Google are also offering $20,000 to whoever hacks Chrome, however, which kind of negates the argument as with that money you can buy a Mac and have plenty of spare change.
Whenever my sister borrowed a laptop from me, she'd always bring it back, open and running. Every time she did it I wanted to scream "YOU F***ING IDIOT!" at her. Eventually I bought a new netbook and sold her my old Eee PC for £50, partly so I didn't have to deal with her doing that. I still cringe when I see her pick it up by the screen.
Potentially I guess these things could incorporate mesh networking, so you could build a network that way. Might not ensure you could stay connected to the wider web in circumstances like the recent events in Egypt, but certainly in cities it could keep everyone in contact internally - for instance, you could host a blog on your own device that covered the events, and anyone who could connect to the mesh network could read it that way.
With the PogoPlug, all you're doing really on the device is stopping a shell script that's running, and installing a new bootloader. Everything else gets installed on whatever storage device you attach to it, so I think it's probably fairly difficult to properly brick it (although there are more obscure NAND installs that do have the potential to really screw it up).
Good luck with your PogoPlug. I bought one in the new year sales, £20 off, and I ran Plugbox Linux on it for a couple of weeks, but I really couldn't get on too well with it as I don't really like Arch Linux very much, so I've switched to using Debian Squeeze instead. Installed that last night and I'm in the process of turning it into a mail server.
I actually think Debian is a more obvious choice for these devices than an Arch-based distro as it has more packages than any other distro and has good support for ARM. In my case I really wanted a number of packages that were in Debian, such as byobu and procmail, and I use Ubuntu on the desktop and have always liked Debian-based distros, so it seemed the obvious choice.
Cheers, I'll give that another go now, and see if I can get it working. Squeeze does introduce a lot of things that I like and already use on my Ubuntu desktop, such as byobu, and I like Debian-based distros a lot better than the Arch-based Plugbox Linux I've been using on it, so I'm eager to get Squeeze working on it.
Fortunately it's no longer an issue as just a few minutes ago I discovered the deb2targz tool, which converts deb packages to tarballs, and used that to install the version of procmail from Debian Lenny for armel, and it seems to work OK.
Still wish I could get Debian running on the PogoPlug, but Arch will do.
Logging in via SSH is the only way to get into the PogoPlug, so that's not an option, although I've remastered Ubuntu images in the past to include extra software so I could probably do the same with Debian. And I think it's something more serious than that - it doesn't request an IP address from the router so it could be networking is disabled. Doesn't matter that much as I've gotten the Arch-based Plugbox Linux working on it. It's just I'd rather use a Debian-based distro as Arch's repositories don't seem to be nearly as extensive - there's no procmail, for instance, and I'm using mine as a mail server.
I tried that on my pink PogoPlug but couldn't get it to work - install seemed to go fine but couldn't log in via SSH afterwards. Maybe that's why - could be Squeeze is too big for my PogoPlug. Might be worth trying it with Lenny instead.
Already tried that this weekend gone - didn't work, couldn't log in via SSH after the install was done so I went back to Plugbox. Still, it's a good opportunity to push the boat out a little and try an Arch-based distro, and I can always try again once Squeeze is released.
I've got a PogoPlug, which is apparently based on the SheevaPlug platform, and it was a real bargain. I picked it up in the sale for £50, and I've installed Plugbox Linux (an Arch-based distro - I'd prefer Debian but I can't get that working on it) and it works really well. I've set up Postfix and Dovecot on it and I use it as a mail server, and I also have Apache, MySQL and PHP on there for testing purposes. Fantastic device.
My current employers are also a large insurance company, and they're the same. At present I have to use a ridiculously locked-down copy of Windows XP at work. Seriously, I can't rearrange my Start menu into alphabetical order, it's that bad. Last year I asked the IT helpdesk if they could relax the restrictions as it was actively slowing me down, but I was told they wouldn't because no-one else at my level had relaxed restrictions either. So I have to keep blundering around through the start menu, trying to remember where each application is.
However, in November I applied for a Django development job internally (which I didn't get), and the development team had far less restrictions. I asked about what development environment they used, and one of them used his Macbook, and apparently several others had Ubuntu or Debian running in Virtualbox on their work machines.
It wasn't just a bunch of people standing around waiting for something to happen! This guy was essentially a reporter in the field and they cut to him every now and then, as well as to a woman in Hawaii, as well as some prerecorded segments. It was pretty interesting, actually.
