs did not cut margins - they are as high as ever.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that you are incorrect on this point. Or "wrong" if you prefer that word.
In the 80's, Apple was making margins of up to 55% on computers. In 1989, there was no model of Mac that cost less than $3000 (in 1989 dollars; in 2011 dollars that would be over $5200). (source)
That's insane. Today Macs are premium computers but they are not that overpriced anymore.
Apple in those days used to do tricks like bundle in an Apple external hard drive, which was also a high-margin item. People wanted to just buy the Mac and buy a less-expensive external hard drive, but they didn't get that option.
I was pretty sure that Dell and the other commodity computer makers must get by on less than 10% margins. I found an article claiming that the industry average margin on a notebook is 2%. (And on netbooks it's more like 0.6%!)
Apple wants to stay out of commodity markets, which is one reason why we won't ever see a "Mac netbook". Apple hates to compete on price and just refuses to do it. (Which is fine; BMW doesn't compete on price either.)
In the 90's Apple was in serious trouble. I personally believe that their strategy of charging the absolute highest possible price they could manage in the late 80's set them up for the serious trouble. Their margins now are high but not crazy high.
But actually, when I did the Google search to try to find a link backing up my claim of the 50% margin on Macs in the late 80's, I found a lot of articles estimating that Apple is making 50% margins on iPhone and iPad. This is 50% on a $500 product instead of 50% on a $3,000 or $4,000 product, which may help explain why this seems to be more sustainable than a 55% margin on a Macintosh.
Even if the competition from Android does force them to lower their prices, they should still be able to make good money.
OBTW, Apple is poised to become the #1 PC maker next year.
So, please tell me what part of "They can continue to make good money by selling nice stuff at premium prices" sounds like I'm surprised or skeptical about the above?
So if Apple had gone the Microsoft route in 1989, taken over the lion's share of the OS market, and been in Microsoft's position throughout the 1990s, which do you think is more likely—that they would still have fired Gil Amelio, bought NeXT, and given Steve Jobs total control of the company? Or that they would have ended up in a pattern very similar to Microsoft, with businessmen rather than visionaries running the company, and making sure to avoid putting out any highly risky new products?
That is a very interesting question and I don't have an answer. It doesn't seem likely that Steve Jobs could have ended up as the top guy. NeXT would have run out of money and would be just a historical footnote today. (As I understand it, NeXT was just about out of money in the actual history. Now imagine them trying to compete with low-cost mass-market Mac computers on top of everything else.)
But is it inevitable that a rock-solid position as the top computer OS and software company must mean that your products start to suck? I don't think so, but I can't prove it. I'm not even a famous pundit so nobody cares about my opinions anyway.
I just don't think it's likely that some of the key events would happen the same.
No, we are talking about a completely different alternate history here. Apple would be in the position of providing Mac OS for thousands of different computer models, just as Microsoft does now. Apple wouldn't be just the BMW of the computer world, and that would change their whole strategy. Like Microsoft, they would suffer the pain of supporting all the wildly different hardware out there, not just a few hand-picked computer models.
And it would have been the 68000 family of chips that was aggressively improved, rather than the x86 family. Maybe Intel would have started making 68K chips under license? Things would have been different in a lot of ways.
So, what you're saying is, you think Apple is (or should be) regretting their decision then, because if they had done what you suggest, they could be in Microsoft's position today?
I don't believe I said that.
What I said was that Apple's decision to charge crazy high premium prices for Macs in the late 80's made money for them hand over fist, but set them up to nearly go bankrupt in the 90's as Windows surged. Had Apple adopted the Microsoft licensing model, I think the Windows surge wouldn't have happened; it could have been a Mac OS surge instead.
These days, Apple does quite well as the BMW of the computer industry. They make solid, nice stuff, and people will pay more for it. Microsoft is more like the Honda or Ford of the computer industry (warning: not exact metaphor as Microsoft doesn't make computers).
A dying dinosaur, desperately trying to remain cool and relevant?
Microsoft's problems are not due to their licensing model. They are due to their own inept management. They have too many layers of middle management, and they just don't get things done effectively anymore.
Apple under Jobs had the clarity of vision that comes from one man unambiguously in charge. Since Jobs was right more often than he was wrong, that worked well for them.
Since the Apple model is currently working well for Apple, I'm not predicting their death or anything. However, I really do think Androids will take over the majority of the tablet space, and I can't think of what Apple's next big thing will be.
Apple had first-mover advantage in tablets, and their phone was so good I'll say they had first-mover advantage in good smartphones. That advantage is eroding fast. What will be their next thing to give them first-mover advantage?
They can continue to make good money by selling nice stuff at premium prices. But I'm wondering whether they will be able to really shake up the industry ever again.
The mac clones almost killed Apple. The problem was that the clones cannibalize sales of Apple macs rather than expanding the marketshare of Mac OS.
I agree with the above statement, but Apple could have done well by opening the Mac.
The Apple model is to charge premium prices for a premium product. Apple makes a large amount of money on each of their products sold.
The Microsoft model is to license out their software to anyone who wants it. Microsoft makes a small amount of money per product but with massive volume.
In 1989, Windows was still a bad joke. People were paying staggering premiums for Macs. At that time, Apple could have adopted the Microsoft model, and we would all be running Macs today and Windows would be a footnote in history.
That would have been a hard decision to make, because as I already noted, people were paying staggering premiums for Macs. But the writing was on the wall: Microsoft and IBM were not going to just give up; eventually one of Windows or OS/2 was going to stop sucking and give actual competition to the Mac. When that did happen, Apple nearly died.
Apple was already desperate, clutching at straws, when it tried its experiment of licensing out the OS. In 1989 Apple wasn't desperate at all, and could have done the deal from a position of strength.
Later, after that window of opportunity was already past and when Windows was already dominating the market, Apple tried to open up their control just a little bit: licensing out their OS to just a few clone makers, while still trying to charge premium prices for premium products. This compromise was the worst of all worlds and never had a chance of success.
To go with the computers, it would be great if you had some sort of library. Even just one bookshelf with useful reference books: introduction to programming in Python, HTML 5 reference, vim reference, etc.
I'd like to suggest a Safari site license, if you can afford it. They might offer an affordable Safari license for schools?
I am a big fan of classic Heinlein. As you say, his "juveniles" are almost all worth reading. My favorite was Citizen of the Galaxy where we follow Thorby as he has to adjust at least four times to changes in his situation.
Like you, I enjoy reading David Weber's space opera stuff. The first two books in the Honor Harrington series are home runs. I'm still reading the series but I can't recommend the later books as much as I do the earlier ones.
You might want to check out another of my favorite books: Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It's a near-future novel about an "arcology" built in the Los Angeles area after a horrible fire destroyed a large area. Some people really hate Todos Santos and are trying to destroy it; the people who live in Todos Santos love the place and are loyal to it. Hmm, I think I need to re-read that again. Baen has an ebook edition: http://webscription.net/p-683-oath-of-fealty.aspx
If you like military SF, you shouldn't miss the classic Falkenberg stories by Jerry Pournelle. My favorite was the novel The Mercenary, but over the years that novel has been bundled together with other Falkenberg stories in ever-larger volumes. The final result is The Prince which includes all the Falkenberg stories in one place. Once again Baen has an ebook: http://www.webscription.net/p-322-the-prince.aspx
I really enjoyed Aaron Allston's "Doc Sidhe" novels. Sadly there are only two. Allston has a deep love of the old "pulps" from the 30's, with characters like The Shadow; he wanted to write something sort of similar. I won't say much more because you can just read the first novel for free, courtesy of the Baen Free Library: http://www.webscription.net/p-110-doc-sidhe.aspx
I also enjoy pretty much everything ever written by Christopher Anvil. I will specifically recommend The Power of Illusion, a collection of Anvil stories. My favorite from that collection is a story called "The Day the Machines Stopped". Luckily, you can read that story from the "sample chapters" link for the Baen ebook: http://www.webscription.net/chapters/143913412X/143913412X.htm
Frankly, I haven't tried to solve the problem of the government doing a man-in-the-middle attack on my server. I was content to just not have passwords going over the Internet in clear text.
