This is another reason Linux is not that user friendly. It's a chicken and an egg problem. I'm have average computer skills and using Linux is a lot less user friendly because of issues such as the issues with Flash. It appears to be getting better and I hope to use Linux on my laptop eventually, but it is still a pain in the ass to use Linux. Also, I have a Verizon broadband card that doesn't have Linux software for it.
If configuring your system is a pain, maybe Linux is not for you. Luckily, it's big enough as a platform that any user-level problem can be answered with a little Google search on the right search terms (in my experience. YMMV). Yes, there's no unified one-click-install for Flash on Linux, but once you've followed the instructions to set it up, you're all the more capable of troubleshooting it if anything goes wrong down the road. Moving from Windows to Ubuntu on my desktop around half a year ago was a real speed boost in the short term (might just be the fresh system install effect), and recently my (very non-tech-savvy) little sister made the switch as well, and I'm teaching her to search the web whenever she has problems and helping her with the command line whenever.
If you have problems setting up Flash, search the web. Someone's probably had exactly the same problem as you before.
With regard to lack of hardware/driver support... sometimes there's 3rd party software that can help you. Sometimes, there's nothing you can do.
A big downside for me was that it is i586, something I didn't think off when buying it, meaning that distros such as Arch Linux won't run on it natively.
I was about to suggest for speed, why not use Arch+dwm? Your post covers it slightly, but what about installing dwm in Ubuntu, or in another i586-native Linux distro? My laptop is getting old, and after neither Windows XP nor Ubuntu ran acceptably fast, I switched to Arch and dwm, and while boot is only slightly faster, time to login is basically nil, since it's as simple as 'su user -e startx' in inittab. timothy is complaining about Gnome startup times... so fix it!
ftp releases.mozilla.org
cd pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/win32/en-US/
ls
get "Firefox Setup 3.6.exe"
And you don't even need to memorize the dir structure, since ls is right there. I've used this on just about every Windows XP/Vista machine I've had to bootstrap for a user. I heard rumors that built-in ftp isn't included in Windows anymore; in that case, you're out of luck. (or you could use the ftp client in Windows Explorer or whatchamacallit, if they kept that.)
So anyone creating a social networking application is ultimately gaining access to Facebook?
They're gaining access to data similar to what Facebook has, yes. If Google Social Networking and Mail becomes more popular than Facebook, then whatever Facebook has won't matter, because Google will have better social networking data than Facebook. Which is what we don't want.
Google wants Microsoft's desktop monopoly to break, and at the same time they compete directly with Apple's iTunes. As a consequence their only realistic shot at this is to help Linux flourish.
Microsoft sees Google as a threat to their monopoly and hence they can't let Google kill Firefox as Firefox users would likely prefer chrome to IE, thereby strengthening google further.
Or, you know, Google and Microsoft could be enemies and still both want Mozilla and Apple to die.
technically an all lowercase password is just as secure as any other password. You could take a set of random characters and have them all end up as lowercase letters. It is only bad because of the common belief that brute force attacks (and god forbid--dictionary attacks) check all of the lowercase options first. In that case, it is probably also better to start all of your passwords with a 'z' since they tend to check in alphabetical order.
I hate it when systems specifically require odd crap though...requiring a mixed password (must have 2 of the 3 following features or something) is good but saying that my 8-character password must include at least two numbers is actually decreasing the keyspace fairly significantly since you can limit several parts of the password to 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 as opposed to every single letter/number/punctuation.
Your password must be 8 characters long. It must contain two digits and three uppercase letters. Characters must be ordered in strictly ascending ASCII order (no lowercase before uppercase; no uppercase before numerals; alphagram order)....
Strength: Weak. Your password is not strong enough. Try again.
If you're not on Facebook your tags won't be grouped - you'll be named with no link and no way to view other photos of you. Meaning the people who see your tag have already found the photo by other means. Making the tag pretty much useless.
I disagree. My typing speed on my Android phone (software keyboard) is fastest when I'm using my two thumbs while holding the phone, it's clearly doable. Next is one thumb writing, and two index finger writing is just horrible. But again, that's very subjective.
Yes, much too soon. I enjoy tasteless jokes, but I don't enjoy tasteless jokes.
FTFY. Some people like talking about the issues but keeping it funky; some people are having a hard time understanding this but can relate to it more easily by way of humor. You may not like it, the mods may not like it and I will be modded down, but that's just how I and my friend Anonymous Coward feels.
