You don't have to bother with that in Ubuntu... you just go to a flash enabled page, it will say it is missing a plugin and ask if you want to install it. You click a couple of times and it installs it and it works.
Of course I agree with you... but that is not what I was trying to say... parent was saying that people aren't ready to buy music online - they would much rather purchase CDs at Walmart... I offered iTunes as a evidence that people ARE ready to buy online.
On a tangent... we don't need more iTunes clones in the open source world. We need a device independent, and vendor independent music purchasing system - open source iTunes, basically, so that Indie bands can sell their music online, accessed from software that will automatically manage their music library, manage their devices, etc...
Yes... this is complicated, because there are many different devices and ways of doing things, but we the OS world can define the standard, the uprising will be powerful.
Except that Google has decided to be bound not just to the laws of the countries they operate in, but have also claimed and I believe attempted to operate to a higher standard. At least in some matters they ask themselves not only is something legal, but is it right.
They still make me nervous, but I believe they do a better job of being ethical than some of the other guys.
We techies may well be open to online delivery, but the other 98% of the world is not. That's why Wal-Mart still makes gobs of money and will continue to do so for many years to come. People just aren't psychologically and emotionally ready to grow out of the brick-and-mortar system yet.
Right... because iPod and iTunes sales are only to techies. While I agree that not everybody is ready to give up on CDs, iTunes and P2P have made significant inroads into the way that people get their music. Downloading music is definitely not just for techies.
No... because the fault is in distribution... Once they stop distributing it, they are no longer breaking the license. From what I gather they will also have to pay some penalty or damage fee.
This gives way to the brilliant add-on... A little adjustable arm (gooseneck maybe? I dunno - something) that will allow you to position the book in the right place for you to read it on your back. And then a remote that will allow you to turn the pages. Then you can truly relax without getting a sore arm. Far better than paper books for reading on one's back.
and of course, what other side effects are there? We must be careful before we try and fix our meddling by meddling more. Sure. the bacteria is natural, but in what environment?
I don't think that helps at all... There would be no way to ensure that the code being run corresponds to the source code being released. AGPL does nothing for security. The decision at the end of the day is who do you trust?
In fact, releasing the source code would make it easier to convince people it is safe, because some might even look at the code and say, "well, looks okay..." But what is actually being executed? Who knows.
AGPL won't help security... having to release the source is intended to increase sharing, not security. The point of a hacked site is for it to operate like a non-hacked site.
Except that using a lot of resources and causing a crash are very different... There are certainly third party apps that use lots of memory in Windows... that is pretty clear. But the argument is that the Operating System should be smart enough to not let those apps bring the system down. It might be useful to be able to limit the amount of memory that plugins can use... using resources (i.e. memory) is very different from causing a crash.
There are programs such as MyPasswordSafe, that allow you to store your passwords in an encrypted form. I have one crazy password that protects all the other passwords. I haven't checked the encryption on it, but I know I need the password (which is stored only in my head), to unlock the other passwords.
sure... but people are overlooking the fact that if you are in to stuff that is serious enough to require this kind of privacy then you really should make the effort to know what you are doing and to do it right.
The average person doesn't know how to do design a bridge properly... but if somebody were to design a bridge, they had better take the time to learn how to do it properly.
So, in this case, before you send sensitive data over the Internet, know the process, or get it approved from somebody you trust (and it might not be wise to trust somebody offering a free service over the Internet)
There are some things that you should be really really really sure about...
If I'm reading right, Blizzard hasn't necessarily done anything wrong... they've only done something that makes it difficult to know if they are compromising your personal information.
*even if they remove the offending pages from future copies*, since the entire book is now contaminated.
This is untrue. First, because the license doesn't automatically become FDL, it becomes a license violation which should be dealt with through law. Second, because there is nothing that states that once something is released using FDL it always has to be released in that license. The author is free to release his portion of the work using any license he/she chooses, in the same way that software publishers can dual license their software.
If the license did automatically become FDL, then the author would still be able to publish the book under a different license without those portions. Those who received the original release that was forced FDL (if this hypothetically did happen), could redistribute the work under the FDL, but those who purchased the other version would not have received it under the FDL and thus could not redistribute it.
