[...] they only know as much about you as you submit to them. [...]
To me there are two problems: First and foremost, it is increasingly hard to find out who is included in that latter "them". So many external resources are linked in websites, from JS libraries to advertising to tracking cookies from collecting societies to Flattr to Facebook to Amazon to what the hell else there is, that even with Adblock Plus and NoScript I am sometimes overwhelmed with what to block and what to allow. And it is only getting worse.
The second problem is that basically legitimate features are spreading beyond what is tolerable from a privacy-oriented point of view. I have a Facebook account under a fake name and registered to an e-mail address that I do not use anywhere else. I do share links and other resources through this account with contacts there. But I do not want Facebook to know what other websites I browse. I would have to go through quite some trouble to maintain perfect separation of concerns in day-to-day browsing. That is unacceptable. Browsers need to catch up to what is reality in the web of 2010.
[...] No rational security policy in the world (except maybe military) requires you to actually own the hardware your data rests on. Nor do they require that your employees have direct access to said hardware. [...]
Our legal department respectfully disagrees. We shell out quite some cash on top of our regular support contracts so that no outside technician touches any system with its hard-drive installed. They have to bring their own bootable disk. And we recently had to move our branch's mail server from the Austria head office to our location in Germany. We are not even in a sensitive industry. But between state regulation, data protection laws and insurance terms we have very little room for outsourcing anything. The only component hosted externally is our static website. Everything else is kept on premises.
To you and everyone else who replied in a similar vein:
You have your analogies wrong. The internet is not the physical world. Your server is not a house. Your website is not a tangible object. Many "off-line" social conventions do not carry over into the internet because there is no equivalent to apply them to. Houses are inherently private unless stated otherwise. So is everything that has a lock attached to it or a name written on it. Those are basic norms that work very well in the real world. But they break down when applied to websites.
How am I supposed to know whether a given server or website or file is meant to be publicly accessible or private if there is no indication whatsoever given? Stuff is put on the internet so that it can be reached. That is the basic presumption.
[...] For example, if you can only get to something by IP Address, it can be implied that it is not "intended" to be public as it was not added to a public facing DNS Server. [...]
Sorry, I have to disagree. If something does not tell me "Not for you!" or require authentication, it is open to the public. Whether that is by intent or accident is the provider's problem. Your example is even more problematic: Every machine (directly) on the internet has a publicly reachable IP address simply by virtue of being on the fucking Internet. Whether it also is reachable via a DNS entry - or even only offers certain content under specific domains - is entirely arbitrary (as far as the visitor is concerned). In essence you suggest that people ought to only use the internet through an "authorised" channel, the DNS. Sorry, that is neither realistic nor particularly desirable.
[...] Launching programs? Boot up? That's not a measure of the full OS. [...]
In general I agree with you, but for netbooks those two measures are amongst the most important ones right after Flash performance. On a desktop or even a conventional laptop I am usually focused on processing power and memory, but I can tolerate even one minute of boot-up time. Netbooks are all about speed and responsiveness for tasks that individually do (or should) not require much raw power. Booting one should not take longer than a few seconds, ideally. Otherwise they lose a lot of their appeal, at least to me.
Reread the first post in this thread and my reply, please. To make this simpler, let me put it in closer proximity and remove anything that is not essential:
BadAnalogyGuy: "There are only two nations with the resources, will, and motive to attack Iran's nuclear ambitions in this way: America and Israel."
Me: "I would not rule out Russia or China."
Do you see where you got me wrong and why your analogy does not fit? Or do I have to spell it out?
I am just at a loss.. It really is like each response after the next is competing to think of a more convoluted, absurd way that someone you don't suspect could be involved in it.
I did not say it is likely. I said I would not rule it out. You take it for granted that
Western agencies do not drop their guard and
Western politicians in charge of setting public policy actually listen to those agencies; and
the Russians and/or Chinese believe this, too, and therefore would not undertake such a risky gamble.