As far as I've gathered (haven't RTFA), the script is opt-in for the websites, and it only registers the text you select, copy and paste on the sites using it. If the sites in question have user login, that's too bad for the users pasting passwords on the sites. However, in that case, the script would already have access to the password input box and its unmasked contents, thanks to the coarse-grained security policies in JavaScript on that matter. Your sensitive information is safe in your clipboard as long as it isn't copied from or pasted to the sites linking with Tynt Insight.
- Prevent anyone from adding anything to that page.
- I didn’t want any email updates, status updates, wall pictures or anything else. In fact, don’t email me anything at all. Don’t change my page at all.
- I wanted to automatically reject all “friend” requests. (I’m not going to use the site, remember.)
I found so many settings in so many different places, that I decided that this was not easy to do. (Even if it is possible, which I’m not convinced about. Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on this.)
Only let friends of friends add you as a friend (privacy option on the site).
Disable all email notifications. This way you'll get max one or two a year, such as the ones they sent out when reviewing their privacy policy, and other things of that matter. (Or, you know, create a throwaway email address with which to sign up, or redirect emails from facebook.com to/dev/null.)
Elizabeth Moon saw this coming. Speed of Dark is an excellent novel about an autist who is coerced into taking treatment against adult autism, though the book is set a bit further in the future from now (2030's, I'd guess, the story doesn't specify exactly).
I wish this functionality was built into the OS, rather than having to do it manually (for example, a way to disallow internet access during installation) -- but at least it's doable on Android. I don't think any other phone platforms give this level of permission separation or control. I'm not so sure that app review would really fix the overall problem; it might catch the obviously-malicious phishing apps like in this story, but I bet that the app auditors' opinion on what is a privacy violation differs greatly from my own.
To be fair, as a developer I would much prefer the all or naught policy that Android enforces - the user basically has to check out the app, see if what it wants to access corresponds to what it's supposed to do, and if not, don't install the application. You're only asking for trouble and bogus bug reports when you let the users deny access to core functionality at their own whim, and if that was the case, the developers would ideally have to spend much more time on graceful degradation in case access to feature x is denied.
However, this brings up the problem of peer pressure (in lack of a better term) - what if the app in question has a really useful feature or it's otherwise important to you, yet it makes ridiculous claims in the list of built-in functionality access?
With smart, non-spontaneous users (i.e. non-users), that wouldn't be a problem because of market forces - the app requires access to data it's not supposed to need, so no one installs it, it doesn't gain popularity, and the developer has to lose the unnecessary privileges to release an app that instead gains popularity. However, that's clearly not what's going on in the Android app market as it is. Internet connectivity is in my experience the most common privilege requested when it's not needed. Often (I suspect) it's for apps that simply need to fetch advertisements to display, even though the base app functionality shouldn't require access to the Internet.
Oh well. I have nothing to hide, so it's not my problem, is it?
Video processing in general is a complete minefield. Even mplayer/mencoder, the best of the bunch imho, has many, many options that won't work together, and can produce output that itself cannot read. How the developers even manage to keep that massive jumble of libraries from bursting into flames I can't imagine.
If you really think about it, the fact that anything on a computer works is amazing. At a low level, magnets read and write ones and zeros on ridiculously fast rotating platters, and then are assembled into files, which then is stored in memory, which is then passed through a video card and converted into some format that can be displayed on a screen. Throw in networked computers and the potential for signal loss over long distances and the probability that something at some point in the process will fail, and the potential for failure increases exponentially. Maybe I'm alone, but I'm in awe of the fact that my computer doesn't just randomly catch fire and explode. (source)
Depends on parsing. He could've meant (half of one) plus (the square root of five) or half of (one plus the square root of five), the latter being the correct value of phi as you stated.
For the sake of comparison, my Chromium sends the following user agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.283.0 Safari/532.8
It seems Chrome/Chromium as well as the Android built-in web browser both run WebKit, and they both base their UAs on Safari's.
It sounds crazy to me to assume that Google would have two different teams to work on two different browsers, and also to assume that they don't share any codebase.
Slashdot Mirror
An Analysis of the Prevalence of Enormous Genitalia Among Scientists (and We Do Mean Enormous, Ladies)
Who watches porn in Flash? I thought it was all QuickTime and JPEGs. No need for porn mode in Flash, is there?
