I just checked out the newest presentation video of this thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP-0Nce5oTQ , and it is quite an interesting product.
Of course the application as a browser only thing is a bit too little.
For the folks who asked what the underlying OS is: Linux + webkit Specs: no idea, not much.
Now what would be really great: a sane interface API for this thing and the possibility to write apps for it + wlan + bluetooth. Then it would be quite a viable niche product (for cool people only) who for instance could program applications that would allow them to dim the light in their rooms on this thing or monitor a remote server.
I see some potential for micro payments, but the current and past initiatives seem to have some flaws:
Flaw 1: There is no limit. Micro payments would be nice in a way, that you deposit some amount of money on a micro-payment account (10-20 dollars for instance) and then use it until it is empty. Then you could reload it manually, for instance with an online banking account (no automatic loading of the account to limit potential losses, like with pre paid phones).
Flaw 2: Greed. Come on, 20-70 ct are not exactly micro, especially in the current environment. They are small at best. If you could get some premium content for like 1-5 ct, then people might be convinced to use it. The whole idea is to use the economics of scale. This would help small developers to create some content/service/whatever and get a compensation for it.
The current implementations seem to fail to adopt to real conditions. Wake me when we get something workable.
There are basically 3 toolkits that come up for Linux GUI development:
- GTK+ - QT - wxWidgets
and all have their own little flaws. GTK is nice and mature, but not overly flexible. QT is on the way of maturing, but it is still quite far from complete or usable (e.g. it takes some settings of my GNOME desktop and then plays with them so much that it ends with the correct colour scheme and for normal controls font size 24.. bold). Also only by looking at the syntax conventions of QT I get RSI in my fingers. wxWidgets is admittedly a horrible mess, but probably a good place to start writing a consolidation framework without forcing everyone to do the same. Probably the best choice would be to fix and clean up the internal mess of wx, add QT support and build a software development kit around it (sound, video, whatever). But mesmerising about it is quite useless. Unless someone takes one of the GUI frameworks and puts together a workable development kit on his own, there will be no good answer to the question.
To make it short: everybody is scratching their own itch, so either find some folks with the same itch or just develop it yourself and stop moaning about it.
>> "Hacking, properly defined, is essential to computer science."
I mostly agree with your post, except that hacking is not inherently specific to computers. The more generic definition is 'to find new ways to solve a problem'. The term got popular in cs though, that's right.
You misunderstood something there. The world already reduced buying American debt. It's not that attractive anymore.
The money that currently is used to do all this -- well, lets say interesting -- stimulus projects is made out of thin air. The central banks are creating it by increasing the money supply. (No, printing is out, it's mostly digital now).
America is quite effective exporting it's deficit to the world as many important goods are traded in Dollar, which spreads the inflation around the world.
What you should be worried about is that the rest of the world starts to get fed up with the fed and American monetary policy and go in another direction. Russia, China and other big players are already thinking about creating alternatives and reforming global financial systems.
It's a lot of politics and the threshold to really go in a different direction is quite high, but as it stands now, it is closing in, or in layman's terms, the rest of the world starts to reach the point of having enough of American financial BS (no offense there).
If the Dollar stops being used as international trade currency, then you really should start to worry. Well, actually once that happens Americans can kiss their collective asses good by.
Not there is all this fuss about the pirate bay, but what did the IP interest group win? The site is still up and there are countless others, even if it would not be.
My guess is that they want to systematically forbid any kind of uncontrolled information exchange in the so called civilized world.
But even if they succeed, what for? There is still the so called developing world, and if free speech is outlawed in the western world the need for unencumbered service will make them develop this kind of thing quite fast.
Also a lot of dark-nets will spawn once the pressure is too high.
Will the basic principle have changed? No. So I conclude that this pissing contest is organized to seed fear and doubt again and nothing more. Stupid morons.