How exactly is your family and friends trusting your TLS connections? Did you go up to transmit them your CA cert? Or do you just register a certificate and you trust the ever growing number of organizations issuing them?
I apologize, but I am not sure I understand the point you are trying to make here.
It seems you are raising issues outside the scope of my original posting here: specifically, you are saying that my family and friends might not be able to trust the encryption my server is using, because I might have gone to a bad cert issuing organization. Is that correct?
I'm using self-signed certs. If you think this is a bad idea, please go ahead and explain why.
And you might think I'm being sarcastic here, but actually if I am doing something insecure, I do appreciate being educated about it so I can improve the way I do things. I would prefer you just educate me without a snarky attitude, but I will accept a lesson even if I must tolerate some snark to get it.
Also, if you feel that I should learn more about security, please recommend a book or web site that you think would be a good resource for me. Thank you.
I'm partial to science fiction and some fantasy. My favorite books are mostly "hard" SF, where the tech stuff is believable or at least self-consistent.
Luckily, a whole lot of the stuff I like is available as ebooks. Baen sells many of my favorite authors, and some of the stuff I like is public domain.
I'll give a very strong recommendation to Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy mystery stories. These are actually hard SF stories, despite featuring sorcerers casting spells; the spells follow certain rules, and the solution to a mystery is never something stupid like "an evil sorcerer cast the 'locked room mystery' spell". Randall Garrett had figured out many details of an alternate history for Earth; the stories were always set in the year he wrote them, but in a world of low technology and advanced magic. Every Lord Darcy story ever written is available in a single volume, and you can get it as a Baen ebook or as a paper book at your choice. Mostly it is short stories, but there is a novel called Too Many Magicians which I have re-read at least a dozen times, perhaps 20 times or more. You can get the flavor from the first Lord Darcy story, which has lapsed into the public domain and you can find it here: The Eyes Have It
I'll also give a very strong recommendation to the whole Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold. Some of the novels in the series won the Hugo or the Nebula, so I'm not the only one. She very convincingly sells the idea that Miles Vorkosigan is a genius; some books just tell you "So-and-so is a genius" but the character doesn't ever do anything smart. Not here! (My theory is that Bujold is really smart, and spends a lot of time thinking about how Miles should do things; and the "genius" part is that Miles comes up with his solutions quickly.) If you tackle this, I recommend you start with the book Shards of Honor and then read the series in chronological order (not the order in which they were written). Miles is born at the end of the second book; the first two are more about his mother Cordelia.
If you want to go really old-school you could read the classic Lensmen series by E. E. "Doc" Smith. These books really set the bar for space opera; in the first books you might only see a few dozen ships fighting a battle, but by the end of the series the battles become truly epic. My favorite part was where they turned the Solar System into an epic-sized vacuum tube to focus energy from the Sun to fry invading space fleets; this weapon was called "The Sunbeam". The heroes are heroic, the bad guys are despicable, and you will never wonder which is which in this series; look elsewhere for philosophical ruminations on the shades of grey between good and evil.
I will also give a strong recommendation to certain stories by Keith Laumer featuring a protagonist named Jame Retief. Unfortunately, toward the end of his life Laumer wrote some really bad Retief stories, or took good ones and padded them out to novel length (with bad new material). So, I can't just recommend any Retief story. The ones written in the 60's are pretty much all good. Baen has a collection simply called Retief! and every story in that one is good; it includes my all-time favorite story, "Cultural Exchange". Retief is a very competent man, with a very junior rank in the Corps Diplomatique Terrestine (the diplomatic corps of Terra, or the CDT). Pretty much every senior person in the CDT is incompetent, and Retief scurries about behind the scenes salvaging situations that the ambassadors were screwing up. Laumer in his early years was a master of lean, fast-moving prose; he packed a lot of action into a few short pages, and he crammed a whole lot of ideas into some of his stories. The entire Retief! book is offered for free on the Baen "Free Library" page; check it out! (This link is from Google; I can't seem to access baen.com right now, so perhaps their server is down for some reason? If this link
Then you didn't understand how STARTLS works (hint: it also can be on port 25).
Oh good grief. I meant that I have port 993 open and port 143 closed, okay? And I have the server settings to "require encryption" for originating emails via SMTP.
Obviously, email that arrives from other servers on the Internet was sent in clear text and arrives unencrypted over port 25.
Your mail is encrypted for PART of the transport (in fact, for the part that you control). But that's it. It may have been sent to you over a non SSL webmail for example. And you must be sending it to a 3rd party that anyway, will read what you sent unencrypted.
It's great that you want to explain things to me, and I guess I appreciate it. But while you seem to think I don't understand security, in my turn I think you completely failed to comprehend what I wrote.
The subject of the post was "Secure within a single server" and I noted that I have friends and family who have accounts on my server. I commented that I could send email to them and it would be encrypted when I sent it and encrypted when they pull it from the server. And I noted that this doesn't solve the general problem.
You actually quoted the relevant part of my original posting: "when I send email to family members who are using my server" (emphasis added)
So could you please explain to me how my email to, say, my sister is insecure? It's encrypted when I send it to my server, then it sits on my server, and then it's encrypted when her email client pulls it from my server via port 993.
I didn't say anything about the security not extending beyond my own server because I thought it was so incredibly obvious that I need not spell it out in so many words. But, just in case you are still confused, that's what I meant when I said this doesn't "solve the general problem".
If [right click] is anything but instantaneous, it's time to do a virus scan, wipe [...] and start over.
Not necessarily. If the web browser sucks up enough RAM to cause the system to start swapping, then the user might have to wait while the right-click code swaps in.
I have historically been a lazy power user. Because I'm a power user I tend to open lots of web pages; because I'm lazy I tend to leave them open. I have had the web browser push my system into swapping many times, to the point where I am now modifying my behavior to accommodate the web browser (in other words, I'm trying to close more tabs more often).
At worst, the swapping gets so bad the system is unusable. I "only" have 4GB of RAM; one would think that should be enough even for a lazy power user.
If you aren't sure whether your system is swapping, look at the hard disk light. If it's on continuously, your system is swapping. One thing you can try to fix it: erase all the browsing history, make sure the browser will remember all your tabs, and quit and restart the browser. If the browser is noticeably snappier (and you see the hard disk light isn't on) then your problem was the swapping.
If your system isn't swapping and it's slow for the right-click menu to pop up, I agree you should worry.
I run my own mail server. Anyone connecting to it over the Internet must use an encrypted connection for receiving or sending mail; I don't even open the insecure ports in my firewall. A few of my friends and family members have accounts on my server.
So, when I send email to family members who are using my server, my email is encrypted while going onto the server and being pulled from the server.
This doesn't solve the general problem but it is better than having only insecure email.
The biggest secrets I send over email anyway tend to be the dates we are going on vacation; it is unlikely that anyone would intercept our email and decide to burglarize our home, but why risk it?
If we have a file with secret data we want to send, we usually just use SSH to copy it to one server or another. I'm not the only geek in my family and several of us have Linux servers running SSH.
I suggest you read the novel A Lion on Tharthee by Grant Callin. It discusses the engineering challenges of making a self-sufficient environment to support human life far away from repair shops and spare parts. (It's just plain a fun novel too, worth reading for its own sake; you might want to start with the novel that came before it to get the full story in the correct sequence.)
For non-fact, you should probably read the book Halfway to Anywhere by G. Harry Stine. I say "probably" because I haven't read it yet, but everything I have heard about it is good.
We managed to go to Earth's moon by the quick-and-dirty method, with a single rocket launch; it makes much more sense though to build out some infrastructure. A spacecraft for a Mars trip should be built in Earth orbit. There should be some way to cheaply send up things like fuel that are tough and expendable; maybe a linear accelerator on the Equator or something. I think Halfway to Anywhere talks about such stuff.
I believe the title of that book refers to a comment by Robert A. Heinlein: Once you have escaped Earth gravity, you are halfway to anywhere in the Solar System.
