None of the technically minded folks I knew (including, it seems, most of slashdot) seemed determined to either ignore or disparage wave. How was it to succeed without technical people supporting it, who would do so if they wouldnt?
Some tools may be better than some of the features, but I totally disagree that email was better than wave at pretty much anything. Email sucks at collaboration, badly. Its pretty much only good at announcing things; for any sort of multi-person back and forth, it works, but not well.
That's because it's chat with a couple of features
Only in the sense that a car is a horse with a couple of features, otherwise, youre just wrong. Among its "couple of features" (unashamedly pulled from an earlier post, as it seems this, like so many myths, persist...)
All server-to-server communication is TLS encrypted and authenticated. All wave origins are verified using digital signatures, so, to quote from wikipedia,
Therefore, a downstream wave provider can verify that the wave provider is not spoofing wavelet operations. It should not be able to falsely claim that a wavelet operation originated from a user on another wave provider or that it was originated in a different context.
Thus, spam really ceases to be an issue
Waves can be embedded. Blog comment sections can be replaced by waves; forum threads by waves. All comments would appear in your inbox. Email cannot even hope to replicate this other than with the clunky-and-annoying "notify me when someone responds" forum setting.
You can easily add people to the discussion. The only way to do so with email is to re-forward the whole chain of emails to them and ask them to reply-all; or to include them in the next reply-all and hope that noone else responds first. This is a pretty glaring flaw of email that Wave fixes.
There are of course a ton of other reasons why Wave was more than just "chat with a couple of features", but these were big. Wave had the chance to completely redo how we communicated, freeing people from having to keep track of 10 different IM networks + email + forums + blog comments. All of this was, and is in its current implentation, able to be taken care of from a wave inbox. Spam would have taken a hit, as would phishing, because you wouldnt be able to forge "accountservices@capitolone.com". Email chains would have ceased to be a gigantic disaster of people forwarding, reforwarding, editing, reforwarding, and generally mucking up inboxes with garbage. Most importantly, a portable interface could have been crafted around all this, practically for free-- dont need a custom client for each feature, just a client for wave.
Its a little disheartening to see so many people (even techies) who dismissed it out of hand given how much better it was (with no disadvantages that I can discern). I understand why, sort of, since it really wasnt explained at all, and it took me several hours of screwing with to figure out just what it was, and could do. But one would hope the prevailing attitude on slashdot would be "that looks interesting, lets test it and find out if its any good" rather than "that looks complicated, im going to stick with what I know because this scares me".
I mean, if its taking this long to get IPv6 rolled out, and this just failed to take off, what hope have we of ever being rid of rickety old SMTP? Do we just need to keep extending the thing to death until its major flaws are fixed (if thats even possible)? Are we to be stuck fiddling around with seperate interfaces for every form of communication we use (IM, IRC, email, messageboards, comments) for the forseeable future?
Finally, given the above, how can people POSSIBLY be responding "and nothing of value was lost" in an honest to goodness impressive attempt that was completely opened to the public (source for the servers was released!)? Is everyone really that in love with MS Exchange?
I've never known Microsoft to tell their customers that something is wrong.
In their defense, I think they actually did once. After years of denying that anything was wrong with Vista, they basically came out with 7 and said, "Ok, we know we screwed up before. Truth time: Our new OS is better, we promise."
Its not much, but they DID admit that vista sucked.
Theyre incorrect in places that noone would go, because the roads are ficticious dead-ends with no offshoots. They certainly do not put real addresses in the wrong spot on purpose, thats just stupid.
You know, there are some good points in your post, but its really irritating that the general vibe seems to still be "google has some hidden agenda".
I mean, at every step of the way of Chrome's evolution, people have been absolutely digging for reasons not to like it, and for Google to be up to some nefarious plot with it--
First, they complained that the EULA said "Google pwns ur stuff". Googles legal team set the record straight, that died down
Then the claim was that everything in google passes through googles servers (which may be true in default installs, but is also true for IE's default search for MS, and Firefox's for Yahoo or Google). This myth remains, DESPITE the easy 3 click "turn on privacy plz" checkboxes.
