The more the internet is popular, the more idiots and internet analfabets join the global network, the more will internet look like Wild West. A lot of people don't know the basic security measures and practice for safely living on the web. For example, a local shop got their only web-connected computer infected with Conficker and God-knows-whatnot. They use it for browsing the web and interaction with the bank. Besides that, they use it for printing the customer pictures inserting the customer USB keys into it. The AV can't update itself, WinXP limps, but it still works. I warned them I should fix their computer ASAP because it threatens their banking account, prolly infects customers USB key etc... They agreed with me, but they really can't afford the downtime eventhough I promised them I would make sure the downtime would be minimal. After two months the owner still didn't contact me, although he's 3 meters away from where I work. I would ban the access to the internet for that kind of people if you ask me.
If I could synchronize my PIM data from my Evolution, then I'm sold! I've been looking for seamless and headachless synchronization with Linux PIMs for years!
It's funny how everybody, including companies that "invented" so called netbook have trouble defining, what netbook actually is. Asus coined the term and created a very profitable niche in it's own right. When the rest of the crowd blindly followed the hype nobody actually understood what netbooks really are. Maybe if Microsoft hadn't flexed it's muscle with an old and battered WinXP but introduced an innovative platform, the perception of a netbook would be a different from what it is now - a small laptop that's becoming fatter due to an untrimmed OS that was shoved to OEMs in a hurry.
So now we have Microsoft defining what netbook is because of Win7, Intel is having problems with screen size. And I have difficulties explaining my customers what this little lappy actually is for. While it was primarily meant for the "net" part it's still basically an underpowered laptop on which people are putting stuff on that wasn't meant for in the first place. Atom might eventually as well eat out the classic x86 market of home desktops and laptops, but it's the manufacturers own fault, following the hype that nobody really understands.
... it's just a freaking social networking site! And for most of their users, it's just that, period. Or a phonebook of 21. century, if you will - it's just nice to have all your friends and relatives at hand, but why spam and be spammed all of the time? The economy of "free" that internet brought with it surely enabled the idiots who speak first and then think later, to spam the others who most of the time have something better to do.
Someone has to be first and it's no wonder to me that Linux can reach this goals first since the development models allows that very well. On the other hand, it seems to me just another moot point to show how superduper OS Linux is. Of course it is great! But yelling "I got here first" won't help you much if the turtle is what most people want...
Firefox is a mature product which technically reached and even surpassed similar products. Innovation and change for the sake of themselves isn't as good as real change. I would regard adding tabs to a browser as a true innovation which resolved the taskbar bloated windows (and it wasn't Mozilla, it was Opera who first did it), but reconfiguring the way they work isn't really that workflow changing. Changing structure of tabs would please about 5% people who probably already resolved their problems with extensions and piss off the 95% who actually didn't benefit much from it. Just try to hack the existing interface with some neat things. Although many might disagree but I think the 'awesome bar' was a nice example of how the mature products can still innovate.
Every now and then I still get surprised by the naivety of science to finally subdue the nature. This geoengineering sounds so 19th century.
We seem to subdue and control everything but ourselves. Fine, we do geoengineering. Should be this done by the UN, state by state, commercialized? Should we pay to get rain? And after that? What another aspect of our lives, life on this planet should be controlled, used and probably abused?
...come to me than fetching it through browser all the time. It's nice to have redundancy through web clients if anything breaks down locally but I to me feels cloud computing more clunky and unproductive than local.
I don't see an issue with this. I know I'll get modded down to oblivion, but I see no problem with teaching people A method to compete in the market place.
I'd actually be disappointed if information like this weren't being taught in Silicon Valley!
It's wrong, because they'll still lose in the end and it's gonna blow up in their face. I believe these FUD tactics can be deployed only for limited period of time. We have a saying in our country that "lies have short legs". Lies and deception might work well against competitive proprietary products, but against FOSS which doesn't solely rely on financial sources, they will eventually run out of time.
So he's going to release a tool that lets people break into Gmail accounts. And unless you read slashdot, you'd have no idea to go into preferences and flip a switch.
How is this a public service? For the 99% of the world who dont read SD every day, they're pretty much screwed.
It's good I'm a nerd and will now flip the magic switch on my gmail account...but it seems like a big f-u to everyone else.
D
You can notify your Google Chat buddies with a simple custom message, which tells them that SSL-less Gmail is not secure and how to enable this. That's what I just did.
I think that this is actually quite a complex problem consisting of many factors:
b) some people don't want to spend the money on crap games with little replay value
c) some people don't like to wait for a few days or weeks instead of hours to get it through some torrent site
d) any of these people have enough motivation or ignorance to face the increasing dangers of searching for cracks on malware ridden websites
1) some people will pay for the game because they still don't know what P2P is
2) a few people will pay for the game because they have enough money to afford and don't mind waiting a bit
3) a very few will pay for the game since they don't want to bother with cracks. This factor is increasing with online play (see WoW or Steam for example).