I'd direct them to the Free Range Kids blog. If I were a parent I would definitely get a copy of the book too, and lend it to anyone who tried to tell me that my kids were in constant danger.
Now everything is going "cloud", I can see a gap in the market for "family cloud" appliances - plonk them on your home network, trust a few similar units on the networks of family members, and get the benefits of redundant backups, mail service, etc, exchanging the cost of your privacy for a few hundred dollars.
Ever heard of a PogoPlug? It's a tiny server running an embedded Linux distro of some kind, and it's a kind of self-hosted version of Dropbox. You connect it to your router, attach 1-4 flash drives or external hard drives, and you can share their contents over the Internet.
One thing I recall from The Singularity Is Near in particular is the future timeline where he wrote a prediction of what the world would be like in 2010, and said something along the lines of "We'll have computers built into our glasses that will overlay information about our environment, such as 'That's Doctor Smith'." At first glance that may not seem to be true, but I have a number of apps on my Android phone that do pretty much that (Layar, Wikitude, Google Goggles), so Kurzweil isn't actually too far off - he got the general idea right, even if he ascribed it to the wrong device.
Kurzweil may seem a little nutty, but I have to say his predictions have stood the test of time better than those of virtually any other futurist I can name.
How about Clutter? It's implemented in C, but has bindings for C++, Perl, Python, and Ruby, among others, and it makes it pretty easy to create custom animations. The documentation looks OK, and it'll work on Windows, OS X or Linux.
I absolutely LOVED the...Adventure series by Willard Price when I was a kid of about 7 or 8, all about two teenage boys who captured animals for their father's business providing animals for zoos. With hindsight they were probably a little un-PC, but that's mostly because of their age. I think they're still in print, and are a really good read.
Now, hang on. This is nothing to do with any kind of email elitism. The fact is that of all the free email services, Gmail is definitely the power users choice in a way things like Hotmail aren't.
All I was saying is that considering what the typical Gmail user is like compared to the typical Hotmail user, then Facebook's mail service is more likely to be a threat to Hotmail.
I think this is more likely to be a threat to Hotmail or AOL Mail than Gmail. Gmail is a power user's tool while Hotmail is more likely to be used by people who share photos/humorous pictures/jokes with friends and relatives - something that has considerable crossover with Facebook. OK, there are people who use Hotmail for professional purposes, but it has to be said that doing so looks unprofessional. As a Gmail user of three and a half years I really don't think Facebook's offering is at all likely to make me want to switch.
Sued - probably not. But they might well be at risk of prosecution. This is covered by the Data Protection Act 1998, one of the principles of which states that appropriate technical and training measures need to be taken against granting unauthorised access to data. If they are in breach of this they could well be prosecuted by the Information Commissioner's Office.
DPA also requires that the data subject has consented to the processing, which makes me wonder whether by passing user data on to ACS:Law without a court order, ISP's are breaching the Data Protection Act.
TalkTalk definitely haven't - they were quite vocally opposed to the Digital Economy Act, and have publicly stated that they will never surrender customer's details unless presented with a court order.
I'm surprised this isn't already in place. Here in the UK the existing age rating system that was devised originally for videos also applies to video games with certain adult themes, so they can be rated 15 or 18 if necessary, to prevent children under those ages buying those games - for instance, GTA4 on the PS3 is rated 18, so under-18's cannot buy a copy. Half the time when some boneheaded parent is going "Ban this obscenity!" in the pages of the Daily Mail, then the idiot parent bought it for them and failed to look properly, which is their own stupid fault. Better enforcement of the existing rules is the way to go.
Most coffee shops I've been in offer access to a commercial wi-fi operator's services - I had an account with BT Openzone for several years that I used, that cost me about £12 a month. It wasn't worth it, so I've switched to using a prepaid 3G mobile broadband stick - reception's not always great but it means I only pay for what I use.
The truth is, public wi-fi just hasn't worked out the way people thought it would - in Norwich where I work they set up a municipal wi-fi network but it was never that great. Mobile broadband's generally cheaper and more flexible - means I have more options on where to sit with my Dell Mini.
I think use of spreadsheets and word processors has no place in an IT class of any kind - business studies would be a much more appropriate class to use these in. How exactly does anyone expect a kid to get interested in computers from using a spreadsheet?
I think IT classes should probably include programming in at least one modern object-oriented programming language (probably a scripting language like Python or Ruby, since these are pretty flexible and can be used for many different applications, but are fairly easy to learn), and perhaps the basics of networking, but in an interactive fashion.