I can see it both ways. Sometimes you want to slap in whatever disc you have lying around for a quick burn. For my purposes, I use very high quality media because it's what my clients expect, and it has to last a long time. If I was in the sort of job where that didn't matter, I might think differently. I don't think of it as Apple dictating what discs I can use. I think of it as Apple making sure I don't waste my time making unreliable discs that won't last. Garbage in - garbage out. Of course... but if I want to burn something that will last, I will do research and invest in media that will last. If I want to burn a bunch of discs that I will use a few times and discard anyway, I don't want to be forced to waste my money on expensive media.
I'm hesitant though to assume that this was the logic behind it... I somehow doubt that Apple decided to design hardware that specifically rejected certain discs. My guess is that they just didn't test the design enough and do enough iterations of the hardware to make sure it worked with media that other drives have no trouble with.
Not sure I buy it being a software thing... wait states and cycles and timing should all be handled by the CPU and motherboard chipset. Never seen arguments for this being the case. Also not sure what you mean by 'now even Microsoft wants the good stuff'... can you provide a source for that?
I'm all for reliable, well-built, efficient, high quality cars... but I still don't need a Porsche. I'll take a workhorse vehicle over shiny and pretty any day. Don't think it has anything to do with my age - you have no idea how old I am or you wouldn't have written that.
Your problem might be that you're using el cheap-o media. Just as Macs want high quality RAM chips, they want high quality blank discs
You don't consider this a feature, do you? I'd rather be able to choose which media that I use rather than have Apple dictate that I only use certain discs.
I also wouldn't necessarily consider macs wanting high quality RAM chips a good thing either... as somebody with an E.E. degree, that tells me that they have designed so poorly that the slightest value variation will break everything. IMO, it is a better design if you can deal with a wider variety of specs.
It is much easier to design something that will work in very specific conditions than to design something that will handle a broad range of tasks.
To compare an Apple to a Porsche is confirmation to me that I don't need one. I'll stick with Linux.
ahhh... but it is a little known fact that CGA adapters are capable of displaying 16 colours. And, if you connected it to a TV, you could even get many more different colours (about 100) by getting the colours to smear together creating new ones.
Of course routers need basic HTTP Authentication, but this can't be too hard to write a client for. I mentioned in my post that many many users don't bother to reset their router passwords. For those that have, you ask them for it (you don't think people will give it to them? how many people do you think have given hotmail and gmail passwords to facebook?). Sure, there are many different router systems out there, but there are very few very common ones... D-Link, Linksys, Buffalo maybe, and a few others... and what kind of API do you need? Just grab the HTML pages and parse them out with some regular expressions... trivial for a few... but there really are only a few routers that most people will have.
There would be a point where it gets tedious, but you just handle the easy cases, and people with other routers have to do the config themselves.
Alright, I'm not a networking guy by any means, but how exactly is WoW supposed to open up ports on my router? I'm not even going to pretend to understand why they can't use ports that don't need to be explicitly forwarded, but I'd have major problems if any software could convince my router to open up any ports it felt like.
Shouldn't be too complicated, really... all you have to do is communicate with the router using HTTP. You can easily write a client for the standard cases - search for an IP, look for a router on the network (usually at subnet.1), and attempt to detect what kind of router it is. Once you do that, first thing you do is try the default password (which many people don't bother to change). Send the proper requests so that the port gets opened. If the user has changed his/her password, ask them for the username and password for router admin - this may get them stuck if they had a tech setup their router, and send the credential pair to the router to authenticate and open up the port. Some routers you might have to reboot, but most have a way to trigger this through the web admin.
Again, as GP said, you really should ask for confirmation, and if it is password protected (other than the standard 'admin' that you find), you have to ask for the password anyway.