Then the claim was that adblock will NEVER be done properly, because Google relies on ad revenue. Adblock is now done properly (save a few bugs), and yet people find even in that something to criticize.
This might come across as shilling, or fanboyism, or whatever. Yes, I like google products, cause they tend to be well done, but I dont delude myself that theyre not out for profit. What I DONT get, is why, when EVERYONE knows their business model, which is basically "make the web really powerful, and monetize the hell out of ads", they still act like theres hidden evil stuff going on. Is there anything Google can do that WONT garner cries of "hum, another big evil corporation trying to stomp on consumers"? Is it possible that their business model really is just to be really good at what they do?
HOSTS files are messy, require admin to update, and can be a PITA to troubleshoot why X feature on Y website doesnt work, not to mention that they can severely impact network lookups. Theyre a really really kludgy hack.
Im pretty sure you cannot trace an IP to a specific address without talking to the ISP. IPs are dynamically allocated, and are not tied to a specific address, and no network forensics are going to reveal physical router locations unless theyre foolish enough to put the address as the hostname.
This is precisely why the RIAA has to use subpoenas to get that info from ISPs. Infosniper may be giving you the lag/long of the town, but it wont be able to be much more accurate than that.
I really doubt the $1200 card is 12x faster than the $100 card, so yes, unless youre doing "important" stuff (and if you get the ARES, youre not), yes, its a phenomenal waste of cash.
Remixing is useful for forensics, kind of hard to use Backtrack style distros when you need to customize your live CD at every boot.
Im making one at the moment because I deal with a lot of broken windows installations. I had been carrying around (in addition to Windows reinstall disks) DBAN, OphCrack, the NT password reset tool, and Ubuntu (for killing off rootkits), plus several tools on a USB drive, but there are several downsides to this approach:
Thats a bunch of CDs, and its a pain to keep reburning them (when given away, scratched, etc)
The Ubuntu disk allows me to install whatever I need (ie, gparted), but again, thats a pain. There are several things I cant do, as well-- like registry edits easily
Most of this stuff can fit on a single CD
USB drives are prone to infection, and spreading infection
Solution? Remix ubuntu with all the right tools preinstalled, slim out the crap that slows down live boot, turn off automatic processes (ie updates) that hose slower computers, and add several Isolinux options for DBAN + NT Password reset, then add a windows Autorun.inf with sysinternals tools. Ive also embedded our remote access solution (think an enterprisey VNC + DDNS + router traversal). The result? A disk I can give family, tell them "reboot with the disk in", and have full root access to their windows partition.
Heres another scenario: Library wants kiosks, but doesnt want the hassel of viruses, misconfiguration, etc. Solution? Roll your own distro with everything preconfigured in/etc/skel. Computer gets messed up? reboot back into the CD.
How else would you propose to accomplish either of the above with out rolling my own "sub-distro"?
Heres why I WOULD recommend them to some people, in certain controlled instances (have, actually):
A) have you actually tried to figure out how to secure a network, or even your Dad's computer, when doing so requires he have the ABSOLUTE LATEST version of flash, adobe reader, and java? Not to mention those realplayer and QT plugins that are sure to get exploited one of these days? Linux gets it right with centralized software updates; Windows is an absolute nightmare in this regard. Theres WSUS, but oh wait you cant add crap like foxit reader to it, and MSI deployments can be a nightmare to upgrade. Not to mention some things just dont have MSIs.
B) Most users these days honestly dont care that much about windows, as the programs that they run and the way their windows act. Seeing as many users manage to make the transition to Mac just fine, I dont see why you would claim that there are no "Joe Windows users" out there who would survive an easy transition to, say, Ubuntu 9.04. And in general, once you get things working (which ISNT that hard, theres 8 million wiki articles on just about every concievable 9.04 problem by now), they will continue to work; as exploits get discovered, the system will automatically patch as the updates are released.
C) Being able to customize the crap out of Linux means I can take Ubuntu {favorite version}, set up some sane defaults (remove crappy and unnecessary programs, install VNC and a DDNS updater), then compile the whole thing into a single CD that installs the working system as is. A little more work and you can have a backup that runs to an external drive (back-in-time), and set the CD to auto-wipe / reinstall the root partition without touching the/home.