Exactly. Most OSS projects source files supply a header detailing the Copyright holders and the License it is distributed with. Mostly they grant you a non revocable right/requirement to use, extend and redistribute the code with your modifications added. If you add code, that peace of code is owned by you and is automatically under the parent license. It's the same with mySQL, although their License text is a bit murky, but the FOSS exception basically aims for GPL v2.
As for the trademark: it lies with Sun/Oracle and they can basically do whatever they want with it. The worst thing of which is that you are no longer allowed to call it mySQL. A simple rename to something else would solve that problem (you could for instance fork the code and call it ourSQL).
That's what most open source is about: play in one sandbox as long as you like, and fork once you have different non-compatible ideas.
Are you kidding me. Doing my little research (about 2 minutes), I go to Wikipedia and check out the summary box on the right side of the article, which says: Budget: $120 million, Gross revenue: $180,112,419 . With a quick calculation I get 150.08 % return of investment. A normal economic person would probably tell it was worth it. Now what was the question again?
True. This vulnerability is interesting when it comest to IDS observed systems. These normally don't tend to be normal user desktop systems, but high sec systems. Of course these systems will also check outbound traffic, binary hashes and running processes. I'd also doubt that this kind of machines will harbor a consumer motherboard, even if it is a high end one. For all potential users of this peace of equipment it does not make much difference, as it requires root privileges in the first place and that mostly owns most desktops anyway. For windows machines this probably will be a bigger problems as they have their own set of privilege escalation issues, so objectively the tone of voice of the article is misplaced.
GP meant reasonable theory. Take a good book about cryptography and read it, than you will maybe understand. There are a lot of smart people thinking about this kind of problems. It is simply a collision of the basic principles of cryptography. Like saying a normative car is faster than a normative bicycle at maximum speed. Or 1 + 1 != 42
Ps. and yes, I checked TFA and it's wishful thinking at best, arrogant lie at worst.
Less plausibly, it seems that it is talking about a plan to spend 12 thousand million Hungarian forints (54 million USD) on this. I cannot believe that I am reading that correctly.... So let's just assume that I'm misreading that and hope someone who actually reads Hungarian comments on this. </quote>
Hungarian reading person here. As for your question:
Yes, the number is right, it's about 54 million USD as maximal spending allocation for OSS - same amount as for MS and Novel - as it reads.
Not to mention the 17 different domains that the site is loading scripts from (one of which was the video). Did not even bother to fine tune it, just forbid everything and left. Spam as Slashdot front-page article: grrr.
I see one once in a while, but I must admit that I mostly see Windows systems when they have trouble (stigma of the guy who knows computers). I have to agree that if you have good hardware (were not too greedy at buying or had at least a bit of clue what you were looking for) you encounter BSOD quite rarely.
Now only the following things have to happen before I migrate back to Windows: 1. It gets usable for users AND developers. 2. It gets secure (no, don't expect military level security, just the basics). 3. Microsoft adopts sane market policy. 4. Windows gets a sane market share to make homogeneous attack vectors ineffective <20% market share. 5. It gives me some kind of advantage over the competition.
As I can't see any of this happening any time soon, so I can summarize it as: when hell freezes over. But you are right with the BSOD matter.
So true. I personally use mplayer CLI. Once you get the 5 control keys, it is totally superior to GUI applications. It plays almost everything I trow at it. I also have VLC player around and fire it up once in a while in case I encounter some weird format that mplayer cannot play or I'm just too lazy to figure out the magic for it for a one time use. In some of this cases it helps so it is also nice to have around.
And for the other players.. I fully agree, in comparison to these two they are not worth mention. Well, maybe to people who I don't like, but generally no.
I mean, I love gmail because of the reliability, effective spam filtering, volume and imap access. But what is this AJAX thing about? Can I eat it? Can I use my key to sign or encrypt my messages over it? No? I stay with my local client then. Thanks.
Most of the arguments for the cap is that granny is paying a little more than she uses and grandson pays a bit less. Now you could ask granny: hey, your bastard grandson is using modern technology more than you and the cost is shared because of un-transparent pricing of telcos.
I don't know how it is in mighty USA, but in my place granny would kick you in the nuts just for the question an say it is fine as it is.