In the case at hand I would consider the most obvious suspects, but not rule out other possibilities. In general I am afraid that you give people too much credit. During the Cold War there were quite some situations that led us to the brink of an all-out atomic O.K. Corral simply because one side did over- or underestimate their opponent's determination, power and level of military intelligence. I recommend Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War for an explanation of the issues involved with judging what "the other side" may or may not do.
I would not rule out Russia or China. Both have no interest in a strong Iran but every interest in an Iran that appears strong, since this ties and diverts US and Israeli attention and resources. It also sets a "benchmark" of aggression; as long as esp. China is less of a threat that Iran it can get away with quite a lot, barely noticed. A perceived Iranian nuclear threat can then also serve as justification for building missile defense systems and implementing other military measures that would previously have set off tensions with the Western nuclear powers.
The problem does not lie in the language itself but in the platform it is founded upon. And no, Mono is not a solution. If Microsoft wanted portability and independence from Windows there would only be Mono. I am quite sure C# itself is a solid language, but I would not touch it with a ten foot pole.
[...] Or are we just ignoring that because we hate Microsoft more than we like actually getting things done with our code?
Maybe we just take a look at Microsoft's behaviour up until today and judge their future reliability by that? Oh, wait, that is what Raenex already did. Nevermind.
Twitter aside, people usually assume that their posts and comments stay within the context where they were published. I would not be too keen on having my Facebook account linked to my/. or ImageFap account, though I am comfortable with each context on its own. I would be sure to hammer every company that dared to 'helpfully' contact me because I voice my opinion about their products outside their official channels - or because they believe they have something to sell to me based on my online posts - with the legal equivalent of a ban hammer.
Besides, I am quite sure that Cisco's software, judging only from the summary, is illegal in many countries and in serious violation of the TOS of many, if not most social networking sites and online forums and communities.
I already hand out either company-specific e-mail addresses or one that I can throw away at any time when I have to give one to a company. I will not tolerate any intrusion on my 'private' (as in not used for commerce) online identity.
No. Get your schedule right. Apple hate day is tomorrow. Today Apple is ignored as it clearly is irrelevant in the age of the cloud and already fading into obscurity. Has been, really, for the last couple centuries. Just nobody ever bothered to notify Cupertino, so the folks there still show up for work every morning. Poor sods they are, come to think of it.
"Heavy web user" to me implies many open tabs, JavaScript-heavy websites, many add-ons and extensions. I know nobody in person who leaves their browser open for more than a few days at a time, not even with hibernation. How do you manage to achieve such "uptimes"? Do you never install browser or OS updates?
No offense: You may qualify for the Gold edition geek card, but you are not a "heavy web user", you are a fringe case.
The thing about you Firefox supporters is that you aren't heavy web users. [...]
Say what?! That has got to be the most hilarious statement I ever heard in this debate. Besides, it is up for debate. I had FF running for days at a time, and the last time it ran out of memory for me was around the introduction of the first v3 betas.
I am a web developer. I usually have ~10 JS heavy tabs open continuously over the day, plus those that I open and close during "normal" browsing. I run nightly builds, have been for several years without major issues. I have 21 extensions installed, many of whom in beta or nightly builds. And the only thing that consistently gives me trouble is the Flash plugin.
Again: I do not dispute that Firefox has issues. But memory leaks are way overblown.
Not even close. And that is after about 3 hours of browsing on YouTube, Facebook, several forums and DeviantArt. Not saying there are no issues with Firefox, but those memory leaks are hard to reproduce.
WTF is a "content mangement system"? Is this Drupal thing one of those toys people who can't program use to create web sites? (Not trying to troll, I genuinely don't know).
No. It is one of those mature software packages people who do not want to reinvent the wheel every time they have to create a website use so they can focus on programming those parts that are actually unique to one website.
Right. Now we just have to completely rewrite every piece of consumer software out there from the ground up to actually make sensible use of all that power so that my desktop does not feel as if I was still sitting in front of that Pentium 1 machine from the dawn of modern times.