This is another reason Linux is not that user friendly. It's a chicken and an egg problem. I'm have average computer skills and using Linux is a lot less user friendly because of issues such as the issues with Flash. It appears to be getting better and I hope to use Linux on my laptop eventually, but it is still a pain in the ass to use Linux. Also, I have a Verizon broadband card that doesn't have Linux software for it.
If configuring your system is a pain, maybe Linux is not for you. Luckily, it's big enough as a platform that any user-level problem can be answered with a little Google search on the right search terms (in my experience. YMMV). Yes, there's no unified one-click-install for Flash on Linux, but once you've followed the instructions to set it up, you're all the more capable of troubleshooting it if anything goes wrong down the road. Moving from Windows to Ubuntu on my desktop around half a year ago was a real speed boost in the short term (might just be the fresh system install effect), and recently my (very non-tech-savvy) little sister made the switch as well, and I'm teaching her to search the web whenever she has problems and helping her with the command line whenever.
If you have problems setting up Flash, search the web. Someone's probably had exactly the same problem as you before.
With regard to lack of hardware/driver support ... sometimes there's 3rd party software that can help you. Sometimes, there's nothing you can do.
A big downside for me was that it is i586, something I didn't think off when buying it, meaning that distros such as Arch Linux won't run on it natively.
I was about to suggest for speed, why not use Arch+dwm? Your post covers it slightly, but what about installing dwm in Ubuntu, or in another i586-native Linux distro? My laptop is getting old, and after neither Windows XP nor Ubuntu ran acceptably fast, I switched to Arch and dwm, and while boot is only slightly faster, time to login is basically nil, since it's as simple as 'su user -e startx' in inittab. timothy is complaining about Gnome startup times ... so fix it!
Learn the following riddle:
ftp releases.mozilla.org
cd pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/win32/en-US/
ls
get "Firefox Setup 3.6.exe"
And you don't even need to memorize the dir structure, since ls is right there. I've used this on just about every Windows XP/Vista machine I've had to bootstrap for a user. I heard rumors that built-in ftp isn't included in Windows anymore; in that case, you're out of luck. (or you could use the ftp client in Windows Explorer or whatchamacallit, if they kept that.)
xkcd:678
So anyone creating a social networking application is ultimately gaining access to Facebook?
They're gaining access to data similar to what Facebook has, yes. If Google Social Networking and Mail becomes more popular than Facebook, then whatever Facebook has won't matter, because Google will have better social networking data than Facebook. Which is what we don't want.
love-shy or incel.
I'm hypochondriac, you insensitive clod!
Google wants Microsoft's desktop monopoly to break, and at the same time they compete directly with Apple's iTunes. As a consequence their only realistic shot at this is to help Linux flourish.
Microsoft sees Google as a threat to their monopoly and hence they can't let Google kill Firefox as Firefox users would likely prefer chrome to IE, thereby strengthening google further.
Or, you know, Google and Microsoft could be enemies and still both want Mozilla and Apple to die.
technically an all lowercase password is just as secure as any other password. You could take a set of random characters and have them all end up as lowercase letters. It is only bad because of the common belief that brute force attacks (and god forbid--dictionary attacks) check all of the lowercase options first. In that case, it is probably also better to start all of your passwords with a 'z' since they tend to check in alphabetical order.
I hate it when systems specifically require odd crap though...requiring a mixed password (must have 2 of the 3 following features or something) is good but saying that my 8-character password must include at least two numbers is actually decreasing the keyspace fairly significantly since you can limit several parts of the password to 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 as opposed to every single letter/number/punctuation.
Your password must be 8 characters long. It must contain two digits and three uppercase letters. Characters must be ordered in strictly ascending ASCII order (no lowercase before uppercase; no uppercase before numerals; alphagram order). ...
Strength: Weak. Your password is not strong enough. Try again.
If you're not on Facebook your tags won't be grouped - you'll be named with no link and no way to view other photos of you. Meaning the people who see your tag have already found the photo by other means. Making the tag pretty much useless.
Touch screens are one hand only!
I disagree. My typing speed on my Android phone (software keyboard) is fastest when I'm using my two thumbs while holding the phone, it's clearly doable. Next is one thumb writing, and two index finger writing is just horrible. But again, that's very subjective.
Oblig xkcd 691
Maybe not so much 1 and l as l and I.
Good for us.
Yes, much too soon. I enjoy tasteless jokes, but I don't enjoy tasteless jokes.
FTFY. Some people like talking about the issues but keeping it funky; some people are having a hard time understanding this but can relate to it more easily by way of humor. You may not like it, the mods may not like it and I will be modded down, but that's just how I and my friend Anonymous Coward feels.