If you can cut out (as much as possible) the middleman, set a reasonable price, make the game available to a worldwide audience within a few click "distance" and have them pay for your game in a simple and not frustrating manner I think there should be enough people to pay for the game.
The main problem is, that there is no such globalised and convenient financial system available to the masses in comparison to the availability of P2P networks. I, for example, don't have/or use a credit or a debit card, and so are many of my peers, eventhough they could get it - there's just not yet such a need to use one, and certainly not for games only.
Eventhough Steam is showing the path, it can't address the financial problem completely. But I guess this problem will fade away as the gaming demographic matures worldwide even more and the financial transactions will move online.
Quality and replay value are also an important factors. If you're making a game, that most people would play it just once and then forget, it would be better if it could be rented online. I can't figure how would this work (micropayments,...?). On the other hand, games of high quality and good replay value have a better chance of being bought. Mods and community are a big plus in my opinion.
The best anwser against piracy is actually quite obvious: don't build just a game, enable diversity through mods, create a community, build a following around it, and don't forget to scale your development properly. Game is just a core product, the services is what matters today. The regular "run-through-and-forget" consumers wouldn't buy the game anyway, if they can get around P2P.
It seems lately that Microsoft can't keep up with the competition:
"Linux on Asus EEE? Uh, we'll throw WinXP at it, until we come up with something decent. Crap, we'll have to implement ODF before our OOXML into Office! Well, drop old document specs to our competitors, that'll keep them busy implementing our standards."
These specs are nothing but a bait that will keep F/LOSS off course delivering the best open document standards to the world. The only thing that we need is a mass converter from.doc to.odt or.pdf, not another office app that creates even more non-standard documents.
I see two things here:
1. It runs on 4 x quad core. Which is about just 4X the CPU power a normal user could have right now. A 4X speed improvement isn't probably that far away. Given the Moore's law, would that be (in theory) 3 to 4 years? That would be actually pretty soon.
Actually, that wasn't crazy. The free software was taken away from Stallman when proprietary licenses were enforced, thus forcing him to create GPL. If there we're no proprietary licenses, there would be no need for GPL. And that's the ultimate goal of GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod this parent into orbit for the whole world to see.
... u r doin it wrong.
I second that. Firefox started the browser war, but now it seems to follow the others rather than raising the bar.
Its easier to dump/waste/drop/bury it and build next year's model, which will be cheaper.
There, fixed it for you.
The more the internet is popular, the more idiots and internet analfabets join the global network, the more will internet look like Wild West. A lot of people don't know the basic security measures and practice for safely living on the web. For example, a local shop got their only web-connected computer infected with Conficker and God-knows-whatnot. They use it for browsing the web and interaction with the bank. Besides that, they use it for printing the customer pictures inserting the customer USB keys into it. The AV can't update itself, WinXP limps, but it still works. I warned them I should fix their computer ASAP because it threatens their banking account, prolly infects customers USB key etc... They agreed with me, but they really can't afford the downtime eventhough I promised them I would make sure the downtime would be minimal. After two months the owner still didn't contact me, although he's 3 meters away from where I work. I would ban the access to the internet for that kind of people if you ask me.
If I could synchronize my PIM data from my Evolution, then I'm sold! I've been looking for seamless and headachless synchronization with Linux PIMs for years!
It's funny how everybody, including companies that "invented" so called netbook have trouble defining, what netbook actually is. Asus coined the term and created a very profitable niche in it's own right. When the rest of the crowd blindly followed the hype nobody actually understood what netbooks really are. Maybe if Microsoft hadn't flexed it's muscle with an old and battered WinXP but introduced an innovative platform, the perception of a netbook would be a different from what it is now - a small laptop that's becoming fatter due to an untrimmed OS that was shoved to OEMs in a hurry.
So now we have Microsoft defining what netbook is because of Win7, Intel is having problems with screen size. And I have difficulties explaining my customers what this little lappy actually is for. While it was primarily meant for the "net" part it's still basically an underpowered laptop on which people are putting stuff on that wasn't meant for in the first place. Atom might eventually as well eat out the classic x86 market of home desktops and laptops, but it's the manufacturers own fault, following the hype that nobody really understands.
They didn't, because they know they would have lost badly.
And rather than looking like a looser, they call it a contribution to the community with a little PR fanfare.
... it's just a freaking social networking site! And for most of their users, it's just that, period. Or a phonebook of 21. century, if you will - it's just nice to have all your friends and relatives at hand, but why spam and be spammed all of the time? The economy of "free" that internet brought with it surely enabled the idiots who speak first and then think later, to spam the others who most of the time have something better to do.
Someone has to be first and it's no wonder to me that Linux can reach this goals first since the development models allows that very well. On the other hand, it seems to me just another moot point to show how superduper OS Linux is. Of course it is great! But yelling "I got here first" won't help you much if the turtle is what most people want...