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Not sure I agree. The Matrix Reloaded features Trinity hacking into a computer in the power plant, and she can be clearly seen to be using nmap.
Google are also offering $20,000 to whoever hacks Chrome, however, which kind of negates the argument as with that money you can buy a Mac and have plenty of spare change.
Whenever my sister borrowed a laptop from me, she'd always bring it back, open and running. Every time she did it I wanted to scream "YOU F***ING IDIOT!" at her. Eventually I bought a new netbook and sold her my old Eee PC for £50, partly so I didn't have to deal with her doing that. I still cringe when I see her pick it up by the screen.
Potentially I guess these things could incorporate mesh networking, so you could build a network that way. Might not ensure you could stay connected to the wider web in circumstances like the recent events in Egypt, but certainly in cities it could keep everyone in contact internally - for instance, you could host a blog on your own device that covered the events, and anyone who could connect to the mesh network could read it that way.
With the PogoPlug, all you're doing really on the device is stopping a shell script that's running, and installing a new bootloader. Everything else gets installed on whatever storage device you attach to it, so I think it's probably fairly difficult to properly brick it (although there are more obscure NAND installs that do have the potential to really screw it up).
Good luck with your PogoPlug. I bought one in the new year sales, £20 off, and I ran Plugbox Linux on it for a couple of weeks, but I really couldn't get on too well with it as I don't really like Arch Linux very much, so I've switched to using Debian Squeeze instead. Installed that last night and I'm in the process of turning it into a mail server.
I actually think Debian is a more obvious choice for these devices than an Arch-based distro as it has more packages than any other distro and has good support for ARM. In my case I really wanted a number of packages that were in Debian, such as byobu and procmail, and I use Ubuntu on the desktop and have always liked Debian-based distros, so it seemed the obvious choice.
Cheers, I'll give that another go now, and see if I can get it working. Squeeze does introduce a lot of things that I like and already use on my Ubuntu desktop, such as byobu, and I like Debian-based distros a lot better than the Arch-based Plugbox Linux I've been using on it, so I'm eager to get Squeeze working on it.
Fortunately it's no longer an issue as just a few minutes ago I discovered the deb2targz tool, which converts deb packages to tarballs, and used that to install the version of procmail from Debian Lenny for armel, and it seems to work OK. Still wish I could get Debian running on the PogoPlug, but Arch will do.
Logging in via SSH is the only way to get into the PogoPlug, so that's not an option, although I've remastered Ubuntu images in the past to include extra software so I could probably do the same with Debian. And I think it's something more serious than that - it doesn't request an IP address from the router so it could be networking is disabled. Doesn't matter that much as I've gotten the Arch-based Plugbox Linux working on it. It's just I'd rather use a Debian-based distro as Arch's repositories don't seem to be nearly as extensive - there's no procmail, for instance, and I'm using mine as a mail server.
I tried that on my pink PogoPlug but couldn't get it to work - install seemed to go fine but couldn't log in via SSH afterwards. Maybe that's why - could be Squeeze is too big for my PogoPlug. Might be worth trying it with Lenny instead.
Already tried that this weekend gone - didn't work, couldn't log in via SSH after the install was done so I went back to Plugbox. Still, it's a good opportunity to push the boat out a little and try an Arch-based distro, and I can always try again once Squeeze is released.
I've got a PogoPlug, which is apparently based on the SheevaPlug platform, and it was a real bargain. I picked it up in the sale for £50, and I've installed Plugbox Linux (an Arch-based distro - I'd prefer Debian but I can't get that working on it) and it works really well. I've set up Postfix and Dovecot on it and I use it as a mail server, and I also have Apache, MySQL and PHP on there for testing purposes. Fantastic device.
My current employers are also a large insurance company, and they're the same. At present I have to use a ridiculously locked-down copy of Windows XP at work. Seriously, I can't rearrange my Start menu into alphabetical order, it's that bad. Last year I asked the IT helpdesk if they could relax the restrictions as it was actively slowing me down, but I was told they wouldn't because no-one else at my level had relaxed restrictions either. So I have to keep blundering around through the start menu, trying to remember where each application is. However, in November I applied for a Django development job internally (which I didn't get), and the development team had far less restrictions. I asked about what development environment they used, and one of them used his Macbook, and apparently several others had Ubuntu or Debian running in Virtualbox on their work machines.
It wasn't just a bunch of people standing around waiting for something to happen! This guy was essentially a reporter in the field and they cut to him every now and then, as well as to a woman in Hawaii, as well as some prerecorded segments. It was pretty interesting, actually.
