Asus have a couple of models which IMO sound far more useful devices than pure tablets. The Eee Slider is a tablet with a slide out keyboard which tilts the screen for typing. The Eee Pad Transformer is a tablet that you can stuff into a netbook style housing with keyboard / mouse.
IMO both devices are far, far more suitable than tablets for any kind of text input, e.g. lectures, writing emails, essays, slashdot comments. Of course the price might be prohibitive when they launch but we'll see.
That's the biggest issue with tablets at the moment - they cost too damned much money. It really is a ripoff. A tablet should be the same price as a netbook, but manufacturers are still in greed mode. They see Apple commanding stupid premiums for their device and they "compete" by pricing their devices similarly. There is absolutely no reason a decent tablet shouldn't cost $300 or less. There are already a few examples (e.g. Advent Vega is a Tegra 2 10" tablet for £250) but the brand names are still too expensive. Hopefully when the market is flooded with Android 3.0 devices the prices will become a bit more reasonable and competitive.
I didn't say self signed, I said self generated. i.e. some guy runs keytool or similar that just craps out a random keypair. Then in this hypothetical extension to the protocol they they associate said key with their PGP key and its web of trust. i.e. the key has fields or metadata containing a signature & id of a PGP key. The clients would only interact with the public key. I don't see how it would permit a man in the middle attack.
At it's basic level https does what it's supposed to which is encrypt traffic and bestow some sites with a measure of trust. It's slow and complex but it's mature and works.
The fundamental problem for me is that https is a hassle and costs money to implement. You have to buy the cert or at least go through the rigmarole of obtaining one, often accompanied by submitting scans of government documents or whatnot. At the end of this process you get a time limited cert which has largely meaningless "trust" attached to it. For medium / small businesses and end users all this hassle is a major obstacle.
The kicker is this issue has already been resolved - webs of trust. PGP lets users roll their own key, distribute it to people they know who subsequently sign it. As people sign each other's keys they build up a trust model uniquely amongst themselves.
It's too bad Google, MS, Firefox can't work together on an extension for self generated certs which are then signed by a PGP key instead of a CA. Instead of trusting the CA, the user trusts (or distrusts) based on the web of trust. The cert never expires but becomes invalid if the PGP key is revoked / expired. Then anyone can roll their own cert without the inconvenience and expense of buying one.
At the point that certs become freely available, the use of https would sky rocket. At the very least people would benefit from encrypted communication, and where trust is required they'd have that too and probably more of it than some worthless CA sig,
I didn't just say how it looks. I cited several points a typical consumer is interested in - looks, features, ease of use, price, support. The fact a phone is rootable or not is clearly going to be a matter of supreme insignificance for most users. Maybe a few geeks might care (as they might that there is a Linux kernel in some phones). Most users do not.
The general public really don't give a shit about bootloaders. They're more concerned about how pretty the phone looks, what features it supports, how easy it is to use, how much it costs, and at a push what is the likelihood of long term support for the device. Talk about bootloaders to the average person and their eyes will glaze over. It's simply a non issue.
Personally I haven't even seen many Motorola devices recently in EU stores which may explain why they're not doing so well. As far as I can tell none of the phone networks here in Ireland (Vodafone, O2, Meteor & Three) carry a single Motorola handset. A few years ago they'd probably have 3 or 4 models apiece. Maybe Motorola has withdrawn from the market, or they're not seen as devices worth selling any more.
You're right no browser is perfect but I see no indication that Firefox, Chrome, Opera or even Safari are shying away from implementing the standards as best and fully as they can. If IE9 drops major chunks of useful functionality on the floor I simply hope that the web doesn't shy away from using it because of that.
Oh it could be as ubiquitous as Skype. It just requires the project to have the dedication and pragmatism to see the idea through from the concept to a real world client and infrastructure which is comparable (preferably better) than what's already there. That means an attractive client that works on every major OS, a protocol seamlessly adapts to runs through firewalls and so forth, and an infrastructure which is adaptive, secure and cheap and beneficial to run.
But as this is a GNU project we're talking about it will probably be none of those things.