Actually, there were plenty of capped and flatrate packages around here some time ago. Nobody wanted caps, so they get rare.
Also, maybe I'm a bit mistaken, but I was thinking that we entered the 21st century, the age of information society a few years back. On the other hand, if I follow the current trend, then we will use telex in a few years again.
I agree too. Linux is a great system, but it has it's weaknesses too. The reason I like it that much is that it seems to be the least broken system, but there is plenty of improvement possibility.
Also I'm mostly using it for desktop and simple server functions. There are places where it is not the right tool, like for example nuclear plants and things that need a high reliability are better fit with things like QNX. For system design educational purposes I would suggest plan 9.
Anyway, I would like to see more competition in the OS segment. I would like to have a choice of more than just one or two (Linux/BSD/Mac) mature systems and I also like to see the current ones getting better with time. And it's happening, just a bit slowly.
Just asking. I mean, the girls were dragged though court for a year now, publicly embarrassed and probably get a psychic damage for lifetime just because they dared to send some pictures of themselves. And now the court says: "OK, so you were right, sorry for the bother, have a good life."? So everything is fine now as justice is served? Am I the only one who finds this picture a bit awkward?
Point is, Hurd and Plan 9 are not dead. Neither were they alive ever, but they are not dead.
Hurd just has a bit slower development process. Think of it as the tectonic plate movement among OS-es. In only a few billion years it will be mainstream.
Plan 9 is in active development too, but it is more used as experimental and study operating system. It is really clean source code and design making it excellent for academic study and research. Stuff that gets developed for it also comes to mainstream OS'es, like the/dev and/proc file abstraction.
Slashdot Mirror
I just checked out the newest presentation video of this thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP-0Nce5oTQ , and it is quite an interesting product.
Of course the application as a browser only thing is a bit too little.
For the folks who asked what the underlying OS is: Linux + webkit
Specs: no idea, not much.
Now what would be really great: a sane interface API for this thing and the possibility to write apps for it + wlan + bluetooth. Then it would be quite a viable niche product (for cool people only) who for instance could program applications that would allow them to dim the light in their rooms on this thing or monitor a remote server.
I see some potential for micro payments, but the current and past initiatives seem to have some flaws:
Flaw 1: There is no limit. Micro payments would be nice in a way, that you deposit some amount of money on a micro-payment account (10-20 dollars for instance) and then use it until it is empty. Then you could reload it manually, for instance with an online banking account (no automatic loading of the account to limit potential losses, like with pre paid phones).
Flaw 2: Greed. Come on, 20-70 ct are not exactly micro, especially in the current environment. They are small at best. If you could get some premium content for like 1-5 ct, then people might be convinced to use it. The whole idea is to use the economics of scale. This would help small developers to create some content/service/whatever and get a compensation for it.
The current implementations seem to fail to adopt to real conditions. Wake me when we get something workable.
There are basically 3 toolkits that come up for Linux GUI development:
- GTK+
- QT
- wxWidgets
and all have their own little flaws. GTK is nice and mature, but not overly flexible. QT is on the way of maturing, but it is still quite far from complete or usable (e.g. it takes some settings of my GNOME desktop and then plays with them so much that it ends with the correct colour scheme and for normal controls font size 24.. bold). Also only by looking at the syntax conventions of QT I get RSI in my fingers. wxWidgets is admittedly a horrible mess, but probably a good place to start writing a consolidation framework without forcing everyone to do the same. Probably the best choice would be to fix and clean up the internal mess of wx, add QT support and build a software development kit around it (sound, video, whatever). But mesmerising about it is quite useless. Unless someone takes one of the GUI frameworks and puts together a workable development kit on his own, there will be no good answer to the question.
To make it short: everybody is scratching their own itch, so either find some folks with the same itch or just develop it yourself and stop moaning about it.
>> "Hacking, properly defined, is essential to computer science."
I mostly agree with your post, except that hacking is not inherently specific to computers. The more generic definition is 'to find new ways to solve a problem'. The term got popular in cs though, that's right.