Michael Flynn wrote a series about a serious plan to get into space by private industry in the near future. I think the first novel in the series is called Firestar. IIRC they used a super-cannon to send fuel canister into orbit; someone called the cannon "God's Own Shotgun".
Since this is Slashdot, I'll share some details on the problem of measuring loudness.
Loudness is difficult to measure objectively, because loudness is what a human experiences when listening to audio. Intensity, on the other hand, is easy to measure; just get a sound level meter.
Why is loudness different than intensity? Because the human auditory system contains a natural filterbank that divides incoming audio up into multiple bands, and then applies an exponential scaling function to each band. Old books and papers call these bands critical bands; I think the more modern concept is ERBs.
For sounds that hit only one band, such as a pure sine tone, the intensity of the sound is a good approximation of loudness. But sounds that hit multiple bands scale roughly linearly in the number of bands hit. I'll give an example.
If you generate a pure sine tone at power level X, and then generate two sine tones each at power level X/2, then the measured intensity will be identical. However, if the two sine tones are in different bands, the loudness will be nearly double.
So, as a rule of thumb, the more frequency bands a given sound hits, the louder it is at any given power level. Something that sounds like white noise will be louder than something that sounds like a clear bell tone or a single flute note.
The people who make commercials know how to game the system. I'm pretty sure that there were already limits on measured intensity of commercials, but that wasn't enough to solve the problem.
Imagine you are driving along, listening to a radio show. Maybe talk radio, maybe NPR, whatever. You have the "volume control" knob on your car radio set to a comfortable listening level. The radio show only has audio at typical human speech frequencies, and isn't trying to sound loud. Now comes the commercial, which smears its audio all over the spectrum; it puts processing on the voice, with reverb and stuff. "Sunday Sunday Sunday-y-y-y!!!! M-m-monster truck demolition derby!!!" or whatever. It's not your imagination, it really is louder. But a sound level meter might say it's the same as the radio show content, or only slightly higher intensity level.
The company for which I work (DTS) has a solution to the problem called "Neural Loudness Control", and there is a white paper available that really goes into detail about this stuff, so you don't need to stop with my lame explanation. NLC has a full "loudness model" that approximates the human auditory system when computing a loudness metric; but it also can operate in a mode that follows the new standard.
So the new standard, 1770, is a pretty easy-to-calculate approximation of loudness. You apply two filters: one that simulates the transfer function of an average human head, and the "RLB weighting curve"; then compute mean-square energy on the result. This is simple enough that nobody really has an excuse in the 21st Century that it would be hard to comply.
I'm a little worried that it is too simple, and there might be ways to trick it. For example, it doesn't seem to handle audio that is smeared across multiple bands to make it sound louder. But I'm not actually working in the area of loudness measurement, and from what I've heard, 1770 works okay for most stuff. It's better than no standard.
You obviously have a fundamental misunderstanding of Stallman's position--which is that copyright shouldn't even exist. The only reason he created the GPL was to use the existing copyright system as a mechanism to enforce his ideal paradigm, which is that no one owns any code, and it is freely available to everyone to do with as they please.
People keep saying RMS doesn't want copyright. Even he says it. But he really does want controls on what people can do with software.
The situation you describe, where code is freely available and everyone may do as they please, would be either a BSD license or perhaps public domain. RMS disapproves of both of these.
RMS wants to enforce the freedom of code by placing limits on what you can do with it. To RMS, no-one should be free to take open source code, change it in proprietary ways, and not share the changes. RMS wants some sort of legal structure to compel the sharing of the changes.
BSD fans and GPL fans argue over which license is "more free". GPL places limits on what you can do with the code; BSD places no limits; clearly BSD must be more free. But BSD lets Microsoft take Kerberos, break it in proprietary ways, and sell the result without sharing the source code; GPL prevents this; clearly GPL enforces a higher level of freedom. Personally, I think both have their points and I would release code under either license, depending on my goals.
RMS, asked about Napster, said "I see nothing unethical in the job it does. Why shouldn't you send a copy of some music to a friend?" So he explicitly doesn't care about a system designed to make sure musicians get paid for their work. He would probably say that the musicians should make money by performing live at shows, just as he makes money giving lectures.
Since violations of the GPL involve closing code that was once open, or holding back new code that should be released under the GPL, it makes sense that would aggressively pursue violations--or that he would like to, if he had the financial resources.
Sure. RMS seems to think that free sharing of source code is the most important issue in the world, and he is very serious about promoting it and enforcing it.
Eric Raymond famously asked RMS whether, if RMS had the power to do so, he would require all software written to be put under GPL. RMS didn't answer, but I think it's clear that the answer is "yes", because RMS has repeatedly made very clear public statements that it is "not ethical" to release software under any license that doesn't enforce the sharing of changes.
Linus, on the other hand, I've never seen as any kind of ideologue or ax-grinder. He just wants to put out good code, and if he can get paid for it, why complain?
I agree. Linus has said that releasing Linux under the GPL was one of the best decisions he ever made; the GPL really worked out for him and for Linux. But he refuses to take Linux to GPLv3, because he doesn't have any desire to place limits on what people can do with Linux.
It really bothers RMS that Tivo can use Linux to make a locked-down platform. Linus doesn't care. It really bothers RMS that Google can run Linux on servers without ever "distributing" it and being forced to share changes. Linus doesn't care.
(For what it's worth, I don't agree with RMS' position on copyright, beyond wanting some reform. The elimination of copyright is not something I would like to see.)
I am a big fan of copyright... however, the current state of IP law is horrible. I think the best possible reform would be to allow people or companies to keep copyright on works as long as they want, but only by renewing the copyright explicitly for each work. If the Disney company wants to keep the "Steamboat Willy" cartoon copyrighted, let them do so, but make them pay a renewal fee every year. (And that fee can be something trivial like $10 or even $1.)
Right now there are copyrighted works in a horrible sort of limbo. They are copyrighted, so you c
They are taking all the GTK 2.x libraries and renaming them. Their goal is to allow MATE to co-exist nicely with GNOME 3 on the same computer.
Once they have it working, they might look at adopting the GNOME 3 libraries. But what they are doing right now is the fastest route to a stable MATE desktop that co-exists with GNOME 3.
If you want something that looks more like GNOME 2 but runs on the GNOME 3 libraries, take a look at MGSE.
For $50 more the Nook Tablet or for the same price the older Nook Color are real tablets as opposed to the limited Amazon cloud device the Fire is.
Yes. Even the Nook Color is a pretty darn nice piece of hardware, but the Nook Tablet smokes it on performance. The Color has an 800 MHz single-core processor; the Tablet has a 1 GHz dual-core processor and likely a better GPU. The user experience is slick on the Nook Tablet. And it plays Netflix out of the box, and YouTube and other Flash videos work great in the web browser.
We are seeing a glitch with Flash videos in the web browser: it plays great, but after it plays the video is dead. Can't replay. If you navigate away from the video and then back, and wait for it to load again, you can watch it again. We can live with this, and I figure it will be fixed pretty soon.
Meanwhile I am planning to root our old Nook Color. With CyanogenMod 7, the Color becomes a real 7" tablet with pretty full features, including USB host and BlueTooth. No camera or microphone or GPS, but my phone has those and I'll survive somehow.
If you are a geek reading Slashdot, you want Nook hardware rather than the Kindle Fire.
"A persistent window list or dock would interfere with this goal, serving as a constant temptation to switch focus."
Who wrote this? How did this become the official position of GNOME 3 officially?
On the one hand, I sort of respect that they aren't letting tradition shackle them. They are trying to boldly change things, to make something really new and really better.
On the other hand, they have changed a bunch of stuff and made it worse!
They got rid of some stuff that takes up space; and I always use GNOME on a giant desktop display with lots of room to spare. Even my netbook has a 10.1" screen and I don't begrudge a few pixels for a window list.
They got rid of the window list, it seems, because it is a distraction. But I am used to it being there and I don't notice it when I'm working; whereas with GNOME 3 I have no option but to have a distracting animation of windows flying about and arranging themselves any time I want to change apps. I have to hit the logo key, watch a dazzling display, find the window I want, click on it, and watch it zoom to full size. This is less distracting than clicking on the button for the window I want, and having it instantly be the topmost window? (Answer: no, it's more distracting, not less. At least that's true for me. But GNOME gives no option; this is the new One True Way that we must all use.)