Eclipse is great although it can get horribly busy and fragile just from tossing in a few plugins. One major issue I constantly face is running out of permgenspace or encountering plugins that insist on Eclipse running from full path specified JDK + JRE to function.
Netbeans is decent IDE too. Much cleaner than Eclipse but suffering in other ways especiall on large projects where you might have more than one thing to debug. One incredibly frustrating about both is how orthogonal they can be sometimes. E.g. Netbeans has great integrated maven support but the XML editor is awful, conversely Eclipse has useless Maven support but m2eclipse plugin is pretty great. Netbeans has a dreadful code formatter & refactoring, but it's great at editing UIs. Eclipse has a fantastic code formatting / refactoring but abysmal editor. Sometimes you have to use both to accomplish a single task.
For C++ development I haven't tried Eclipse but it looks passable, certainly better than nothing. I think QT creator also has potential depending on what you're making. I think C++ development on Linux would be massively more pleasant if gcc were dumped for clang and gdb for a LLVM source level debugger.
A more standards compliant IE is always to be welcomed. What should not be welcomed is that "more" standards compliant != standards compliant. Things like web workers & WebGL are not implemented in IE9 which is quite disturbing. Web workers have massive potential for interactive sites, and WebGL is critical for games and some kinds of visual sites. What I hope is that nobody bothers to compromise for the sake of IE's inadequacies or egregious omissions in the way they may have done in the past. Design the site to a standard and if a browser doesn't meet the standard send the user off to the "reduced experience" version or to a page to download a decent browser. The days where sites had to bend over to IE's inadequacies should be over.
Major con as in horrifically expensive to build & run with potentially catastrophic consequences in the event of failure / human error. Even if the Japanese do get the situation under control, the Fukushima plant is an expensive, radioactive writeoff and will take years to clean up or rebuild. If a solar / wind farm got hit by an earthquake you'd be looking at some ruined equipment and downed towers, possibly some fires if there were battery / capacitor arrays. Nothing anywhere close in terms of risk or expense.
I recognize nuclear has many advantages over wind / solar, but the aftermath of a disaster is most definitely not one of its benefits.
If you're in a large boat capable of propulsion and you're downwind of even minor nuclear fallout, you would be a fool to stay put. I also do not get any sense that this is a coverup or being glossed over. Radiation could be relatively minor but you still don't want a boat full of people breathing it in.
Nuclear needs to be promoted but it has to be with a plan for sustainable energy too. Every energy source has it's pros & cons (Japan demonstrates the major con of nuclear), but renewables aren't the solution by themselves either.
I've seen this statement before, and I've always wondered - is there a Cliff's Notes version of the alleged supporting evidence for it? I mean, actual statements from people of Plato's era along the lines of "that Plato sure does like inventing ancient cities that never existed as back-story for his work! I bet in a few thousand years, people will think Atlantis actually existed, even though all of us here in Ancient Greece know that that is completely false!".
I don't see the problem with starting with the default assumption that the place was hypothetical. There is no supporting evidence and Plato used the place as a springboard to go off into a philosophical discourse.
I can well believe than in a few thousand years there will be pseudo archeological cranks who will spend their lives looking for Hogwarts, and claiming they've found it every time they unearth some evidence of a railway track.
I don't get the comparisons to Katrina either except for negatively reflecting on the US's pathetic preparedness and response compared to Japan's in a vastly more catastrophic event.
Japan has suffered major damage and casualties and will take months to get back to any sense of normality but given the magnitude of the situation I think they're coping pretty well. I am certain in the aftermath that there will be massive scope for improvement, to mitigate future disasters through in building designs, emergency response, warning systems, to tsunami proof survival shelters, nuclear plants design etc.
Anyone claiming anything a site is Atlantis is either a crank or a sell out. Serious archaeologists do not make such bold proclamations unless they want to be skinned alive by their peers. And throwing in a hook about a tsunami seems like ghoulish self promotion in the current circumstances
They used to say the exact same thing about Troy, and then someone dug it up. Same with King Tut's tomb.
Serious archaeologists do not claim that a site doesn't exist just because it hasn't been found. Those are the crackpots who have an agenda to push; real scientists are Skeptics, not Disbelievers.