D) Heres the real kicker. Windows as of now has AWFUL recovery options. Windows XP was the last OS that had any form of disaster recovery-- combofix works well, its got the recovery console, its got repair installs, and its boot.ini is actually editable in any OS. Vista and 7 dont have a useable repair (to repair, you have to launch it from a working windows install...), and any recoveries you make to a new HDD will just not work because the disk ID wont match the BCD. If you get a virus on Vista or 7, youre basically hosed, because combofix doesnt really work on it, and there arent any fantastic removal tools yet (theres GMER, but its showing its age, and I dont know if it works on Win7 x64).
If something goes wrong on Ubuntu, conversely, I can hand them a disk with a remote-access agent on it, remote in, and fix their root partition easily.
Look, Ive heard this argument that "I dont want to be their tech repair guy" before, but chances are you already are, and given the choice between friends and family using Windows with its AWFUL update mechanism, its AWFUL vulnerabilities, its AWFUL recovery options, and the joys of having to hunt down drivers to make crap work (ever try installing XP on a machine that was bundled with Vista home? It SUCKS.), I will take Linux with centralized everything and built in drivers any day.
but have you considered that not all of the "spying" issues in Chrome are have visible controls for the users to turn off by their choice?
Except chromium is open source, and SEVERAL people (including myself) have audited Chrome to verify this. One poster mentioned that he ran it through a sniffing proxy for several days with no extra data. There are TONS of tools out there to verify what Chrome sends to Google; Sysinternals has FileMon and ProcExp which show you everything you need to know about what Chrome does, and Wireshark shows you all data that it sends.
The problem is its all to easy to throw out such accusations with NO proof or shred of evidence whatsoever, and you can then pretend that the burden of proof falls on others to prove you wrong (which they HAVE), when Google in general has shown itself to be completely open about what data it collects. This all basically amounts to people mindlessly bashing Google because for some bizarre reason their success has made them a bad guy in the news, and now on Slashdot.
Then go into tools and uncheck the 3 "please spy on me and give me goodies" boxes, and stop whining about it. This isnt rocket science, the instructions for disabling the "spying things" are posted in EVERY one of these discussions, and are simple enough for a 6 year old.
I know im being naieve here, but can this stupid FUD rumor just die? Chrome is NOT hard to make as "privacy safe" as any other browser, and unlike many others, is actually open source.
Lot wasnt a "hero in the Bible", and the Bible never gives any sort of approval to getting his daughters pregnant. Youre pulling from the section of the Bible known as the historical writings, which, surprise surprise, relate historical events. Quite often no explicit approval or disapproval is given for people's actions; the section just focuses on things that happened, how they happened.
For example, Abraham had multiple wives, but no approval / disapproval is mentioned at all; you just need to turn to the part about having only one wife if you want to see what the Bible says about Abraham in that instance.
Sorry for double post-- If you are referring to the Book of Revelation, then I agree with you on that point; I misunderstood you to mean "revelation in general" (ie the Bible) is "almost entirely using symbolic language", which I would strongly protest. My apologies.
I would disagree with both statements (at least to some degree), and as I certainly do not think they are the consensus view among Christians (at least those who have actually read scripture), stating them as if they were fact is misleading.
Christianity is defined by the Bible, and Im fairly certain I could take up several pages with quotes about how "If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth". In fact its probably easier to just point at the whole book of 1 John and James.
Being Christian doesnt mean you've checked a mark on some survey somewhere, you know; the term refers to "followers of Christ", which implies doing what he instructed.
What you mean to say is that YOU have no use for it, which is a far sight from "its a completely pointless feature". I, for instance, used a mx800 and a G7 mouse back in the day, and enjoyed a few things about them:
1) A heck of a lot quicker and more seamless to move a wireless mouse to a new computer. Wired mouse, you gotta route the wire, or its in the way. Generally not a huge issue, but can be obnoxious depending on how hard it is to get behind the desk or computer in question, especially if its just visiting a friend's house.
2) watching a movie on your computer from a couch. Very nice to be able to control the media player with the mouse on your thigh from 5 feet away. Wired mouse doesnt really cut it.