...forcing Linux distros bundling Internet Explorer?
Firefox is a mature product which technically reached and even surpassed similar products. Innovation and change for the sake of themselves isn't as good as real change. I would regard adding tabs to a browser as a true innovation which resolved the taskbar bloated windows (and it wasn't Mozilla, it was Opera who first did it), but reconfiguring the way they work isn't really that workflow changing.
Changing structure of tabs would please about 5% people who probably already resolved their problems with extensions and piss off the 95% who actually didn't benefit much from it. Just try to hack the existing interface with some neat things. Although many might disagree but I think the 'awesome bar' was a nice example of how the mature products can still innovate.
Every now and then I still get surprised by the naivety of science to finally subdue the nature. This geoengineering sounds so 19th century.
We seem to subdue and control everything but ourselves. Fine, we do geoengineering. Should be this done by the UN, state by state, commercialized? Should we pay to get rain? And after that? What another aspect of our lives, life on this planet should be controlled, used and probably abused?
I agree, it's those half-literate I have to usually worry about. (does anyone remember the quote or a proverb about that?)
Wake me up when they announce WinFS.
...come to me than fetching it through browser all the time. It's nice to have redundancy through web clients if anything breaks down locally but I to me feels cloud computing more clunky and unproductive than local.
I don't see an issue with this. I know I'll get modded down to oblivion, but I see no problem with teaching people A method to compete in the market place.
I'd actually be disappointed if information like this weren't being taught in Silicon Valley!
It's wrong, because they'll still lose in the end and it's gonna blow up in their face. I believe these FUD tactics can be deployed only for limited period of time. We have a saying in our country that "lies have short legs". Lies and deception might work well against competitive proprietary products, but against FOSS which doesn't solely rely on financial sources, they will eventually run out of time.
B(rain)RAID 1 FTW!
Judging by the simplicity of the browser I think Google is after Internet Explorer, not after Firefox.
So he's going to release a tool that lets people break into Gmail accounts. And unless you read slashdot, you'd have no idea to go into preferences and flip a switch.
How is this a public service? For the 99% of the world who dont read SD every day, they're pretty much screwed.
It's good I'm a nerd and will now flip the magic switch on my gmail account...but it seems like a big f-u to everyone else.
D
You can notify your Google Chat buddies with a simple custom message, which tells them that SSL-less Gmail is not secure and how to enable this. That's what I just did.
I think that this is actually quite a complex problem consisting of many factors:
b) some people don't want to spend the money on crap games with little replay value
c) some people don't like to wait for a few days or weeks instead of hours to get it through some torrent site
d) any of these people have enough motivation or ignorance to face the increasing dangers of searching for cracks on malware ridden websites
1) some people will pay for the game because they still don't know what P2P is
2) a few people will pay for the game because they have enough money to afford and don't mind waiting a bit
3) a very few will pay for the game since they don't want to bother with cracks. This factor is increasing with online play (see WoW or Steam for example).
If you can cut out (as much as possible) the middleman, set a reasonable price, make the game available to a worldwide audience within a few click "distance" and have them pay for your game in a simple and not frustrating manner I think there should be enough people to pay for the game.
The main problem is, that there is no such globalised and convenient financial system available to the masses in comparison to the availability of P2P networks. I, for example, don't have/or use a credit or a debit card, and so are many of my peers, eventhough they could get it - there's just not yet such a need to use one, and certainly not for games only.
Eventhough Steam is showing the path, it can't address the financial problem completely. But I guess this problem will fade away as the gaming demographic matures worldwide even more and the financial transactions will move online.
Quality and replay value are also an important factors. If you're making a game, that most people would play it just once and then forget, it would be better if it could be rented online. I can't figure how would this work (micropayments,...?). On the other hand, games of high quality and good replay value have a better chance of being bought. Mods and community are a big plus in my opinion.
The best anwser against piracy is actually quite obvious: don't build just a game, enable diversity through mods, create a community, build a following around it, and don't forget to scale your development properly. Game is just a core product, the services is what matters today. The regular "run-through-and-forget" consumers wouldn't buy the game anyway, if they can get around P2P.
Admiral Adama, is that you?
It seems lately that Microsoft can't keep up with the competition:
"Linux on Asus EEE? Uh, we'll throw WinXP at it, until we come up with something decent. Crap, we'll have to implement ODF before our OOXML into Office! Well, drop old document specs to our competitors, that'll keep them busy implementing our standards."
These specs are nothing but a bait that will keep F/LOSS off course delivering the best open document standards to the world. The only thing that we need is a mass converter from .doc to .odt or .pdf, not another office app that creates even more non-standard documents.
Actually, that wasn't crazy. The free software was taken away from Stallman when proprietary licenses were enforced, thus forcing him to create GPL. If there we're no proprietary licenses, there would be no need for GPL. And that's the ultimate goal of GPL.