Rubbish. Proper archeology is driven by laboriously mapping & excavating sites, recovering fragments of pottery, writing, jewelry, carvings, writing, analysing firepit, bone & plant remains, taking soil samples, dendrochronological dating and everything else. It's tedious, backbreaking, uncomfortable and methodical work as likely to end in failure as success. And when all that is done, the conclusions made must be supported by the evidence you have gathered and published in a peer reviewed journal. If you're lucky you might find something spectacular and compelling, a lost city maybe or a dead king, but you had damned better have the evidence to support it. Which you will find in your cited examples they did.
In the absence of such evidence you cannot just proclaim Atlantis. That is the hallmark of pseudo archeology, of cranks and attention whores. People with a TV show or book to plug. The Erich von Danikens and Graham Hancocks of this world who engage in the worst kind of making shit up to sell books. And yes Atlantis is a staple of these cranks because it's a magnet to the New Age kooks who like these books.
It appears that TV shows do it too, shamefully even National Geographic. There's nothing like a bit of bait and switch to drum up ratings. Toss in the word Atlantis and tsunami to promote the show, front load with hyperbolic reimaginings of Atlantis with phony CGI and then string the viewer out for an hour before concluding it's just a sunken boat loaded with rocks, or a dumping ground for stone anchors, or some natural feature or some other mundane structure and there is zero evidence to support any other conclusion.
Anyone claiming anything a site is Atlantis is either a crank or a sell out. Serious archaeologists do not make such bold proclamations unless they want to be skinned alive by their peers. And throwing in a hook about a tsunami seems like ghoulish self promotion in the current circumstances
Not to mention they were nice enough to release an H.264 plugin for Firefox [slashdot.org] thus freeing Mozilla from any licensing issues. It supposedly only works native in Windows 7 since Win 7 comes with H.264 support built in, but since it is simply calling the WMP API if you have an H.264 DShow codec installed (personally I like Klite Mega on XP, Vista codec pack for Vista and 7 Codec pack for 7 along with 64 bit MP Classic) it should work just fine.
Firefox was free from any licensing issues ANYWAY. OS X, Windows and Linux all have multimedia frameworks. It would have been relatively straightforward for FF to utilise them for video media types it didn't handle natively.
Ah I get it, God is just being "mysterious". That's the usual cop out for these kinds of acts isn't it? When someone survives against the odds it's a "miracle" and when they don't it's merely "god's will". So God decides to snuff out a bunch of people or trash their livelihoods it's just part of some "greater plan". A plan which involves carnage, untold suffering, human misery, terror and pain. God really is a complete shit isn't He? Let's all bow down and give worship to our cruel, random, unprovable space tyrant.
Bitter much?
Don't want to believe in God, that's cool. Just don't crap all over something that millions of people happen to respect. I get the impression that you have a lot of hate for something you don't really understand. It also sounds like some who believe had tried to explain it to you and you have twisted that into more reason to hate. Clearly, you have made up your mind. Why spit venom on everyone else? Do you think you are going to change their mind?
Bitter? Nope. I merely find religiously motivated excuses for why bad things happen laughable and absurd.
Our lack of understanding is not equivalent to God's arbitrariness.
Also, some people see no difference between causing and permitting, when it is supposed to be the Omnipotent doing either the causing or the permitting.
Everywhere you could live in a real world is dangerous. Would you rather this Omnipotent God put you in an unreal world so you could try to experience life there?
Ah I get it, God is just being "mysterious". That's the usual cop out for these kinds of acts isn't it? When someone survives against the odds it's a "miracle" and when they don't it's merely "god's will". So God decides to snuff out a bunch of people or trash their livelihoods it's just part of some "greater plan". A plan which involves carnage, untold suffering, human misery, terror and pain. God really is a complete shit isn't He? Let's all bow down and give worship to our cruel, random, unprovable space tyrant.
You can bet the WBC and various other fundamentalist idiots will be all over this, blaming it as God's punishment for some supposed transgression. Why God would choose to choose to snuff out unconnected random people and some industrial / farm zones will of course not be adequately explained in any way.
Here's their train of thoughts:
How dare some insignificant worm mock us fancy, bigshot corporate lawyers? That peasant should know his place! Something has to be done to show the cattle who's boss!