3) Aesthetics. Some places (ie, offices, confrence rooms) put a high premium on aesthetics. Any time you reduce wires, you make the place look more professional. And if youre moving around a lot, re-doing velcro ties on wires quickly becomes tiresome.
Also, maybe YOU dont move your mouse around a lot, but i make sure my G9 (wired) mouse has a ton of slack because I move it all over the desk depending on how I rearrange things (papers, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
None of the technically minded folks I knew (including, it seems, most of slashdot) seemed determined to either ignore or disparage wave. How was it to succeed without technical people supporting it, who would do so if they wouldnt?
If they released the source, in what way did they kill the thing?
Some tools may be better than some of the features, but I totally disagree that email was better than wave at pretty much anything. Email sucks at collaboration, badly. Its pretty much only good at announcing things; for any sort of multi-person back and forth, it works, but not well.
That's because it's chat with a couple of features
Only in the sense that a car is a horse with a couple of features, otherwise, youre just wrong. Among its "couple of features" (unashamedly pulled from an earlier post, as it seems this, like so many myths, persist...)
Therefore, a downstream wave provider can verify that the wave provider is not spoofing wavelet operations. It should not be able to falsely claim that a wavelet operation originated from a user on another wave provider or that it was originated in a different context.
Thus, spam really ceases to be an issue
There are of course a ton of other reasons why Wave was more than just "chat with a couple of features", but these were big. Wave had the chance to completely redo how we communicated, freeing people from having to keep track of 10 different IM networks + email + forums + blog comments. All of this was, and is in its current implentation, able to be taken care of from a wave inbox. Spam would have taken a hit, as would phishing, because you wouldnt be able to forge "accountservices@capitolone.com". Email chains would have ceased to be a gigantic disaster of people forwarding, reforwarding, editing, reforwarding, and generally mucking up inboxes with garbage. Most importantly, a portable interface could have been crafted around all this, practically for free-- dont need a custom client for each feature, just a client for wave.
Its a little disheartening to see so many people (even techies) who dismissed it out of hand given how much better it was (with no disadvantages that I can discern). I understand why, sort of, since it really wasnt explained at all, and it took me several hours of screwing with to figure out just what it was, and could do. But one would hope the prevailing attitude on slashdot would be "that looks interesting, lets test it and find out if its any good" rather than "that looks complicated, im going to stick with what I know because this scares me".
I mean, if its taking this long to get IPv6 rolled out, and this just failed to take off, what hope have we of ever being rid of rickety old SMTP? Do we just need to keep extending the thing to death until its major flaws are fixed (if thats even possible)? Are we to be stuck fiddling around with seperate interfaces for every form of communication we use (IM, IRC, email, messageboards, comments) for the forseeable future?
Finally, given the above, how can people POSSIBLY be responding "and nothing of value was lost" in an honest to goodness impressive attempt that was completely opened to the public (source for the servers was released!)? Is everyone really that in love with MS Exchange?
"much more than configure routers" implies you cant make a really good living with a CCIE.
I've never known Microsoft to tell their customers that something is wrong.
In their defense, I think they actually did once. After years of denying that anything was wrong with Vista, they basically came out with 7 and said, "Ok, we know we screwed up before. Truth time: Our new OS is better, we promise."
Its not much, but they DID admit that vista sucked.
Theyre incorrect in places that noone would go, because the roads are ficticious dead-ends with no offshoots. They certainly do not put real addresses in the wrong spot on purpose, thats just stupid.
Areas where you would be looking to exit also tend to be the spot where merges occur and shoulders are scarce.
I mean, at every step of the way of Chrome's evolution, people have been absolutely digging for reasons not to like it, and for Google to be up to some nefarious plot with it--
This might come across as shilling, or fanboyism, or whatever. Yes, I like google products, cause they tend to be well done, but I dont delude myself that theyre not out for profit. What I DONT get, is why, when EVERYONE knows their business model, which is basically "make the web really powerful, and monetize the hell out of ads", they still act like theres hidden evil stuff going on. Is there anything Google can do that WONT garner cries of "hum, another big evil corporation trying to stomp on consumers"? Is it possible that their business model really is just to be really good at what they do?