If the GNOME 3 developers ever build a car, it won't have a steering wheel, a brake pedal, and a gas pedal. They will boldly re-engineer the driving experience. There will probably be a miniature replica of the car mounted on a joystick; you will twist the little car right to turn the real car right. So intuitive! Of course those of us with many years of experience, expert car drivers, will not be able to apply our experience; and if we are recommending a GNOME car to our friends, they will ask us "why is this different from every other car I have ever seen?"
The really frustrating part is that this is a total replay of what happened with the "object oriented file manager". Originally, the GNOME file manager worked pretty much the way it works now. Then they decided that this is overly complicated for newbies. There should be only one window for any one directory, and that one window should remember where it opened last and open in the same place, to build a sense of persistence and make the file system seem more like a real place. (This is similar to how the original Mac Finder worked, I believe. But the Finder in Mac OS X doesn't work that way anymore, and I believe didn't work that way when the GNOME guys made this decision.)
In true GNOME style, they didn't provide a convenient option to turn this off; why would you want to turn it off? It's better. And that is why I, and so many other people, first learned how to use gconftool, to find that option and turn it off.
The very next release of GNOME they changed the default back to the original behavior, and never changed it again. But for GNOME 3, they are sticking to their guns.
In some ways GNOME 3 is nice, but I bitterly resent the amount of control the GNOME guys are trying to assert over how I use my computer. I'm going to try Linux Mint 12 on a spare computer and see how I like it. From what I have seen, MGSE is a giant step up over either of Unity or GNOME 3 Shell.
One of the core goals of GNOME Shell is to provide the GNOME desktop with a consistent and identifiable visual identity.
Why isn't the core goal "make the user be happy and productive"? How does this "visual identity" thing help me? Why should I cooperate with this?
P.S. GNOME 2.x is my favorite desktop environment ever. The GNOME guys have really squandered all the good will I used to have toward them.
Yeah, I could just 'apt-get install gnome-2' on the latest Ubuntu.
Oh, no. I can't, can I?
I believe the problem is that the GNOME 3 libraries don't co-exist well with the GNOME 2 libraries. Given the way Linux handles libraries with versioning, I don't actually understand why this should be such a problem. But in the Linux Mint blog, they said that MATE (the fork of GNOME 2 that is in Linux Mint 12) has renamed all the GNOME 2 libraries so they can install side-by-side with the GNOME 3 libraries with no problem.
It's still early days with MATE. Once they get MATE really sorted out, then it will show up in Ubuntu (either officially or as PPA) .
it's not fair to say the iPad is overpriced because it costs more than the Nook; you're basically saying that all 10" tablets are overpriced because they cost more than the Nook.
I don't think I ever said the iPad is "overpriced". I said that both the Nook Tablet and the iPad are classified in my mind as "tablet devices" and I like how the Nook is half the price. I also said I don't need the iPad 2, and didn't buy one.
As I understand it, Apple spent large sums of money to lock in excellent prices on the major parts needed to make iPads. As a result, anyone else trying to enter the market finds that major parts are hard to come by, expensive, or both. In the near term, this gives Apple an edge in the tablet market. In the long term, I expect that we will see competing tablets that cost less than the iPad, but have similar specs.
I think we agree more than we disagree. We both agree that Apple is sort of the BMW for this sort of product, where you pay more and get more. But I absolutely think that 7" tablet devices qualify as tablet devices, and I think you can usefully compare them against 10" tablet devices.
No, you can't. Because you obviously weren't willing to consider any $500 Android tablets either.
You aren't making any sense. I certainly am willing to consider a $500 Android tablet; if I were buying one, it would be the Samsung Galaxy Tab. But I have no current need for a 10" screen rather than a 7" screen, no current need for a camera, and no current need for the extra horsepower.
You see, in my mind, the Nook Tablet qualifies as a tablet. To you, it's some kind of toy, not in the same class as an iPad 2; you basically said exactly that, so I don't think I'm putting words in your mouth. But I don't agree. For the things I want to do with a tablet, a Nook Tablet or a rooted Nook Color will work.
You aren't going to tell me now that I'm wrong, and the tablet won't do the things I want, are you?
You can get a nice thin and light laptop for $1000, or you can get a similarly spec'd thick and chunky laptop for half that. That doesn't mean that the thin and light is overpriced, it means that you're not even looking at that market segment.
But the Nook Tablet is about as thin as the iPad 2, and it's 2/3 the weight, so it's definitely thin and light.
If you mean that the iPad 2 is like the BMW of tablets, and the Nook Tablet is more like a Volkswagen or something, then sure, I'll go along with that. A BMW is not an "overpriced" car; you are getting more car for more money. But some of us don't want to spend the extra money, and are happy with a lesser car.
But a Volkswagen car still qualifies as a car. You wouldn't say "you can't compare a Volkswagen to a BMW"... or would you?
You can't compare a 10" high-end tablet to a 7" budget tablet or e-reader, they're not the same class of device.
Oh, I think I can. Here, I'll do it. I'll compare the iPad 2 to the Nook Tablet.
Each is better in some ways than the other. iPad 2 has cameras and a larger screen; Nook Tablet is a convenient size for carrying, is lighter (400 grams vs. 601 grams!), and has longer battery life. Both have great screens. Both have a web browser. iPad 2 has more apps, but Nook Tablet has the apps I really care about; in particular, it has Netflix pre-loaded. Both have a 1 GHz dual-core ARM processor. The Nook Tablet has 1GB of RAM, twice as much as iPad 2, and has a claimed 11.5 hour battery life vs. iPad 2's claimed 10 hour battery life.
And Nook Tablet is literally half the price of iPad 2.
So I bought a Nook Tablet and I haven't bought an iPad.
P.S. I also have a Nook Color and I plan to root it and install CyanogenMod. It turns out that the Nook Color actually has Bluetooth hardware that was not enabled by the Nook software stack, so a rooted Nook Color makes a rather nifty little tablet.
If a bunch of Nook Color owners run out and buy a Nook Tablet, now might be a good time to pick up a used Nook Color for cheap. If you can get a new one for $200 you ought to be able to get a used one for around $100 or so. A used iPad 2 will be much more expensive than that.
I am hoping that the Nook Tablet also has hidden Bluetooth hardware, but I have not yet seen this confirmed or disproved.
Slashdot Mirror
Dr. Udo Erasmus wrote a book: Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill. He is an advocate for Omega 3. As far as I can tell, he seems to be a reasonable authority; when I have discussed his ideas with doctors they haven't contradicted anything.
According to Udo Erasmus, the human body cannot make Omega 3 but can convert Omega 3 from one form to another as needed. Thus you should be able to fill all your body's needs for Omega 3 from flax oil alone; while fish oil contains other forms of Omega 3 that are missing from flax, your body should be able to deal with it.
However, he says that some older people have a reduced ability to convert Omega 3 from one form to another, and those people might benefit from eating multiple types of Omega 3.
He recommends eating fresh fish such as salmon, or eating flax oil, but he is not a fan of fish oil capsules; he says those are often rancid and/or heavily processed to keep them stable.
If you are interested in Omega 3, it's worth taking five or ten minutes and reading through his FAQ.
http://www.udoerasmus.com/FAQ/FAQ_index_en.htm
steveha
I'm not thrilled with the security checkpoints at airports, but I do understand that an airplane can be turned into a giant guided missile that can take down a skyscraper. It may be that extreme measures are appropriate for security at an airport.
But how does it make sense to send a VIPR team to search people getting on or off a train? How do you justify that? Are they going to drive the train off the tracks and blow up a building?
"Oh maybe someone has a bomb in his luggage." How often do trains get blown up in America? What are the odds here? And even if the security becomes 100% effective on trains, what about bombs set on the train tracks? Searching train luggage seems completely futile to me.
Has a VIPR team ever caught a terrorist or found a bomb, ever?
Remember, we send people to prison for not paying taxes, or maybe take their homes away. Should we really be using tax dollars for VIPR teams?
steveha
Wrong.