Great. Native code execution. Silverlight. Local apps from the filesystem. Point being exactly what?
To me there are exactly two sensible options:
Having native applications running directly on the OS without any huge layer in between, to reduce overhead and achieve proper integration with the local interface, or
running remote applications in a browser or a specialised VM, to take advantage of portability, ease of updating and central administration.
Anything in between combines all of the disadvantages of both options without realising all too many of the advantages.
I somehow get the impression that you are talking about two distinct things: the evolution (or revolution) of the literal desktop interface - which I would love to see today rather than tomorrow - and the move from truly native apps to standardised VMs or other intermediary layers - which I have come to condemn.
Do you see cloud at all mentioned in the grandparent post? Why is your imagination so limited?
People who focus "away from the desktop" at some point end up with wanting to run everything but the driver layer in the browser, coming from some kind of all new, all fancy web-based platform. Ie. the "cloud".
Chrome OS, iPhone, and WP7 can all run offline local (web) apps just fine. Full 3D games are now officially running natively inside of Chrome using WebGL (search for Google's Web Store).
Great. We essentially get an operating system on top of an operating system that can run local applications that actually aren't really local but web-based but that can be run offline. Say what?
There is a lot of stuff that can safely and easily be done via a web interface - consumer-grade web mail, relatively simple office applications, maybe media players etc. Then there is a hell of a lot of stuff for which I cannot see any net gain from moving those to some half online, half offline platform. This introduces more complexity and overhead than it brings savings, as I see it.
And games? Sure, there are games that can be realised in a browser. Most large modern games cannot. And that is not going to change overnight.
Also, requests like yours demonstrate a need for separation of concerns. Consumers have no use for workstation-demanding application suites like CAD. [...]
This thread is about desktops in enterprise environments. Regardless, more and more "consumers" start reencoding video for their portable players or using other resource-hungry complex applications that have long been the domain of professional users. The technological standard is rising.
Here in Germany OOo has been heavily featured in, ahem, 'dummy' computer and entertainment electronics periodicals over the last few years and distributed on the accompanying discs. Those are aimed at an audience that is savvy enough to know that some people give away their software for free but that does not have insight into the FOSS ecosystem. Explaining to those what benefits LO has to offer over OOo, especially when it is virtually the same piece of software, will take time, perseverance and creativity.
[...] At this point, assuming that the developers behind LibreOffice stay active, I really don't see the Oracle version remaining in use.
That depends to a certain not so small degree on how well LO is 'marketed' to Windows users of OOo. Most Linux users will not really notice the change since they simply get the latest xxxoffice package automatically pulled from their distro's server but on Windows you have to go to a website, download an installer and set it up yourself. And most Windows users will not be on/. to read about this fork. Heck, I was delighted to come across Go-OO some time ago and installed it on my Windows partition, only to find out a few days later that I had been using it for quite some time in my Ubuntu install, since that is what Canonical distributes as 'OpenOffice.org'.
Heise.de and other IT news trackers have already picked up the story, so IT-minded people will probably become aware of LO and the looming conflict with Oracle over the next weeks, but that is not enough to replace OOo for less technical people.
For Christ's sake all the US Govt did was put him on a watch list [...]
...and voilà: Wikileaks' account was promptly closed. If a single one of those 203 (or 193, depending on your view of the world) sovereign countries on this planet has the power to coerce a private company halfway around the world to boot a customer by simply putting their name on a list, how sovereign are those 202 (or 192) other countries really? To the best of my knowledge the UK government and its institutions have taken no official legal step whatsoever against Wikileaks. Unless they do, the company should not, either.
This method of economic 'warfare' is beyond democratic control. Anyone can be cut off their livelihood without legal process, simply by having their name put on some watch list. The state did not freeze the account itself, it can happily direct all blame at the company which - of course - acted out of its own free will, and the company can point to the state's list to justify their decision in choosing whom to do business with and whom not to.