HOSTS files are messy, require admin to update, and can be a PITA to troubleshoot why X feature on Y website doesnt work, not to mention that they can severely impact network lookups. Theyre a really really kludgy hack.
Im pretty sure you cannot trace an IP to a specific address without talking to the ISP. IPs are dynamically allocated, and are not tied to a specific address, and no network forensics are going to reveal physical router locations unless theyre foolish enough to put the address as the hostname.
This is precisely why the RIAA has to use subpoenas to get that info from ISPs. Infosniper may be giving you the lag/long of the town, but it wont be able to be much more accurate than that.
I really doubt the $1200 card is 12x faster than the $100 card, so yes, unless youre doing "important" stuff (and if you get the ARES, youre not), yes, its a phenomenal waste of cash.
Sulfur isnt what causes gas, guy.
Why is this modded troll? Have the mods gone crazy tonight? Parent was contributing to the discussion; if anything mod parent "informative".
Im making one at the moment because I deal with a lot of broken windows installations. I had been carrying around (in addition to Windows reinstall disks) DBAN, OphCrack, the NT password reset tool, and Ubuntu (for killing off rootkits), plus several tools on a USB drive, but there are several downsides to this approach:
Solution? Remix ubuntu with all the right tools preinstalled, slim out the crap that slows down live boot, turn off automatic processes (ie updates) that hose slower computers, and add several Isolinux options for DBAN + NT Password reset, then add a windows Autorun.inf with sysinternals tools. Ive also embedded our remote access solution (think an enterprisey VNC + DDNS + router traversal). The result? A disk I can give family, tell them "reboot with the disk in", and have full root access to their windows partition.
/etc/skel. Computer gets messed up? reboot back into the CD.
Heres another scenario: Library wants kiosks, but doesnt want the hassel of viruses, misconfiguration, etc. Solution? Roll your own distro with everything preconfigured in
How else would you propose to accomplish either of the above with out rolling my own "sub-distro"?
Heres why I WOULD recommend them to some people, in certain controlled instances (have, actually):
/home.
D) Heres the real kicker. Windows as of now has AWFUL recovery options. Windows XP was the last OS that had any form of disaster recovery-- combofix works well, its got the recovery console, its got repair installs, and its boot.ini is actually editable in any OS. Vista and 7 dont have a useable repair (to repair, you have to launch it from a working windows install...), and any recoveries you make to a new HDD will just not work because the disk ID wont match the BCD. If you get a virus on Vista or 7, youre basically hosed, because combofix doesnt really work on it, and there arent any fantastic removal tools yet (theres GMER, but its showing its age, and I dont know if it works on Win7 x64).
A) have you actually tried to figure out how to secure a network, or even your Dad's computer, when doing so requires he have the ABSOLUTE LATEST version of flash, adobe reader, and java? Not to mention those realplayer and QT plugins that are sure to get exploited one of these days? Linux gets it right with centralized software updates; Windows is an absolute nightmare in this regard. Theres WSUS, but oh wait you cant add crap like foxit reader to it, and MSI deployments can be a nightmare to upgrade. Not to mention some things just dont have MSIs.
B) Most users these days honestly dont care that much about windows, as the programs that they run and the way their windows act. Seeing as many users manage to make the transition to Mac just fine, I dont see why you would claim that there are no "Joe Windows users" out there who would survive an easy transition to, say, Ubuntu 9.04. And in general, once you get things working (which ISNT that hard, theres 8 million wiki articles on just about every concievable 9.04 problem by now), they will continue to work; as exploits get discovered, the system will automatically patch as the updates are released.
C) Being able to customize the crap out of Linux means I can take Ubuntu {favorite version}, set up some sane defaults (remove crappy and unnecessary programs, install VNC and a DDNS updater), then compile the whole thing into a single CD that installs the working system as is. A little more work and you can have a backup that runs to an external drive (back-in-time), and set the CD to auto-wipe / reinstall the root partition without touching the
If something goes wrong on Ubuntu, conversely, I can hand them a disk with a remote-access agent on it, remote in, and fix their root partition easily.