Oh, you don't just disagree with my opinion; I'm wrong. Duly noted.
When Jobs came back and saved Apple, he didn't take your approach. In fact, he killed the Mac clone.
Please note that I never said the Microsoft licensing model was the only possible route to success. Please note that I picked 1989 as a good year to try this; Steve Jobs killed off the Mac clones in 1997. Please also note that I said "Apple does quite well as the BMW of the computer industry."
So Steve Jobs killed off the clones, embraced the premium computers concept, and made it work. I never said that was impossible. That would have been a stupid thing for me to say, since the actual history is that he did make it work.
And he cut Apple's endless confusing product line down to four.
I agree; that was one of the good things Jobs did. The endless confusing product line was a bad thing and he was right on that issue.
But Jobs did not cut margins - they are as high as ever.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that you are incorrect on this point. Or "wrong" if you prefer that word.
In the 80's, Apple was making margins of up to 55% on computers. In 1989, there was no model of Mac that cost less than $3000 (in 1989 dollars; in 2011 dollars that would be over $5200). (source)
That's insane. Today Macs are premium computers but they are not that overpriced anymore.
Apple in those days used to do tricks like bundle in an Apple external hard drive, which was also a high-margin item. People wanted to just buy the Mac and buy a less-expensive external hard drive, but they didn't get that option.
I was pretty sure that Dell and the other commodity computer makers must get by on less than 10% margins. I found an article claiming that the industry average margin on a notebook is 2%. (And on netbooks it's more like 0.6%!)
Apple wants to stay out of commodity markets, which is one reason why we won't ever see a "Mac netbook". Apple hates to compete on price and just refuses to do it. (Which is fine; BMW doesn't compete on price either.)
In the 90's Apple was in serious trouble. I personally believe that their strategy of charging the absolute highest possible price they could manage in the late 80's set them up for the serious trouble. Their margins now are high but not crazy high.
But actually, when I did the Google search to try to find a link backing up my claim of the 50% margin on Macs in the late 80's, I found a lot of articles estimating that Apple is making 50% margins on iPhone and iPad. This is 50% on a $500 product instead of 50% on a $3,000 or $4,000 product, which may help explain why this seems to be more sustainable than a 55% margin on a Macintosh.
Even if the competition from Android does force them to lower their prices, they should still be able to make good money.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9150045/Apple_makes_208_on_each_499_iPad
OBTW, Apple is poised to become the #1 PC maker next year.
So, please tell me what part of "They can continue to make good money by selling nice stuff at premium prices" sounds like I'm surprised or skeptical about the above?
Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all.
steveha
So if Apple had gone the Microsoft route in 1989, taken over the lion's share of the OS market, and been in Microsoft's position throughout the 1990s, which do you think is more likely—that they would still have fired Gil Amelio, bought NeXT, and given Steve Jobs total control of the company? Or that they would have ended up in a pattern very similar to Microsoft, with businessmen rather than visionaries running the company, and making sure to avoid putting out any highly risky new products?
That is a very interesting question and I don't have an answer. It doesn't seem likely that Steve Jobs could have ended up as the top guy. NeXT would have run out of money and would be just a historical footnote today. (As I understand it, NeXT was just about out of money in the actual history. Now imagine them trying to compete with low-cost mass-market Mac computers on top of everything else.)
But is it inevitable that a rock-solid position as the top computer OS and software company must mean that your products start to suck? I don't think so, but I can't prove it. I'm not even a famous pundit so nobody cares about my opinions anyway.
I just don't think it's likely that some of the key events would happen the same.
No, we are talking about a completely different alternate history here. Apple would be in the position of providing Mac OS for thousands of different computer models, just as Microsoft does now. Apple wouldn't be just the BMW of the computer world, and that would change their whole strategy. Like Microsoft, they would suffer the pain of supporting all the wildly different hardware out there, not just a few hand-picked computer models.
And it would have been the 68000 family of chips that was aggressively improved, rather than the x86 family. Maybe Intel would have started making 68K chips under license? Things would have been different in a lot of ways.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all.
steveha
So, what you're saying is, you think Apple is (or should be) regretting their decision then, because if they had done what you suggest, they could be in Microsoft's position today?
I don't believe I said that.
What I said was that Apple's decision to charge crazy high premium prices for Macs in the late 80's made money for them hand over fist, but set them up to nearly go bankrupt in the 90's as Windows surged. Had Apple adopted the Microsoft licensing model, I think the Windows surge wouldn't have happened; it could have been a Mac OS surge instead.
These days, Apple does quite well as the BMW of the computer industry. They make solid, nice stuff, and people will pay more for it. Microsoft is more like the Honda or Ford of the computer industry (warning: not exact metaphor as Microsoft doesn't make computers).
A dying dinosaur, desperately trying to remain cool and relevant?
Microsoft's problems are not due to their licensing model. They are due to their own inept management. They have too many layers of middle management, and they just don't get things done effectively anymore.
Apple under Jobs had the clarity of vision that comes from one man unambiguously in charge. Since Jobs was right more often than he was wrong, that worked well for them.
Since the Apple model is currently working well for Apple, I'm not predicting their death or anything. However, I really do think Androids will take over the majority of the tablet space, and I can't think of what Apple's next big thing will be.
Apple had first-mover advantage in tablets, and their phone was so good I'll say they had first-mover advantage in good smartphones. That advantage is eroding fast. What will be their next thing to give them first-mover advantage?
They can continue to make good money by selling nice stuff at premium prices. But I'm wondering whether they will be able to really shake up the industry ever again.
steveha
The mac clones almost killed Apple. The problem was that the clones cannibalize sales of Apple macs rather than expanding the marketshare of Mac OS.
I agree with the above statement, but Apple could have done well by opening the Mac.
The Apple model is to charge premium prices for a premium product. Apple makes a large amount of money on each of their products sold.
The Microsoft model is to license out their software to anyone who wants it. Microsoft makes a small amount of money per product but with massive volume.
In 1989, Windows was still a bad joke. People were paying staggering premiums for Macs. At that time, Apple could have adopted the Microsoft model, and we would all be running Macs today and Windows would be a footnote in history.
That would have been a hard decision to make, because as I already noted, people were paying staggering premiums for Macs. But the writing was on the wall: Microsoft and IBM were not going to just give up; eventually one of Windows or OS/2 was going to stop sucking and give actual competition to the Mac. When that did happen, Apple nearly died.
Apple was already desperate, clutching at straws, when it tried its experiment of licensing out the OS. In 1989 Apple wasn't desperate at all, and could have done the deal from a position of strength.
Later, after that window of opportunity was already past and when Windows was already dominating the market, Apple tried to open up their control just a little bit: licensing out their OS to just a few clone makers, while still trying to charge premium prices for premium products. This compromise was the worst of all worlds and never had a chance of success.
steveha
To go with the computers, it would be great if you had some sort of library. Even just one bookshelf with useful reference books: introduction to programming in Python, HTML 5 reference, vim reference, etc.
I'd like to suggest a Safari site license, if you can afford it. They might offer an affordable Safari license for schools?
http://safaribooksonline.com/
P.S. I hope the computers will have Linux available at least as an option.
steveha
My favorite Roger Zelazny novel is Lord of Light. It's crazy, it's over-the-top, but it's amazing.
I am a big fan of classic Heinlein. As you say, his "juveniles" are almost all worth reading. My favorite was Citizen of the Galaxy where we follow Thorby as he has to adjust at least four times to changes in his situation.
Like you, I enjoy reading David Weber's space opera stuff. The first two books in the Honor Harrington series are home runs. I'm still reading the series but I can't recommend the later books as much as I do the earlier ones.