Slashdot Mirror
[...] they only know as much about you as you submit to them. [...]
To me there are two problems: First and foremost, it is increasingly hard to find out who is included in that latter "them". So many external resources are linked in websites, from JS libraries to advertising to tracking cookies from collecting societies to Flattr to Facebook to Amazon to what the hell else there is, that even with Adblock Plus and NoScript I am sometimes overwhelmed with what to block and what to allow. And it is only getting worse.
The second problem is that basically legitimate features are spreading beyond what is tolerable from a privacy-oriented point of view. I have a Facebook account under a fake name and registered to an e-mail address that I do not use anywhere else. I do share links and other resources through this account with contacts there. But I do not want Facebook to know what other websites I browse. I would have to go through quite some trouble to maintain perfect separation of concerns in day-to-day browsing. That is unacceptable. Browsers need to catch up to what is reality in the web of 2010.
[...] No rational security policy in the world (except maybe military) requires you to actually own the hardware your data rests on. Nor do they require that your employees have direct access to said hardware. [...]
Our legal department respectfully disagrees. We shell out quite some cash on top of our regular support contracts so that no outside technician touches any system with its hard-drive installed. They have to bring their own bootable disk. And we recently had to move our branch's mail server from the Austria head office to our location in Germany. We are not even in a sensitive industry. But between state regulation, data protection laws and insurance terms we have very little room for outsourcing anything. The only component hosted externally is our static website. Everything else is kept on premises.
To you and everyone else who replied in a similar vein:
You have your analogies wrong. The internet is not the physical world. Your server is not a house. Your website is not a tangible object. Many "off-line" social conventions do not carry over into the internet because there is no equivalent to apply them to. Houses are inherently private unless stated otherwise. So is everything that has a lock attached to it or a name written on it. Those are basic norms that work very well in the real world. But they break down when applied to websites.
How am I supposed to know whether a given server or website or file is meant to be publicly accessible or private if there is no indication whatsoever given? Stuff is put on the internet so that it can be reached. That is the basic presumption.
[...] For example, if you can only get to something by IP Address, it can be implied that it is not "intended" to be public as it was not added to a public facing DNS Server. [...]
Sorry, I have to disagree. If something does not tell me "Not for you!" or require authentication, it is open to the public. Whether that is by intent or accident is the provider's problem. Your example is even more problematic: Every machine (directly) on the internet has a publicly reachable IP address simply by virtue of being on the fucking Internet. Whether it also is reachable via a DNS entry - or even only offers certain content under specific domains - is entirely arbitrary (as far as the visitor is concerned). In essence you suggest that people ought to only use the internet through an "authorised" channel, the DNS. Sorry, that is neither realistic nor particularly desirable.
[...] Launching programs? Boot up? That's not a measure of the full OS. [...]
In general I agree with you, but for netbooks those two measures are amongst the most important ones right after Flash performance. On a desktop or even a conventional laptop I am usually focused on processing power and memory, but I can tolerate even one minute of boot-up time. Netbooks are all about speed and responsiveness for tasks that individually do (or should) not require much raw power. Booting one should not take longer than a few seconds, ideally. Otherwise they lose a lot of their appeal, at least to me.
Reread the first post in this thread and my reply, please. To make this simpler, let me put it in closer proximity and remove anything that is not essential:
BadAnalogyGuy: "There are only two nations with the resources, will, and motive to attack Iran's nuclear ambitions in this way: America and Israel."
Me: "I would not rule out Russia or China."
Do you see where you got me wrong and why your analogy does not fit? Or do I have to spell it out?
I am just at a loss.. It really is like each response after the next is competing to think of a more convoluted, absurd way that someone you don't suspect could be involved in it.
I did not say it is likely. I said I would not rule it out. You take it for granted that
In the case at hand I would consider the most obvious suspects, but not rule out other possibilities. In general I am afraid that you give people too much credit. During the Cold War there were quite some situations that led us to the brink of an all-out atomic O.K. Corral simply because one side did over- or underestimate their opponent's determination, power and level of military intelligence. I recommend Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War for an explanation of the issues involved with judging what "the other side" may or may not do.