I'd direct them to the Free Range Kids blog. If I were a parent I would definitely get a copy of the book too, and lend it to anyone who tried to tell me that my kids were in constant danger.
Now everything is going "cloud", I can see a gap in the market for "family cloud" appliances - plonk them on your home network, trust a few similar units on the networks of family members, and get the benefits of redundant backups, mail service, etc, exchanging the cost of your privacy for a few hundred dollars.
Ever heard of a PogoPlug? It's a tiny server running an embedded Linux distro of some kind, and it's a kind of self-hosted version of Dropbox. You connect it to your router, attach 1-4 flash drives or external hard drives, and you can share their contents over the Internet.
One thing I recall from The Singularity Is Near in particular is the future timeline where he wrote a prediction of what the world would be like in 2010, and said something along the lines of "We'll have computers built into our glasses that will overlay information about our environment, such as 'That's Doctor Smith'." At first glance that may not seem to be true, but I have a number of apps on my Android phone that do pretty much that (Layar, Wikitude, Google Goggles), so Kurzweil isn't actually too far off - he got the general idea right, even if he ascribed it to the wrong device. Kurzweil may seem a little nutty, but I have to say his predictions have stood the test of time better than those of virtually any other futurist I can name.
How about Clutter? It's implemented in C, but has bindings for C++, Perl, Python, and Ruby, among others, and it makes it pretty easy to create custom animations. The documentation looks OK, and it'll work on Windows, OS X or Linux.
I absolutely LOVED the ...Adventure series by Willard Price when I was a kid of about 7 or 8, all about two teenage boys who captured animals for their father's business providing animals for zoos. With hindsight they were probably a little un-PC, but that's mostly because of their age. I think they're still in print, and are a really good read.
Now, hang on. This is nothing to do with any kind of email elitism. The fact is that of all the free email services, Gmail is definitely the power users choice in a way things like Hotmail aren't. All I was saying is that considering what the typical Gmail user is like compared to the typical Hotmail user, then Facebook's mail service is more likely to be a threat to Hotmail.
I think this is more likely to be a threat to Hotmail or AOL Mail than Gmail. Gmail is a power user's tool while Hotmail is more likely to be used by people who share photos/humorous pictures/jokes with friends and relatives - something that has considerable crossover with Facebook. OK, there are people who use Hotmail for professional purposes, but it has to be said that doing so looks unprofessional. As a Gmail user of three and a half years I really don't think Facebook's offering is at all likely to make me want to switch.
Sued - probably not. But they might well be at risk of prosecution. This is covered by the Data Protection Act 1998, one of the principles of which states that appropriate technical and training measures need to be taken against granting unauthorised access to data. If they are in breach of this they could well be prosecuted by the Information Commissioner's Office. DPA also requires that the data subject has consented to the processing, which makes me wonder whether by passing user data on to ACS:Law without a court order, ISP's are breaching the Data Protection Act.
TalkTalk definitely haven't - they were quite vocally opposed to the Digital Economy Act, and have publicly stated that they will never surrender customer's details unless presented with a court order.
I'm surprised this isn't already in place. Here in the UK the existing age rating system that was devised originally for videos also applies to video games with certain adult themes, so they can be rated 15 or 18 if necessary, to prevent children under those ages buying those games - for instance, GTA4 on the PS3 is rated 18, so under-18's cannot buy a copy. Half the time when some boneheaded parent is going "Ban this obscenity!" in the pages of the Daily Mail, then the idiot parent bought it for them and failed to look properly, which is their own stupid fault. Better enforcement of the existing rules is the way to go.
Most coffee shops I've been in offer access to a commercial wi-fi operator's services - I had an account with BT Openzone for several years that I used, that cost me about £12 a month. It wasn't worth it, so I've switched to using a prepaid 3G mobile broadband stick - reception's not always great but it means I only pay for what I use. The truth is, public wi-fi just hasn't worked out the way people thought it would - in Norwich where I work they set up a municipal wi-fi network but it was never that great. Mobile broadband's generally cheaper and more flexible - means I have more options on where to sit with my Dell Mini.
I think use of spreadsheets and word processors has no place in an IT class of any kind - business studies would be a much more appropriate class to use these in. How exactly does anyone expect a kid to get interested in computers from using a spreadsheet? I think IT classes should probably include programming in at least one modern object-oriented programming language (probably a scripting language like Python or Ruby, since these are pretty flexible and can be used for many different applications, but are fairly easy to learn), and perhaps the basics of networking, but in an interactive fashion.