Of maybe bigshot lawyers are thinking, "yippee, here's a way to generate 10 billable hours!".
The letter is quite obviously satirical. Even if the person were in the jurisdiction required, his "confession" would be laughed out of court.
All I expect it to do is what happens with the taskbar in Windows 7 or the dock in OS X. You can launch any app you like and it will appear in the task bar / dock. If you wish to keep the icon in the task bar you pin it. Then if you logout and log back in the OS the pinned icons remain where you put them. That's the way I expect app tabs to work in a browser. An app tab is a glorified shortcut that a user has chosen to pin to their tabbar and wants to be there when they restart the app. The user may or may not want to open the other tabs depending on their privacy settings. In my case I don't want normal tabs to reopen and my privacy settings reflect that.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO both devices are far, far more suitable than tablets for any kind of text input, e.g. lectures, writing emails, essays, slashdot comments. Of course the price might be prohibitive when they launch but we'll see.
That's the biggest issue with tablets at the moment - they cost too damned much money. It really is a ripoff. A tablet should be the same price as a netbook, but manufacturers are still in greed mode. They see Apple commanding stupid premiums for their device and they "compete" by pricing their devices similarly. There is absolutely no reason a decent tablet shouldn't cost $300 or less. There are already a few examples (e.g. Advent Vega is a Tegra 2 10" tablet for £250) but the brand names are still too expensive. Hopefully when the market is flooded with Android 3.0 devices the prices will become a bit more reasonable and competitive.
I didn't say self signed, I said self generated. i.e. some guy runs keytool or similar that just craps out a random keypair. Then in this hypothetical extension to the protocol they they associate said key with their PGP key and its web of trust. i.e. the key has fields or metadata containing a signature & id of a PGP key. The clients would only interact with the public key. I don't see how it would permit a man in the middle attack.
The fundamental problem for me is that https is a hassle and costs money to implement. You have to buy the cert or at least go through the rigmarole of obtaining one, often accompanied by submitting scans of government documents or whatnot. At the end of this process you get a time limited cert which has largely meaningless "trust" attached to it. For medium / small businesses and end users all this hassle is a major obstacle.
The kicker is this issue has already been resolved - webs of trust. PGP lets users roll their own key, distribute it to people they know who subsequently sign it. As people sign each other's keys they build up a trust model uniquely amongst themselves.
It's too bad Google, MS, Firefox can't work together on an extension for self generated certs which are then signed by a PGP key instead of a CA. Instead of trusting the CA, the user trusts (or distrusts) based on the web of trust. The cert never expires but becomes invalid if the PGP key is revoked / expired. Then anyone can roll their own cert without the inconvenience and expense of buying one.
At the point that certs become freely available, the use of https would sky rocket. At the very least people would benefit from encrypted communication, and where trust is required they'd have that too and probably more of it than some worthless CA sig,
I didn't just say how it looks. I cited several points a typical consumer is interested in - looks, features, ease of use, price, support. The fact a phone is rootable or not is clearly going to be a matter of supreme insignificance for most users. Maybe a few geeks might care (as they might that there is a Linux kernel in some phones). Most users do not.
Personally I haven't even seen many Motorola devices recently in EU stores which may explain why they're not doing so well. As far as I can tell none of the phone networks here in Ireland (Vodafone, O2, Meteor & Three) carry a single Motorola handset. A few years ago they'd probably have 3 or 4 models apiece. Maybe Motorola has withdrawn from the market, or they're not seen as devices worth selling any more.
In an alternate reality Slashdot is only available via an email request and must read through Gnus.
You're right no browser is perfect but I see no indication that Firefox, Chrome, Opera or even Safari are shying away from implementing the standards as best and fully as they can. If IE9 drops major chunks of useful functionality on the floor I simply hope that the web doesn't shy away from using it because of that.
But as this is a GNU project we're talking about it will probably be none of those things.
Netbeans is decent IDE too. Much cleaner than Eclipse but suffering in other ways especiall on large projects where you might have more than one thing to debug. One incredibly frustrating about both is how orthogonal they can be sometimes. E.g. Netbeans has great integrated maven support but the XML editor is awful, conversely Eclipse has useless Maven support but m2eclipse plugin is pretty great. Netbeans has a dreadful code formatter & refactoring, but it's great at editing UIs. Eclipse has a fantastic code formatting / refactoring but abysmal editor. Sometimes you have to use both to accomplish a single task.