You might want to check out another of my favorite books: Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It's a near-future novel about an "arcology" built in the Los Angeles area after a horrible fire destroyed a large area. Some people really hate Todos Santos and are trying to destroy it; the people who live in Todos Santos love the place and are loyal to it. Hmm, I think I need to re-read that again. Baen has an ebook edition: http://webscription.net/p-683-oath-of-fealty.aspx
If you like military SF, you shouldn't miss the classic Falkenberg stories by Jerry Pournelle. My favorite was the novel The Mercenary, but over the years that novel has been bundled together with other Falkenberg stories in ever-larger volumes. The final result is The Prince which includes all the Falkenberg stories in one place. Once again Baen has an ebook: http://www.webscription.net/p-322-the-prince.aspx
I really enjoyed Aaron Allston's "Doc Sidhe" novels. Sadly there are only two. Allston has a deep love of the old "pulps" from the 30's, with characters like The Shadow; he wanted to write something sort of similar. I won't say much more because you can just read the first novel for free, courtesy of the Baen Free Library: http://www.webscription.net/p-110-doc-sidhe.aspx
I also enjoy pretty much everything ever written by Christopher Anvil. I will specifically recommend The Power of Illusion, a collection of Anvil stories. My favorite from that collection is a story called "The Day the Machines Stopped". Luckily, you can read that story from the "sample chapters" link for the Baen ebook: http://www.webscription.net/chapters/143913412X/143913412X.htm
steveha
Frankly, I haven't tried to solve the problem of the government doing a man-in-the-middle attack on my server. I was content to just not have passwords going over the Internet in clear text.
steveha
How exactly is your family and friends trusting your TLS connections? Did you go up to transmit them your CA cert? Or do you just register a certificate and you trust the ever growing number of organizations issuing them?
I apologize, but I am not sure I understand the point you are trying to make here.
It seems you are raising issues outside the scope of my original posting here: specifically, you are saying that my family and friends might not be able to trust the encryption my server is using, because I might have gone to a bad cert issuing organization. Is that correct?
I'm using self-signed certs. If you think this is a bad idea, please go ahead and explain why.
And you might think I'm being sarcastic here, but actually if I am doing something insecure, I do appreciate being educated about it so I can improve the way I do things. I would prefer you just educate me without a snarky attitude, but I will accept a lesson even if I must tolerate some snark to get it.
Also, if you feel that I should learn more about security, please recommend a book or web site that you think would be a good resource for me. Thank you.
steveha
I'm partial to science fiction and some fantasy. My favorite books are mostly "hard" SF, where the tech stuff is believable or at least self-consistent.
Luckily, a whole lot of the stuff I like is available as ebooks. Baen sells many of my favorite authors, and some of the stuff I like is public domain.
I'll give a very strong recommendation to Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy mystery stories. These are actually hard SF stories, despite featuring sorcerers casting spells; the spells follow certain rules, and the solution to a mystery is never something stupid like "an evil sorcerer cast the 'locked room mystery' spell". Randall Garrett had figured out many details of an alternate history for Earth; the stories were always set in the year he wrote them, but in a world of low technology and advanced magic. Every Lord Darcy story ever written is available in a single volume, and you can get it as a Baen ebook or as a paper book at your choice. Mostly it is short stories, but there is a novel called Too Many Magicians which I have re-read at least a dozen times, perhaps 20 times or more. You can get the flavor from the first Lord Darcy story, which has lapsed into the public domain and you can find it here: The Eyes Have It
I'll also give a very strong recommendation to the whole Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold. Some of the novels in the series won the Hugo or the Nebula, so I'm not the only one. She very convincingly sells the idea that Miles Vorkosigan is a genius; some books just tell you "So-and-so is a genius" but the character doesn't ever do anything smart. Not here! (My theory is that Bujold is really smart, and spends a lot of time thinking about how Miles should do things; and the "genius" part is that Miles comes up with his solutions quickly.) If you tackle this, I recommend you start with the book Shards of Honor and then read the series in chronological order (not the order in which they were written). Miles is born at the end of the second book; the first two are more about his mother Cordelia.
If you want to go really old-school you could read the classic Lensmen series by E. E. "Doc" Smith. These books really set the bar for space opera; in the first books you might only see a few dozen ships fighting a battle, but by the end of the series the battles become truly epic. My favorite part was where they turned the Solar System into an epic-sized vacuum tube to focus energy from the Sun to fry invading space fleets; this weapon was called "The Sunbeam". The heroes are heroic, the bad guys are despicable, and you will never wonder which is which in this series; look elsewhere for philosophical ruminations on the shades of grey between good and evil.
I will also give a strong recommendation to certain stories by Keith Laumer featuring a protagonist named Jame Retief. Unfortunately, toward the end of his life Laumer wrote some really bad Retief stories, or took good ones and padded them out to novel length (with bad new material). So, I can't just recommend any Retief story. The ones written in the 60's are pretty much all good. Baen has a collection simply called Retief! and every story in that one is good; it includes my all-time favorite story, "Cultural Exchange". Retief is a very competent man, with a very junior rank in the Corps Diplomatique Terrestine (the diplomatic corps of Terra, or the CDT). Pretty much every senior person in the CDT is incompetent, and Retief scurries about behind the scenes salvaging situations that the ambassadors were screwing up. Laumer in his early years was a master of lean, fast-moving prose; he packed a lot of action into a few short pages, and he crammed a whole lot of ideas into some of his stories. The entire Retief! book is offered for free on the Baen "Free Library" page; check it out! (This link is from Google; I can't seem to access baen.com right now, so perhaps their server is down for some reason? If this link
Then you didn't understand how STARTLS works (hint: it also can be on port 25).
Oh good grief. I meant that I have port 993 open and port 143 closed, okay? And I have the server settings to "require encryption" for originating emails via SMTP.
Obviously, email that arrives from other servers on the Internet was sent in clear text and arrives unencrypted over port 25.
Your mail is encrypted for PART of the transport (in fact, for the part that you control). But that's it. It may have been sent to you over a non SSL webmail for example. And you must be sending it to a 3rd party that anyway, will read what you sent unencrypted.
It's great that you want to explain things to me, and I guess I appreciate it. But while you seem to think I don't understand security, in my turn I think you completely failed to comprehend what I wrote.
The subject of the post was "Secure within a single server" and I noted that I have friends and family who have accounts on my server. I commented that I could send email to them and it would be encrypted when I sent it and encrypted when they pull it from the server. And I noted that this doesn't solve the general problem.
You actually quoted the relevant part of my original posting: "when I send email to family members who are using my server" (emphasis added)
So could you please explain to me how my email to, say, my sister is insecure? It's encrypted when I send it to my server, then it sits on my server, and then it's encrypted when her email client pulls it from my server via port 993.
I didn't say anything about the security not extending beyond my own server because I thought it was so incredibly obvious that I need not spell it out in so many words. But, just in case you are still confused, that's what I meant when I said this doesn't "solve the general problem".
steveha
If [right click] is anything but instantaneous, it's time to do a virus scan, wipe [...] and start over.
Not necessarily. If the web browser sucks up enough RAM to cause the system to start swapping, then the user might have to wait while the right-click code swaps in.
I have historically been a lazy power user. Because I'm a power user I tend to open lots of web pages; because I'm lazy I tend to leave them open. I have had the web browser push my system into swapping many times, to the point where I am now modifying my behavior to accommodate the web browser (in other words, I'm trying to close more tabs more often).
At worst, the swapping gets so bad the system is unusable. I "only" have 4GB of RAM; one would think that should be enough even for a lazy power user.
If you aren't sure whether your system is swapping, look at the hard disk light. If it's on continuously, your system is swapping. One thing you can try to fix it: erase all the browsing history, make sure the browser will remember all your tabs, and quit and restart the browser. If the browser is noticeably snappier (and you see the hard disk light isn't on) then your problem was the swapping.
If your system isn't swapping and it's slow for the right-click menu to pop up, I agree you should worry.
steveha
I run my own mail server. Anyone connecting to it over the Internet must use an encrypted connection for receiving or sending mail; I don't even open the insecure ports in my firewall. A few of my friends and family members have accounts on my server.
So, when I send email to family members who are using my server, my email is encrypted while going onto the server and being pulled from the server.
This doesn't solve the general problem but it is better than having only insecure email.
The biggest secrets I send over email anyway tend to be the dates we are going on vacation; it is unlikely that anyone would intercept our email and decide to burglarize our home, but why risk it?