I would not rule out Russia or China. Both have no interest in a strong Iran but every interest in an Iran that appears strong, since this ties and diverts US and Israeli attention and resources. It also sets a "benchmark" of aggression; as long as esp. China is less of a threat that Iran it can get away with quite a lot, barely noticed. A perceived Iranian nuclear threat can then also serve as justification for building missile defense systems and implementing other military measures that would previously have set off tensions with the Western nuclear powers.
A simple case of cui bono?.
The problem does not lie in the language itself but in the platform it is founded upon. And no, Mono is not a solution. If Microsoft wanted portability and independence from Windows there would only be Mono. I am quite sure C# itself is a solid language, but I would not touch it with a ten foot pole.
[...] Or are we just ignoring that because we hate Microsoft more than we like actually getting things done with our code?
Maybe we just take a look at Microsoft's behaviour up until today and judge their future reliability by that? Oh, wait, that is what Raenex already did. Nevermind.
Twitter aside, people usually assume that their posts and comments stay within the context where they were published. I would not be too keen on having my Facebook account linked to my /. or ImageFap account, though I am comfortable with each context on its own. I would be sure to hammer every company that dared to 'helpfully' contact me because I voice my opinion about their products outside their official channels - or because they believe they have something to sell to me based on my online posts - with the legal equivalent of a ban hammer.
Besides, I am quite sure that Cisco's software, judging only from the summary, is illegal in many countries and in serious violation of the TOS of many, if not most social networking sites and online forums and communities.
I already hand out either company-specific e-mail addresses or one that I can throw away at any time when I have to give one to a company. I will not tolerate any intrusion on my 'private' (as in not used for commerce) online identity.
So does that mean we hate Apple today?
No. Get your schedule right. Apple hate day is tomorrow. Today Apple is ignored as it clearly is irrelevant in the age of the cloud and already fading into obscurity. Has been, really, for the last couple centuries. Just nobody ever bothered to notify Cupertino, so the folks there still show up for work every morning. Poor sods they are, come to think of it.
"Heavy web user" to me implies many open tabs, JavaScript-heavy websites, many add-ons and extensions. I know nobody in person who leaves their browser open for more than a few days at a time, not even with hibernation. How do you manage to achieve such "uptimes"? Do you never install browser or OS updates?
No offense: You may qualify for the Gold edition geek card, but you are not a "heavy web user", you are a fringe case.
The thing about you Firefox supporters is that you aren't heavy web users. [...]
Say what?! That has got to be the most hilarious statement I ever heard in this debate. Besides, it is up for debate. I had FF running for days at a time, and the last time it ran out of memory for me was around the introduction of the first v3 betas.
I am a web developer. I usually have ~10 JS heavy tabs open continuously over the day, plus those that I open and close during "normal" browsing. I run nightly builds, have been for several years without major issues. I have 21 extensions installed, many of whom in beta or nightly builds. And the only thing that consistently gives me trouble is the Flash plugin.
Again: I do not dispute that Firefox has issues. But memory leaks are way overblown.
Not even close. And that is after about 3 hours of browsing on YouTube, Facebook, several forums and DeviantArt. Not saying there are no issues with Firefox, but those memory leaks are hard to reproduce.
WTF is a "content mangement system"? Is this Drupal thing one of those toys people who can't program use to create web sites? (Not trying to troll, I genuinely don't know).
No. It is one of those mature software packages people who do not want to reinvent the wheel every time they have to create a website use so they can focus on programming those parts that are actually unique to one website.
Right. Now we just have to completely rewrite every piece of consumer software out there from the ground up to actually make sensible use of all that power so that my desktop does not feel as if I was still sitting in front of that Pentium 1 machine from the dawn of modern times.
Great. Native code execution. Silverlight. Local apps from the filesystem. Point being exactly what?