For C++ development I haven't tried Eclipse but it looks passable, certainly better than nothing. I think QT creator also has potential depending on what you're making. I think C++ development on Linux would be massively more pleasant if gcc were dumped for clang and gdb for a LLVM source level debugger.
A more standards compliant IE is always to be welcomed. What should not be welcomed is that "more" standards compliant != standards compliant. Things like web workers & WebGL are not implemented in IE9 which is quite disturbing. Web workers have massive potential for interactive sites, and WebGL is critical for games and some kinds of visual sites. What I hope is that nobody bothers to compromise for the sake of IE's inadequacies or egregious omissions in the way they may have done in the past. Design the site to a standard and if a browser doesn't meet the standard send the user off to the "reduced experience" version or to a page to download a decent browser. The days where sites had to bend over to IE's inadequacies should be over.
I recognize nuclear has many advantages over wind / solar, but the aftermath of a disaster is most definitely not one of its benefits.
If you're in a large boat capable of propulsion and you're downwind of even minor nuclear fallout, you would be a fool to stay put. I also do not get any sense that this is a coverup or being glossed over. Radiation could be relatively minor but you still don't want a boat full of people breathing it in.
Nuclear needs to be promoted but it has to be with a plan for sustainable energy too. Every energy source has it's pros & cons (Japan demonstrates the major con of nuclear), but renewables aren't the solution by themselves either.
I've seen this statement before, and I've always wondered - is there a Cliff's Notes version of the alleged supporting evidence for it? I mean, actual statements from people of Plato's era along the lines of "that Plato sure does like inventing ancient cities that never existed as back-story for his work! I bet in a few thousand years, people will think Atlantis actually existed, even though all of us here in Ancient Greece know that that is completely false!".
I don't see the problem with starting with the default assumption that the place was hypothetical. There is no supporting evidence and Plato used the place as a springboard to go off into a philosophical discourse.
I can well believe than in a few thousand years there will be pseudo archeological cranks who will spend their lives looking for Hogwarts, and claiming they've found it every time they unearth some evidence of a railway track.
Japan has suffered major damage and casualties and will take months to get back to any sense of normality but given the magnitude of the situation I think they're coping pretty well. I am certain in the aftermath that there will be massive scope for improvement, to mitigate future disasters through in building designs, emergency response, warning systems, to tsunami proof survival shelters, nuclear plants design etc.
Anyone claiming anything a site is Atlantis is either a crank or a sell out. Serious archaeologists do not make such bold proclamations unless they want to be skinned alive by their peers. And throwing in a hook about a tsunami seems like ghoulish self promotion in the current circumstances
They used to say the exact same thing about Troy, and then someone dug it up. Same with King Tut's tomb.
Serious archaeologists do not claim that a site doesn't exist just because it hasn't been found. Those are the crackpots who have an agenda to push; real scientists are Skeptics, not Disbelievers.
Rubbish. Proper archeology is driven by laboriously mapping & excavating sites, recovering fragments of pottery, writing, jewelry, carvings, writing, analysing firepit, bone & plant remains, taking soil samples, dendrochronological dating and everything else. It's tedious, backbreaking, uncomfortable and methodical work as likely to end in failure as success. And when all that is done, the conclusions made must be supported by the evidence you have gathered and published in a peer reviewed journal. If you're lucky you might find something spectacular and compelling, a lost city maybe or a dead king, but you had damned better have the evidence to support it. Which you will find in your cited examples they did.
In the absence of such evidence you cannot just proclaim Atlantis. That is the hallmark of pseudo archeology, of cranks and attention whores. People with a TV show or book to plug. The Erich von Danikens and Graham Hancocks of this world who engage in the worst kind of making shit up to sell books. And yes Atlantis is a staple of these cranks because it's a magnet to the New Age kooks who like these books.