If we have a file with secret data we want to send, we usually just use SSH to copy it to one server or another. I'm not the only geek in my family and several of us have Linux servers running SSH.
steveha
I suggest you read the novel A Lion on Tharthee by Grant Callin. It discusses the engineering challenges of making a self-sufficient environment to support human life far away from repair shops and spare parts. (It's just plain a fun novel too, worth reading for its own sake; you might want to start with the novel that came before it to get the full story in the correct sequence.)
Out of print, but you can get it used through Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Lion-Tharthee-Grant-Callin/dp/0671653571
For non-fact, you should probably read the book Halfway to Anywhere by G. Harry Stine. I say "probably" because I haven't read it yet, but everything I have heard about it is good.
We managed to go to Earth's moon by the quick-and-dirty method, with a single rocket launch; it makes much more sense though to build out some infrastructure. A spacecraft for a Mars trip should be built in Earth orbit. There should be some way to cheaply send up things like fuel that are tough and expendable; maybe a linear accelerator on the Equator or something. I think Halfway to Anywhere talks about such stuff.
I believe the title of that book refers to a comment by Robert A. Heinlein: Once you have escaped Earth gravity, you are halfway to anywhere in the Solar System.
Michael Flynn wrote a series about a serious plan to get into space by private industry in the near future. I think the first novel in the series is called Firestar. IIRC they used a super-cannon to send fuel canister into orbit; someone called the cannon "God's Own Shotgun".
steveha
Since this is Slashdot, I'll share some details on the problem of measuring loudness.
Loudness is difficult to measure objectively, because loudness is what a human experiences when listening to audio. Intensity, on the other hand, is easy to measure; just get a sound level meter.
Why is loudness different than intensity? Because the human auditory system contains a natural filterbank that divides incoming audio up into multiple bands, and then applies an exponential scaling function to each band. Old books and papers call these bands critical bands; I think the more modern concept is ERBs.
For sounds that hit only one band, such as a pure sine tone, the intensity of the sound is a good approximation of loudness. But sounds that hit multiple bands scale roughly linearly in the number of bands hit. I'll give an example.
If you generate a pure sine tone at power level X, and then generate two sine tones each at power level X/2, then the measured intensity will be identical. However, if the two sine tones are in different bands, the loudness will be nearly double.
So, as a rule of thumb, the more frequency bands a given sound hits, the louder it is at any given power level. Something that sounds like white noise will be louder than something that sounds like a clear bell tone or a single flute note.
The people who make commercials know how to game the system. I'm pretty sure that there were already limits on measured intensity of commercials, but that wasn't enough to solve the problem.
Imagine you are driving along, listening to a radio show. Maybe talk radio, maybe NPR, whatever. You have the "volume control" knob on your car radio set to a comfortable listening level. The radio show only has audio at typical human speech frequencies, and isn't trying to sound loud. Now comes the commercial, which smears its audio all over the spectrum; it puts processing on the voice, with reverb and stuff. "Sunday Sunday Sunday-y-y-y!!!! M-m-monster truck demolition derby!!!" or whatever. It's not your imagination, it really is louder. But a sound level meter might say it's the same as the radio show content, or only slightly higher intensity level.
The company for which I work (DTS) has a solution to the problem called "Neural Loudness Control", and there is a white paper available that really goes into detail about this stuff, so you don't need to stop with my lame explanation. NLC has a full "loudness model" that approximates the human auditory system when computing a loudness metric; but it also can operate in a mode that follows the new standard.
Also, here's a PowerPoint presentation by JJ Johnston about loudness vs. intensity.
So the new standard, 1770, is a pretty easy-to-calculate approximation of loudness. You apply two filters: one that simulates the transfer function of an average human head, and the "RLB weighting curve"; then compute mean-square energy on the result. This is simple enough that nobody really has an excuse in the 21st Century that it would be hard to comply.
I'm a little worried that it is too simple, and there might be ways to trick it. For example, it doesn't seem to handle audio that is smeared across multiple bands to make it sound louder. But I'm not actually working in the area of loudness measurement, and from what I've heard, 1770 works okay for most stuff. It's better than no standard.
And on the gripping hand, 1770 is the law now.
steveha
You obviously have a fundamental misunderstanding of Stallman's position--which is that copyright shouldn't even exist. The only reason he created the GPL was to use the existing copyright system as a mechanism to enforce his ideal paradigm, which is that no one owns any code, and it is freely available to everyone to do with as they please.
People keep saying RMS doesn't want copyright. Even he says it. But he really does want controls on what people can do with software.
The situation you describe, where code is freely available and everyone may do as they please, would be either a BSD license or perhaps public domain. RMS disapproves of both of these.
RMS wants to enforce the freedom of code by placing limits on what you can do with it. To RMS, no-one should be free to take open source code, change it in proprietary ways, and not share the changes. RMS wants some sort of legal structure to compel the sharing of the changes.
BSD fans and GPL fans argue over which license is "more free". GPL places limits on what you can do with the code; BSD places no limits; clearly BSD must be more free. But BSD lets Microsoft take Kerberos, break it in proprietary ways, and sell the result without sharing the source code; GPL prevents this; clearly GPL enforces a higher level of freedom. Personally, I think both have their points and I would release code under either license, depending on my goals.
RMS, asked about Napster, said "I see nothing unethical in the job it does. Why shouldn't you send a copy of some music to a friend?" So he explicitly doesn't care about a system designed to make sure musicians get paid for their work. He would probably say that the musicians should make money by performing live at shows, just as he makes money giving lectures.
Since violations of the GPL involve closing code that was once open, or holding back new code that should be released under the GPL, it makes sense that would aggressively pursue violations--or that he would like to, if he had the financial resources.
Sure. RMS seems to think that free sharing of source code is the most important issue in the world, and he is very serious about promoting it and enforcing it.
Eric Raymond famously asked RMS whether, if RMS had the power to do so, he would require all software written to be put under GPL. RMS didn't answer, but I think it's clear that the answer is "yes", because RMS has repeatedly made very clear public statements that it is "not ethical" to release software under any license that doesn't enforce the sharing of changes.
Linus, on the other hand, I've never seen as any kind of ideologue or ax-grinder. He just wants to put out good code, and if he can get paid for it, why complain?
I agree. Linus has said that releasing Linux under the GPL was one of the best decisions he ever made; the GPL really worked out for him and for Linux. But he refuses to take Linux to GPLv3, because he doesn't have any desire to place limits on what people can do with Linux.
It really bothers RMS that Tivo can use Linux to make a locked-down platform. Linus doesn't care. It really bothers RMS that Google can run Linux on servers without ever "distributing" it and being forced to share changes. Linus doesn't care.
(For what it's worth, I don't agree with RMS' position on copyright, beyond wanting some reform. The elimination of copyright is not something I would like to see.)
I am a big fan of copyright... however, the current state of IP law is horrible. I think the best possible reform would be to allow people or companies to keep copyright on works as long as they want, but only by renewing the copyright explicitly for each work. If the Disney company wants to keep the "Steamboat Willy" cartoon copyrighted, let them do so, but make them pay a renewal fee every year. (And that fee can be something trivial like $10 or even $1.)
Right now there are copyrighted works in a horrible sort of limbo. They are copyrighted, so you c
Do they use Gtk 2.x, or Gtk 3.x?
They are taking all the GTK 2.x libraries and renaming them. Their goal is to allow MATE to co-exist nicely with GNOME 3 on the same computer.
Once they have it working, they might look at adopting the GNOME 3 libraries. But what they are doing right now is the fastest route to a stable MATE desktop that co-exists with GNOME 3.
If you want something that looks more like GNOME 2 but runs on the GNOME 3 libraries, take a look at MGSE.
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1851
steveha
For $50 more the Nook Tablet or for the same price the older Nook Color are real tablets as opposed to the limited Amazon cloud device the Fire is.
Yes. Even the Nook Color is a pretty darn nice piece of hardware, but the Nook Tablet smokes it on performance. The Color has an 800 MHz single-core processor; the Tablet has a 1 GHz dual-core processor and likely a better GPU. The user experience is slick on the Nook Tablet. And it plays Netflix out of the box, and YouTube and other Flash videos work great in the web browser.