To me there are exactly two sensible options:
Anything in between combines all of the disadvantages of both options without realising all too many of the advantages.
I somehow get the impression that you are talking about two distinct things: the evolution (or revolution) of the literal desktop interface - which I would love to see today rather than tomorrow - and the move from truly native apps to standardised VMs or other intermediary layers - which I have come to condemn.
Do you see cloud at all mentioned in the grandparent post? Why is your imagination so limited?
People who focus "away from the desktop" at some point end up with wanting to run everything but the driver layer in the browser, coming from some kind of all new, all fancy web-based platform. Ie. the "cloud".
Chrome OS, iPhone, and WP7 can all run offline local (web) apps just fine. Full 3D games are now officially running natively inside of Chrome using WebGL (search for Google's Web Store).
Great. We essentially get an operating system on top of an operating system that can run local applications that actually aren't really local but web-based but that can be run offline. Say what?
There is a lot of stuff that can safely and easily be done via a web interface - consumer-grade web mail, relatively simple office applications, maybe media players etc. Then there is a hell of a lot of stuff for which I cannot see any net gain from moving those to some half online, half offline platform. This introduces more complexity and overhead than it brings savings, as I see it.
And games? Sure, there are games that can be realised in a browser. Most large modern games cannot. And that is not going to change overnight.
Also, requests like yours demonstrate a need for separation of concerns. Consumers have no use for workstation-demanding application suites like CAD. [...]
This thread is about desktops in enterprise environments. Regardless, more and more "consumers" start reencoding video for their portable players or using other resource-hungry complex applications that have long been the domain of professional users. The technological standard is rising.
Sure. Wake me up when full-scale GIS and 3D CAD software are available from the "cloud". SAP is sadly beginning to buy into this bullshit.
This makes any difference whatsoever how?
Here in Germany OOo has been heavily featured in, ahem, 'dummy' computer and entertainment electronics periodicals over the last few years and distributed on the accompanying discs. Those are aimed at an audience that is savvy enough to know that some people give away their software for free but that does not have insight into the FOSS ecosystem. Explaining to those what benefits LO has to offer over OOo, especially when it is virtually the same piece of software, will take time, perseverance and creativity.
[...] At this point, assuming that the developers behind LibreOffice stay active, I really don't see the Oracle version remaining in use.
That depends to a certain not so small degree on how well LO is 'marketed' to Windows users of OOo. Most Linux users will not really notice the change since they simply get the latest xxxoffice package automatically pulled from their distro's server but on Windows you have to go to a website, download an installer and set it up yourself. And most Windows users will not be on /. to read about this fork. Heck, I was delighted to come across Go-OO some time ago and installed it on my Windows partition, only to find out a few days later that I had been using it for quite some time in my Ubuntu install, since that is what Canonical distributes as 'OpenOffice.org'.
Heise.de and other IT news trackers have already picked up the story, so IT-minded people will probably become aware of LO and the looming conflict with Oracle over the next weeks, but that is not enough to replace OOo for less technical people.
[...] We're trying to defeat DRM --- not enhance it. [...]
Those two are the same. Any truly secure DRM renders the protected content unusable, thereby rendering the DRM useless.
For Christ's sake all the US Govt did was put him on a watch list [...]
...and voilà: Wikileaks' account was promptly closed. If a single one of those 203 (or 193, depending on your view of the world) sovereign countries on this planet has the power to coerce a private company halfway around the world to boot a customer by simply putting their name on a list, how sovereign are those 202 (or 192) other countries really? To the best of my knowledge the UK government and its institutions have taken no official legal step whatsoever against Wikileaks. Unless they do, the company should not, either.
This method of economic 'warfare' is beyond democratic control. Anyone can be cut off their livelihood without legal process, simply by having their name put on some watch list. The state did not freeze the account itself, it can happily direct all blame at the company which - of course - acted out of its own free will, and the company can point to the state's list to justify their decision in choosing whom to do business with and whom not to.