It appears that TV shows do it too, shamefully even National Geographic. There's nothing like a bit of bait and switch to drum up ratings. Toss in the word Atlantis and tsunami to promote the show, front load with hyperbolic reimaginings of Atlantis with phony CGI and then string the viewer out for an hour before concluding it's just a sunken boat loaded with rocks, or a dumping ground for stone anchors, or some natural feature or some other mundane structure and there is zero evidence to support any other conclusion.
Anyone claiming anything a site is Atlantis is either a crank or a sell out. Serious archaeologists do not make such bold proclamations unless they want to be skinned alive by their peers. And throwing in a hook about a tsunami seems like ghoulish self promotion in the current circumstances
Not to mention they were nice enough to release an H.264 plugin for Firefox [slashdot.org] thus freeing Mozilla from any licensing issues. It supposedly only works native in Windows 7 since Win 7 comes with H.264 support built in, but since it is simply calling the WMP API if you have an H.264 DShow codec installed (personally I like Klite Mega on XP, Vista codec pack for Vista and 7 Codec pack for 7 along with 64 bit MP Classic) it should work just fine.
Firefox was free from any licensing issues ANYWAY. OS X, Windows and Linux all have multimedia frameworks. It would have been relatively straightforward for FF to utilise them for video media types it didn't handle natively.
Ah I get it, God is just being "mysterious". That's the usual cop out for these kinds of acts isn't it? When someone survives against the odds it's a "miracle" and when they don't it's merely "god's will". So God decides to snuff out a bunch of people or trash their livelihoods it's just part of some "greater plan". A plan which involves carnage, untold suffering, human misery, terror and pain. God really is a complete shit isn't He? Let's all bow down and give worship to our cruel, random, unprovable space tyrant.
Bitter much?
Don't want to believe in God, that's cool. Just don't crap all over something that millions of people happen to respect. I get the impression that you have a lot of hate for something you don't really understand. It also sounds like some who believe had tried to explain it to you and you have twisted that into more reason to hate. Clearly, you have made up your mind. Why spit venom on everyone else? Do you think you are going to change their mind?
Bitter? Nope. I merely find religiously motivated excuses for why bad things happen laughable and absurd.
Our lack of understanding is not equivalent to God's arbitrariness.
Also, some people see no difference between causing and permitting, when it is supposed to be the Omnipotent doing either the causing or the permitting.
Everywhere you could live in a real world is dangerous. Would you rather this Omnipotent God put you in an unreal world so you could try to experience life there?
Ah I get it, God is just being "mysterious". That's the usual cop out for these kinds of acts isn't it? When someone survives against the odds it's a "miracle" and when they don't it's merely "god's will". So God decides to snuff out a bunch of people or trash their livelihoods it's just part of some "greater plan". A plan which involves carnage, untold suffering, human misery, terror and pain. God really is a complete shit isn't He? Let's all bow down and give worship to our cruel, random, unprovable space tyrant.
You can bet the WBC and various other fundamentalist idiots will be all over this, blaming it as God's punishment for some supposed transgression. Why God would choose to choose to snuff out unconnected random people and some industrial / farm zones will of course not be adequately explained in any way.
Here's their train of thoughts: How dare some insignificant worm mock us fancy, bigshot corporate lawyers? That peasant should know his place! Something has to be done to show the cattle who's boss!
Of maybe bigshot lawyers are thinking, "yippee, here's a way to generate 10 billable hours!". The letter is quite obviously satirical. Even if the person were in the jurisdiction required, his "confession" would be laughed out of court.
Sorry, but really... Pray? How about actively supporting in a manner other than preaching to a non-existing man in the cloud.
It wouldn't do any good anyway as the Japanese have no souls.
Pray to the god who arbitrarily decided to cause this catastrophe? That makes a load of sense.
All I expect it to do is what happens with the taskbar in Windows 7 or the dock in OS X. You can launch any app you like and it will appear in the task bar / dock. If you wish to keep the icon in the task bar you pin it. Then if you logout and log back in the OS the pinned icons remain where you put them. That's the way I expect app tabs to work in a browser. An app tab is a glorified shortcut that a user has chosen to pin to their tabbar and wants to be there when they restart the app. The user may or may not want to open the other tabs depending on their privacy settings. In my case I don't want normal tabs to reopen and my privacy settings reflect that.