If they do that, then I will stop using it even if they offer me money to use it.
..start using some saner format and provide fair pricing, yes.
You misunderstood something there. The world already reduced buying American debt. It's not that attractive anymore.
The money that currently is used to do all this -- well, lets say interesting -- stimulus projects is made out of thin air. The central banks are creating it by increasing the money supply. (No, printing is out, it's mostly digital now).
America is quite effective exporting it's deficit to the world as many important goods are traded in Dollar, which spreads the inflation around the world.
What you should be worried about is that the rest of the world starts to get fed up with the fed and American monetary policy and go in another direction. Russia, China and other big players are already thinking about creating alternatives and reforming global financial systems.
It's a lot of politics and the threshold to really go in a different direction is quite high, but as it stands now, it is closing in, or in layman's terms, the rest of the world starts to reach the point of having enough of American financial BS (no offense there).
If the Dollar stops being used as international trade currency, then you really should start to worry. Well, actually once that happens Americans can kiss their collective asses good by.
Now correct me if I'm wrong.
Not there is all this fuss about the pirate bay, but what did the IP interest group win? The site is still up and there are countless others, even if it would not be.
My guess is that they want to systematically forbid any kind of uncontrolled information exchange in the so called civilized world.
But even if they succeed, what for? There is still the so called developing world, and if free speech is outlawed in the western world the need for unencumbered service will make them develop this kind of thing quite fast.
Also a lot of dark-nets will spawn once the pressure is too high.
Will the basic principle have changed? No. So I conclude that this pissing contest is organized to seed fear and doubt again and nothing more. Stupid morons.
Exactly. Most OSS projects source files supply a header detailing the Copyright holders and the License it is distributed with. Mostly they grant you a non revocable right/requirement to use, extend and redistribute the code with your modifications added. If you add code, that peace of code is owned by you and is automatically under the parent license. It's the same with mySQL, although their License text is a bit murky, but the FOSS exception basically aims for GPL v2.
As for the trademark: it lies with Sun/Oracle and they can basically do whatever they want with it. The worst thing of which is that you are no longer allowed to call it mySQL. A simple rename to something else would solve that problem (you could for instance fork the code and call it ourSQL).
That's what most open source is about: play in one sandbox as long as you like, and fork once you have different non-compatible ideas.
It's all written in law and license texts.
Are you kidding me. Doing my little research (about 2 minutes), I go to Wikipedia and check out the summary box on the right side of the article, which says: Budget: $120 million, Gross revenue: $180,112,419 . With a quick calculation I get 150.08 % return of investment. A normal economic person would probably tell it was worth it. Now what was the question again?
True. This vulnerability is interesting when it comest to IDS observed systems. These normally don't tend to be normal user desktop systems, but high sec systems. Of course these systems will also check outbound traffic, binary hashes and running processes. I'd also doubt that this kind of machines will harbor a consumer motherboard, even if it is a high end one. For all potential users of this peace of equipment it does not make much difference, as it requires root privileges in the first place and that mostly owns most desktops anyway. For windows machines this probably will be a bigger problems as they have their own set of privilege escalation issues, so objectively the tone of voice of the article is misplaced.
GP meant reasonable theory. Take a good book about cryptography and read it, than you will maybe understand. There are a lot of smart people thinking about this kind of problems. It is simply a collision of the basic principles of cryptography. Like saying a normative car is faster than a normative bicycle at maximum speed. Or 1 + 1 != 42
Ps. and yes, I checked TFA and it's wishful thinking at best, arrogant lie at worst.
What about adiabatic quantum computing?
While ethically and theoretically you are right, in practice no one cares what you are doing in your sandbox.
On the other hand, if you start to mess with a big portion of the Internet, people will realize and start scratching their itches.
Downside of course is fun jail time, but it is for a good purpose.