Thinking about this, this could be a pretty severe botnet infection if virus writers leveraged this... I would bet that if somebody hasn't secured their PC enough to prevent worms, then there is a good change they haven't changed the password on their router/wireless router. How hard would it be to write new firmware (especially considering the existence of the openwrt project), and have the virus flash the router with the new firmware. This could probably all be done transparent to the user - perhaps a momentary connection loss as the router reboots, but that's it. Then you could have routers infected instead of just PCs, and you could in the new firmware make it impossible to change the firmware back (maybe the reset button would work on some routers, but on some it probably wouldn't).
hmmm... that is odd... I didn't realize that it only worked on notebooks. I know some CPUs don't allow it - Celerons, for one. I remember trying to install it on my fedora box (which was on the celeron), and it said the processor didn't support it. From that I assumed I could use it on the desktop if I had the right CPU.
Maybe not.
Good luck... I'm happily using speedstep here, and though it doesn't get down to 200 MHz, the machine runs at 800 most of the time. I would think that as we come to the realization that no matter how green our power is, it is still greener to use less, there would be a trend towards more and more of this. We'll see... I wonder how much electricity we could save if features like this worked better in general. Doesn't seem like that difficult of a feature to implement, though that being said, it has been a couple of years since I was in UNI designing small uPs.
It may not be perfected yet, but I will say that it is much better, and Ubuntu is making strides in this direction. One of the things I love about my Linux is that it does seem to cycle down the CPU. Using XP, my notebook constantly sounded like an airplane taking off. On Linux, it is a low hum of the fan, which in some conditions is hardly noticeable. Maybe XP just eats more CPU cycles, but the conclusion I reached was that Linux was cycling down and Windows wasn't. I didn't do anything to configure that, BTW... it just worked. I guess I'm just lucky though too, because everything worked right off the install... suspend, resume, wireless, video, power saving.
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You don't have to bother with that in Ubuntu... you just go to a flash enabled page, it will say it is missing a plugin and ask if you want to install it. You click a couple of times and it installs it and it works.
Isn't too complicated. apt-get isn't needed.
Ian
Right... because if you don't speak English, you can't have an opinion, right?
Of course I agree with you... but that is not what I was trying to say... parent was saying that people aren't ready to buy music online - they would much rather purchase CDs at Walmart... I offered iTunes as a evidence that people ARE ready to buy online.
On a tangent... we don't need more iTunes clones in the open source world. We need a device independent, and vendor independent music purchasing system - open source iTunes, basically, so that Indie bands can sell their music online, accessed from software that will automatically manage their music library, manage their devices, etc...
Yes... this is complicated, because there are many different devices and ways of doing things, but we the OS world can define the standard, the uprising will be powerful.
Except that Google has decided to be bound not just to the laws of the countries they operate in, but have also claimed and I believe attempted to operate to a higher standard. At least in some matters they ask themselves not only is something legal, but is it right.
They still make me nervous, but I believe they do a better job of being ethical than some of the other guys.
We techies may well be open to online delivery, but the other 98% of the world is not. That's why Wal-Mart still makes gobs of money and will continue to do so for many years to come. People just aren't psychologically and emotionally ready to grow out of the brick-and-mortar system yet.
Right... because iPod and iTunes sales are only to techies. While I agree that not everybody is ready to give up on CDs, iTunes and P2P have made significant inroads into the way that people get their music. Downloading music is definitely not just for techies.
No... because the fault is in distribution... Once they stop distributing it, they are no longer breaking the license. From what I gather they will also have to pay some penalty or damage fee.
Hmmm.... true... and if they are mentally ill, we have nothing to worry about, right?
This gives way to the brilliant add-on... A little adjustable arm (gooseneck maybe? I dunno - something) that will allow you to position the book in the right place for you to read it on your back. And then a remote that will allow you to turn the pages. Then you can truly relax without getting a sore arm. Far better than paper books for reading on one's back.
So are you saying the EEPROM (electrically erasable Programmable Read Only Memory) is an oxymoron?
Okay... maybe it is, but ROM doesn't necessarily mean read only anymore.
People put clothes on their bongs nowadays? Wow... and I thought clothing pets was crazy.
and of course, what other side effects are there? We must be careful before we try and fix our meddling by meddling more. Sure. the bacteria is natural, but in what environment?