As far as I've gathered (haven't RTFA), the script is opt-in for the websites, and it only registers the text you select, copy and paste on the sites using it. If the sites in question have user login, that's too bad for the users pasting passwords on the sites. However, in that case, the script would already have access to the password input box and its unmasked contents, thanks to the coarse-grained security policies in JavaScript on that matter. Your sensitive information is safe in your clipboard as long as it isn't copied from or pasted to the sites linking with Tynt Insight.
- Create a public page with my real name on it.
- Prevent anyone from adding anything to that page.
- I didn’t want any email updates, status updates, wall pictures or anything else. In fact, don’t email me anything at all. Don’t change my page at all.
- I wanted to automatically reject all “friend” requests. (I’m not going to use the site, remember.)
I found so many settings in so many different places, that I decided that this was not easy to do. (Even if it is possible, which I’m not convinced about. Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on this.)
And you're done!
Elizabeth Moon saw this coming. Speed of Dark is an excellent novel about an autist who is coerced into taking treatment against adult autism, though the book is set a bit further in the future from now (2030's, I'd guess, the story doesn't specify exactly).
(I read it recently on recommendation of another /. comment)
I wish this functionality was built into the OS, rather than having to do it manually (for example, a way to disallow internet access during installation) -- but at least it's doable on Android. I don't think any other phone platforms give this level of permission separation or control. I'm not so sure that app review would really fix the overall problem; it might catch the obviously-malicious phishing apps like in this story, but I bet that the app auditors' opinion on what is a privacy violation differs greatly from my own.
To be fair, as a developer I would much prefer the all or naught policy that Android enforces - the user basically has to check out the app, see if what it wants to access corresponds to what it's supposed to do, and if not, don't install the application. You're only asking for trouble and bogus bug reports when you let the users deny access to core functionality at their own whim, and if that was the case, the developers would ideally have to spend much more time on graceful degradation in case access to feature x is denied.
However, this brings up the problem of peer pressure (in lack of a better term) - what if the app in question has a really useful feature or it's otherwise important to you, yet it makes ridiculous claims in the list of built-in functionality access?
With smart, non-spontaneous users (i.e. non-users), that wouldn't be a problem because of market forces - the app requires access to data it's not supposed to need, so no one installs it, it doesn't gain popularity, and the developer has to lose the unnecessary privileges to release an app that instead gains popularity. However, that's clearly not what's going on in the Android app market as it is. Internet connectivity is in my experience the most common privilege requested when it's not needed. Often (I suspect) it's for apps that simply need to fetch advertisements to display, even though the base app functionality shouldn't require access to the Internet.
Oh well. I have nothing to hide, so it's not my problem, is it?
Any windows video conversions took hours, but ffmpeg did conversions almost as fast as disk would allow.
He could've used ffmpeg on Windows, and you could've run Windows Movie Maker in Wine. This anecdote is more CLI vs. GUI, but I agree.
Video processing in general is a complete minefield. Even mplayer/mencoder, the best of the bunch imho, has many, many options that won't work together, and can produce output that itself cannot read. How the developers even manage to keep that massive jumble of libraries from bursting into flames I can't imagine.
If you really think about it, the fact that anything on a computer works is amazing. At a low level, magnets read and write ones and zeros on ridiculously fast rotating platters, and then are assembled into files, which then is stored in memory, which is then passed through a video card and converted into some format that can be displayed on a screen. Throw in networked computers and the potential for signal loss over long distances and the probability that something at some point in the process will fail, and the potential for failure increases exponentially. Maybe I'm alone, but I'm in awe of the fact that my computer doesn't just randomly catch fire and explode. (source)
Wrong.
Depends on parsing. He could've meant (half of one) plus (the square root of five) or half of (one plus the square root of five), the latter being the correct value of phi as you stated.
The built-in browser on my HTC Magic sends the following user agent string:
Other phones (from analyzing my access logs from my site which attracts mobile users) send either Mobile Safari/525.20.1 or Mobile Safari/530.17.
For the sake of comparison, my Chromium sends the following user agent:
It seems Chrome/Chromium as well as the Android built-in web browser both run WebKit, and they both base their UAs on Safari's.
It sounds crazy to me to assume that Google would have two different teams to work on two different browsers, and also to assume that they don't share any codebase.
Damn, clicked Submit instead of Continue Editing. My point still stands.