Look, Ive heard this argument that "I dont want to be their tech repair guy" before, but chances are you already are, and given the choice between friends and family using Windows with its AWFUL update mechanism, its AWFUL vulnerabilities, its AWFUL recovery options, and the joys of having to hunt down drivers to make crap work (ever try installing XP on a machine that was bundled with Vista home? It SUCKS.), I will take Linux with centralized everything and built in drivers any day.
but have you considered that not all of the "spying" issues in Chrome are have visible controls for the users to turn off by their choice?
Except chromium is open source, and SEVERAL people (including myself) have audited Chrome to verify this. One poster mentioned that he ran it through a sniffing proxy for several days with no extra data. There are TONS of tools out there to verify what Chrome sends to Google; Sysinternals has FileMon and ProcExp which show you everything you need to know about what Chrome does, and Wireshark shows you all data that it sends.
The problem is its all to easy to throw out such accusations with NO proof or shred of evidence whatsoever, and you can then pretend that the burden of proof falls on others to prove you wrong (which they HAVE), when Google in general has shown itself to be completely open about what data it collects. This all basically amounts to people mindlessly bashing Google because for some bizarre reason their success has made them a bad guy in the news, and now on Slashdot.
but it's really pointless when it's spying on
Then go into tools and uncheck the 3 "please spy on me and give me goodies" boxes, and stop whining about it. This isnt rocket science, the instructions for disabling the "spying things" are posted in EVERY one of these discussions, and are simple enough for a 6 year old.
I know im being naieve here, but can this stupid FUD rumor just die? Chrome is NOT hard to make as "privacy safe" as any other browser, and unlike many others, is actually open source.
If its so trivial, one would expect it would have been patented already.
Lot wasnt a "hero in the Bible", and the Bible never gives any sort of approval to getting his daughters pregnant. Youre pulling from the section of the Bible known as the historical writings, which, surprise surprise, relate historical events. Quite often no explicit approval or disapproval is given for people's actions; the section just focuses on things that happened, how they happened.
For example, Abraham had multiple wives, but no approval / disapproval is mentioned at all; you just need to turn to the part about having only one wife if you want to see what the Bible says about Abraham in that instance.
which is good, 7 being a good number
Understanding that you are being humorous, I will still pipe up and mention that 7 isnt really a "good" number, but rather the number of completion.
Sorry for double post-- If you are referring to the Book of Revelation, then I agree with you on that point; I misunderstood you to mean "revelation in general" (ie the Bible) is "almost entirely using symbolic language", which I would strongly protest. My apologies.
I would disagree with both statements (at least to some degree), and as I certainly do not think they are the consensus view among Christians (at least those who have actually read scripture), stating them as if they were fact is misleading.
Christianity is defined by the Bible, and Im fairly certain I could take up several pages with quotes about how "If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth". In fact its probably easier to just point at the whole book of 1 John and James.
Being Christian doesnt mean you've checked a mark on some survey somewhere, you know; the term refers to "followers of Christ", which implies doing what he instructed.
It's a completely pointless feature.
bzzzt, wrong.
What you mean to say is that YOU have no use for it, which is a far sight from "its a completely pointless feature". I, for instance, used a mx800 and a G7 mouse back in the day, and enjoyed a few things about them:
1) A heck of a lot quicker and more seamless to move a wireless mouse to a new computer. Wired mouse, you gotta route the wire, or its in the way. Generally not a huge issue, but can be obnoxious depending on how hard it is to get behind the desk or computer in question, especially if its just visiting a friend's house.
2) watching a movie on your computer from a couch. Very nice to be able to control the media player with the mouse on your thigh from 5 feet away. Wired mouse doesnt really cut it.
3) Aesthetics. Some places (ie, offices, confrence rooms) put a high premium on aesthetics. Any time you reduce wires, you make the place look more professional. And if youre moving around a lot, re-doing velcro ties on wires quickly becomes tiresome.
Also, maybe YOU dont move your mouse around a lot, but i make sure my G9 (wired) mouse has a ton of slack because I move it all over the desk depending on how I rearrange things (papers, etc).