I don't think that helps at all... There would be no way to ensure that the code being run corresponds to the source code being released. AGPL does nothing for security. The decision at the end of the day is who do you trust?
In fact, releasing the source code would make it easier to convince people it is safe, because some might even look at the code and say, "well, looks okay..." But what is actually being executed? Who knows.
AGPL won't help security... having to release the source is intended to increase sharing, not security. The point of a hacked site is for it to operate like a non-hacked site.
Exactly... but what you do is you simply add voice dial so that calls can be made with the touch of a button... and stick bluetooth on it...
Ian
Or use gpart, which will fix your partitions on Linux. Still a good idea to backup, but that will solve at least some of your trouble.
Except that using a lot of resources and causing a crash are very different... There are certainly third party apps that use lots of memory in Windows... that is pretty clear. But the argument is that the Operating System should be smart enough to not let those apps bring the system down. It might be useful to be able to limit the amount of memory that plugins can use... using resources (i.e. memory) is very different from causing a crash.
There are programs such as MyPasswordSafe, that allow you to store your passwords in an encrypted form. I have one crazy password that protects all the other passwords. I haven't checked the encryption on it, but I know I need the password (which is stored only in my head), to unlock the other passwords.
sure... but people are overlooking the fact that if you are in to stuff that is serious enough to require this kind of privacy then you really should make the effort to know what you are doing and to do it right.
The average person doesn't know how to do design a bridge properly... but if somebody were to design a bridge, they had better take the time to learn how to do it properly.
So, in this case, before you send sensitive data over the Internet, know the process, or get it approved from somebody you trust (and it might not be wise to trust somebody offering a free service over the Internet)
There are some things that you should be really really really sure about...
What privacy laws is it breaking?
If I'm reading right, Blizzard hasn't necessarily done anything wrong... they've only done something that makes it difficult to know if they are compromising your personal information.
*even if they remove the offending pages from future copies*, since the entire book is now contaminated.
This is untrue. First, because the license doesn't automatically become FDL, it becomes a license violation which should be dealt with through law. Second, because there is nothing that states that once something is released using FDL it always has to be released in that license. The author is free to release his portion of the work using any license he/she chooses, in the same way that software publishers can dual license their software.
If the license did automatically become FDL, then the author would still be able to publish the book under a different license without those portions. Those who received the original release that was forced FDL (if this hypothetically did happen), could redistribute the work under the FDL, but those who purchased the other version would not have received it under the FDL and thus could not redistribute it.
I can see it both ways. Sometimes you want to slap in whatever disc you have lying around for a quick burn. For my purposes, I use very high quality media because it's what my clients expect, and it has to last a long time. If I was in the sort of job where that didn't matter, I might think differently. I don't think of it as Apple dictating what discs I can use. I think of it as Apple making sure I don't waste my time making unreliable discs that won't last. Garbage in - garbage out.
Of course... but if I want to burn something that will last, I will do research and invest in media that will last. If I want to burn a bunch of discs that I will use a few times and discard anyway, I don't want to be forced to waste my money on expensive media.
I'm hesitant though to assume that this was the logic behind it... I somehow doubt that Apple decided to design hardware that specifically rejected certain discs. My guess is that they just didn't test the design enough and do enough iterations of the hardware to make sure it worked with media that other drives have no trouble with.
Not sure I buy it being a software thing... wait states and cycles and timing should all be handled by the CPU and motherboard chipset. Never seen arguments for this being the case. Also not sure what you mean by 'now even Microsoft wants the good stuff'... can you provide a source for that?
I'm all for reliable, well-built, efficient, high quality cars... but I still don't need a Porsche. I'll take a workhorse vehicle over shiny and pretty any day. Don't think it has anything to do with my age - you have no idea how old I am or you wouldn't have written that.
Your problem might be that you're using el cheap-o media. Just as Macs want high quality RAM chips, they want high quality blank discs
You don't consider this a feature, do you? I'd rather be able to choose which media that I use rather than have Apple dictate that I only use certain discs.