We are seeing a glitch with Flash videos in the web browser: it plays great, but after it plays the video is dead. Can't replay. If you navigate away from the video and then back, and wait for it to load again, you can watch it again. We can live with this, and I figure it will be fixed pretty soon.
Meanwhile I am planning to root our old Nook Color. With CyanogenMod 7, the Color becomes a real 7" tablet with pretty full features, including USB host and BlueTooth. No camera or microphone or GPS, but my phone has those and I'll survive somehow.
If you are a geek reading Slashdot, you want Nook hardware rather than the Kindle Fire.
steveha
This link just floored me.
https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/FAQ#Why_no_window_list_or_dock.3F
"A persistent window list or dock would interfere with this goal, serving as a constant temptation to switch focus."
Who wrote this? How did this become the official position of GNOME 3 officially?
On the one hand, I sort of respect that they aren't letting tradition shackle them. They are trying to boldly change things, to make something really new and really better.
On the other hand, they have changed a bunch of stuff and made it worse!
They got rid of some stuff that takes up space; and I always use GNOME on a giant desktop display with lots of room to spare. Even my netbook has a 10.1" screen and I don't begrudge a few pixels for a window list.
They got rid of the window list, it seems, because it is a distraction. But I am used to it being there and I don't notice it when I'm working; whereas with GNOME 3 I have no option but to have a distracting animation of windows flying about and arranging themselves any time I want to change apps. I have to hit the logo key, watch a dazzling display, find the window I want, click on it, and watch it zoom to full size. This is less distracting than clicking on the button for the window I want, and having it instantly be the topmost window? (Answer: no, it's more distracting, not less. At least that's true for me. But GNOME gives no option; this is the new One True Way that we must all use.)
If the GNOME 3 developers ever build a car, it won't have a steering wheel, a brake pedal, and a gas pedal. They will boldly re-engineer the driving experience. There will probably be a miniature replica of the car mounted on a joystick; you will twist the little car right to turn the real car right. So intuitive! Of course those of us with many years of experience, expert car drivers, will not be able to apply our experience; and if we are recommending a GNOME car to our friends, they will ask us "why is this different from every other car I have ever seen?"
The really frustrating part is that this is a total replay of what happened with the "object oriented file manager". Originally, the GNOME file manager worked pretty much the way it works now. Then they decided that this is overly complicated for newbies. There should be only one window for any one directory, and that one window should remember where it opened last and open in the same place, to build a sense of persistence and make the file system seem more like a real place. (This is similar to how the original Mac Finder worked, I believe. But the Finder in Mac OS X doesn't work that way anymore, and I believe didn't work that way when the GNOME guys made this decision.)
In true GNOME style, they didn't provide a convenient option to turn this off; why would you want to turn it off? It's better. And that is why I, and so many other people, first learned how to use gconftool, to find that option and turn it off.
The very next release of GNOME they changed the default back to the original behavior, and never changed it again. But for GNOME 3, they are sticking to their guns.
In some ways GNOME 3 is nice, but I bitterly resent the amount of control the GNOME guys are trying to assert over how I use my computer. I'm going to try Linux Mint 12 on a spare computer and see how I like it. From what I have seen, MGSE is a giant step up over either of Unity or GNOME 3 Shell.
One of the core goals of GNOME Shell is to provide the GNOME desktop with a consistent and identifiable visual identity.
Why isn't the core goal "make the user be happy and productive"? How does this "visual identity" thing help me? Why should I cooperate with this?
P.S. GNOME 2.x is my favorite desktop environment ever. The GNOME guys have really squandered all the good will I used to have toward them.
steveha
Yeah, I could just 'apt-get install gnome-2' on the latest Ubuntu.
Oh, no. I can't, can I?
I believe the problem is that the GNOME 3 libraries don't co-exist well with the GNOME 2 libraries. Given the way Linux handles libraries with versioning, I don't actually understand why this should be such a problem. But in the Linux Mint blog, they said that MATE (the fork of GNOME 2 that is in Linux Mint 12) has renamed all the GNOME 2 libraries so they can install side-by-side with the GNOME 3 libraries with no problem.
It's still early days with MATE. Once they get MATE really sorted out, then it will show up in Ubuntu (either officially or as PPA) .
steveha
it's not fair to say the iPad is overpriced because it costs more than the Nook; you're basically saying that all 10" tablets are overpriced because they cost more than the Nook.
I don't think I ever said the iPad is "overpriced". I said that both the Nook Tablet and the iPad are classified in my mind as "tablet devices" and I like how the Nook is half the price. I also said I don't need the iPad 2, and didn't buy one.
As I understand it, Apple spent large sums of money to lock in excellent prices on the major parts needed to make iPads. As a result, anyone else trying to enter the market finds that major parts are hard to come by, expensive, or both. In the near term, this gives Apple an edge in the tablet market. In the long term, I expect that we will see competing tablets that cost less than the iPad, but have similar specs.
I think we agree more than we disagree. We both agree that Apple is sort of the BMW for this sort of product, where you pay more and get more. But I absolutely think that 7" tablet devices qualify as tablet devices, and I think you can usefully compare them against 10" tablet devices.
steveha
No, you can't. Because you obviously weren't willing to consider any $500 Android tablets either.
You aren't making any sense. I certainly am willing to consider a $500 Android tablet; if I were buying one, it would be the Samsung Galaxy Tab. But I have no current need for a 10" screen rather than a 7" screen, no current need for a camera, and no current need for the extra horsepower.
You see, in my mind, the Nook Tablet qualifies as a tablet. To you, it's some kind of toy, not in the same class as an iPad 2; you basically said exactly that, so I don't think I'm putting words in your mouth. But I don't agree. For the things I want to do with a tablet, a Nook Tablet or a rooted Nook Color will work.
You aren't going to tell me now that I'm wrong, and the tablet won't do the things I want, are you?
You can get a nice thin and light laptop for $1000, or you can get a similarly spec'd thick and chunky laptop for half that. That doesn't mean that the thin and light is overpriced, it means that you're not even looking at that market segment.
But the Nook Tablet is about as thin as the iPad 2, and it's 2/3 the weight, so it's definitely thin and light.
If you mean that the iPad 2 is like the BMW of tablets, and the Nook Tablet is more like a Volkswagen or something, then sure, I'll go along with that. A BMW is not an "overpriced" car; you are getting more car for more money. But some of us don't want to spend the extra money, and are happy with a lesser car.
But a Volkswagen car still qualifies as a car. You wouldn't say "you can't compare a Volkswagen to a BMW"... or would you?
steveha
You can't compare a 10" high-end tablet to a 7" budget tablet or e-reader, they're not the same class of device.
Oh, I think I can. Here, I'll do it. I'll compare the iPad 2 to the Nook Tablet.
Each is better in some ways than the other. iPad 2 has cameras and a larger screen; Nook Tablet is a convenient size for carrying, is lighter (400 grams vs. 601 grams!), and has longer battery life. Both have great screens. Both have a web browser. iPad 2 has more apps, but Nook Tablet has the apps I really care about; in particular, it has Netflix pre-loaded. Both have a 1 GHz dual-core ARM processor. The Nook Tablet has 1GB of RAM, twice as much as iPad 2, and has a claimed 11.5 hour battery life vs. iPad 2's claimed 10 hour battery life.
And Nook Tablet is literally half the price of iPad 2.
So I bought a Nook Tablet and I haven't bought an iPad.
P.S. I also have a Nook Color and I plan to root it and install CyanogenMod. It turns out that the Nook Color actually has Bluetooth hardware that was not enabled by the Nook software stack, so a rooted Nook Color makes a rather nifty little tablet.
If a bunch of Nook Color owners run out and buy a Nook Tablet, now might be a good time to pick up a used Nook Color for cheap. If you can get a new one for $200 you ought to be able to get a used one for around $100 or so. A used iPad 2 will be much more expensive than that.
I am hoping that the Nook Tablet also has hidden Bluetooth hardware, but I have not yet seen this confirmed or disproved.
steveha