Less plausibly, it seems that it is talking about a plan to spend 12 thousand million Hungarian forints (54 million USD) on this. I cannot believe that I am reading that correctly. ... So let's just assume that I'm misreading that and hope someone who actually reads Hungarian comments on this. </quote>
Hungarian reading person here. As for your question:
Yes, the number is right, it's about 54 million USD as maximal spending allocation for OSS - same amount as for MS and Novel - as it reads.
Let's hope it is true.
Not to mention the 17 different domains that the site is loading scripts from (one of which was the video). Did not even bother to fine tune it, just forbid everything and left. Spam as Slashdot front-page article: grrr.
I see one once in a while, but I must admit that I mostly see Windows systems when they have trouble (stigma of the guy who knows computers). I have to agree that if you have good hardware (were not too greedy at buying or had at least a bit of clue what you were looking for) you encounter BSOD quite rarely.
Now only the following things have to happen before I migrate back to Windows:
1. It gets usable for users AND developers.
2. It gets secure (no, don't expect military level security, just the basics).
3. Microsoft adopts sane market policy.
4. Windows gets a sane market share to make homogeneous attack vectors ineffective <20% market share.
5. It gives me some kind of advantage over the competition.
As I can't see any of this happening any time soon, so I can summarize it as: when hell freezes over. But you are right with the BSOD matter.
There goes my karma..
So true. I personally use mplayer CLI. Once you get the 5 control keys, it is totally superior to GUI applications. It plays almost everything I trow at it. I also have VLC player around and fire it up once in a while in case I encounter some weird format that mplayer cannot play or I'm just too lazy to figure out the magic for it for a one time use. In some of this cases it helps so it is also nice to have around.
And for the other players.. I fully agree, in comparison to these two they are not worth mention. Well, maybe to people who I don't like, but generally no.
I mean, I love gmail because of the reliability, effective spam filtering, volume and imap access. But what is this AJAX thing about? Can I eat it? Can I use my key to sign or encrypt my messages over it? No? I stay with my local client then. Thanks.
Maybe a penis is blended in for a very short time periodically..
Most of the arguments for the cap is that granny is paying a little more than she uses and grandson pays a bit less. Now you could ask granny: hey, your bastard grandson is using modern technology more than you and the cost is shared because of un-transparent pricing of telcos.
I don't know how it is in mighty USA, but in my place granny would kick you in the nuts just for the question an say it is fine as it is.
Actually, there were plenty of capped and flatrate packages around here some time ago. Nobody wanted caps, so they get rare.
Also, maybe I'm a bit mistaken, but I was thinking that we entered the 21st century, the age of information society a few years back. On the other hand, if I follow the current trend, then we will use telex in a few years again.
I agree too. Linux is a great system, but it has it's weaknesses too. The reason I like it that much is that it seems to be the least broken system, but there is plenty of improvement possibility.
Also I'm mostly using it for desktop and simple server functions. There are places where it is not the right tool, like for example nuclear plants and things that need a high reliability are better fit with things like QNX. For system design educational purposes I would suggest plan 9.
Anyway, I would like to see more competition in the OS segment. I would like to have a choice of more than just one or two (Linux/BSD/Mac) mature systems and I also like to see the current ones getting better with time. And it's happening, just a bit slowly.
Hm, did I left something out?
Just asking. I mean, the girls were dragged though court for a year now, publicly embarrassed and probably get a psychic damage for lifetime just because they dared to send some pictures of themselves. And now the court says: "OK, so you were right, sorry for the bother, have a good life."? So everything is fine now as justice is served? Am I the only one who finds this picture a bit awkward?
s/goed/will have gone/
No, I'm not a native speaker, why do you ask?
Point is, Hurd and Plan 9 are not dead. Neither were they alive ever, but they are not dead.
/dev and /proc file abstraction.
Hurd just has a bit slower development process. Think of it as the tectonic plate movement among OS-es. In only a few billion years it will be mainstream.
Plan 9 is in active development too, but it is more used as experimental and study operating system. It is really clean source code and design making it excellent for academic study and research. Stuff that gets developed for it also comes to mainstream OS'es, like the