I also wouldn't necessarily consider macs wanting high quality RAM chips a good thing either... as somebody with an E.E. degree, that tells me that they have designed so poorly that the slightest value variation will break everything. IMO, it is a better design if you can deal with a wider variety of specs.
It is much easier to design something that will work in very specific conditions than to design something that will handle a broad range of tasks.
To compare an Apple to a Porsche is confirmation to me that I don't need one. I'll stick with Linux.
ahhh... but it is a little known fact that CGA adapters are capable of displaying 16 colours. And, if you connected it to a TV, you could even get many more different colours (about 100) by getting the colours to smear together creating new ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter
Of course routers need basic HTTP Authentication, but this can't be too hard to write a client for. I mentioned in my post that many many users don't bother to reset their router passwords. For those that have, you ask them for it (you don't think people will give it to them? how many people do you think have given hotmail and gmail passwords to facebook?). Sure, there are many different router systems out there, but there are very few very common ones... D-Link, Linksys, Buffalo maybe, and a few others... and what kind of API do you need? Just grab the HTML pages and parse them out with some regular expressions... trivial for a few... but there really are only a few routers that most people will have.
There would be a point where it gets tedious, but you just handle the easy cases, and people with other routers have to do the config themselves.
Alright, I'm not a networking guy by any means, but how exactly is WoW supposed to open up ports on my router? I'm not even going to pretend to understand why they can't use ports that don't need to be explicitly forwarded, but I'd have major problems if any software could convince my router to open up any ports it felt like.
Shouldn't be too complicated, really... all you have to do is communicate with the router using HTTP. You can easily write a client for the standard cases - search for an IP, look for a router on the network (usually at subnet.1), and attempt to detect what kind of router it is. Once you do that, first thing you do is try the default password (which many people don't bother to change). Send the proper requests so that the port gets opened. If the user has changed his/her password, ask them for the username and password for router admin - this may get them stuck if they had a tech setup their router, and send the credential pair to the router to authenticate and open up the port. Some routers you might have to reboot, but most have a way to trigger this through the web admin.
Again, as GP said, you really should ask for confirmation, and if it is password protected (other than the standard 'admin' that you find), you have to ask for the password anyway.
Thinking about this, this could be a pretty severe botnet infection if virus writers leveraged this... I would bet that if somebody hasn't secured their PC enough to prevent worms, then there is a good change they haven't changed the password on their router/wireless router. How hard would it be to write new firmware (especially considering the existence of the openwrt project), and have the virus flash the router with the new firmware. This could probably all be done transparent to the user - perhaps a momentary connection loss as the router reboots, but that's it. Then you could have routers infected instead of just PCs, and you could in the new firmware make it impossible to change the firmware back (maybe the reset button would work on some routers, but on some it probably wouldn't).
hmmm... that is odd... I didn't realize that it only worked on notebooks. I know some CPUs don't allow it - Celerons, for one. I remember trying to install it on my fedora box (which was on the celeron), and it said the processor didn't support it. From that I assumed I could use it on the desktop if I had the right CPU.
Maybe not.
Good luck... I'm happily using speedstep here, and though it doesn't get down to 200 MHz, the machine runs at 800 most of the time. I would think that as we come to the realization that no matter how green our power is, it is still greener to use less, there would be a trend towards more and more of this. We'll see... I wonder how much electricity we could save if features like this worked better in general. Doesn't seem like that difficult of a feature to implement, though that being said, it has been a couple of years since I was in UNI designing small uPs.
It may not be perfected yet, but I will say that it is much better, and Ubuntu is making strides in this direction. One of the things I love about my Linux is that it does seem to cycle down the CPU. Using XP, my notebook constantly sounded like an airplane taking off. On Linux, it is a low hum of the fan, which in some conditions is hardly noticeable. Maybe XP just eats more CPU cycles, but the conclusion I reached was that Linux was cycling down and Windows wasn't. I didn't do anything to configure that, BTW... it just worked. I guess I'm just lucky though too, because everything worked right off the install... suspend, resume, wireless, video, power saving.