> if you can keep Chrome 6 alive — Windows users have reported frequent crashes, and Google has temporarily suspended the update progress to find out what is going on.
I've experienced Chrome crashes too - more frequently than IE or Firefox. And that's a big problem with Chrome: You can't turn off Automatic updates(*). You will find several hundred meg vanishing from your download quota. I guess the Google developers with their top-of-the-line hardware forget that us regular folks care about things like bandwidth, disk space (it leaves the downloaded files sitting on your hard drive - multiple versions) and quotas (because I don't want to go over my peak quota because some punk program won't take directions). It also jumps up and starts downloading and installing even if you're in the middle of something.
I'd rather schedule my own updates to fit my own schedule - I don't want some program stuffing up when I'm in the middle of something. Chrome has some nice features - it's fast and it doesn't waste the screen space or have the memory bloat that Firefox or IE do, but Chrome crashes a lot and in the end I figured Firefox was best because it at least gives you some control over your PC. Chrome doesn't.
* = Google do provide a way for Enterprise users to modify the groups policy because (as described in their faq) 'enterprises should be able to schedule their own updates'. But Joe Public doesn't get that luxury, and there's no checkbox to turn it up like every other software is decent enough to provide. BTW don't try the REGEDITS; they don't work. Google know about all this because there are many posts complaining about it (search for 'disable chrome automatic updates'), but in the usual corporate arrogance won't even acknowledge the problem: pesky customers! Google think they know what's best.
Now look at the Weasel words from Apple:
> The practice is not sanctioned by Apple either. An Apple spokeswoman said while she could not comment on company policy, “consumers could buy iPads directly from us” without any add-ons.
That first sentence I think was added since the article was posted. Note the spokesweasel won't "comment on company policy." LOLWOT? She only says you don't have to buy add-ons if you buy straight from Apple. She didn't deny that Apple was behind forcing retailers this. Plus JB is an authorised Apple reseller. If it weren't true you would think Apple would be ripping them a new one. I hope the ACCC gives Apple (and JB) a good bollocksing to get to the bottom of who was behind this.
McAfee are going in for the hardsell. At work our enterprise uses McAfee Anti-virus products. They've had add-ons to IE and Firefox for some time, but the latest automatic updates were ridiculous. They've added a McAfee toolbar WHICH TAKES UP AN ENTIRE LINE of screen space just to list a little red/green McAfee button. Firefox already lists McAfee as a "problematic extension" but doesn't mention the wasted space problem: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions
It doesn't affect Chrome. Ironically one of Chrome's selling points it makes maximum use of available screen space. McAfee now makes that even more true!
Rudd has to call an election soon, but what a choice it will be: Either Conservative-Christian Kevin Rudd or his opponent Conservative-Christian Tony Abbott. Abbott has refused to speak out against the net filter. Secretly, I would say he quite likes it and will go along with it.
> "I think that it makes sense to try to ensure that the homes of Australia aren't invaded with pornography via the internet," said Abbott. "On the other hand I don't want to see wider censorship and I don't want to see the internet destroyed as a tool for people's education or as a tool for people's businesses."
Talk about fence sitting.
> What it came down to was a question of whether it was technically feasible, according to Abbott. Yet he wasn't willing to air his thoughts on the matter. "I just don't know enough about it at this stage to have an opinion on that," he said. http://www.zdnet.com.au/abbott-drawn-into-filter-debate-339300089.htm
Who is really to blame in this is Microsoft. Some fool of a Microsoftie decided that, by default, whenever media (CDs, USBs) was inserted into a removable drive it should run AUTORUN on that drive. It can be disabled with TweakUI (link below) but you need to be a geek to think to do it and must do it on all your machines (and possibly all accounts on your machines) and if you forget, like I did, once, whamo! You're infected. A virus scanner can help, but they won't catch the latest viruses/horses (which is exactly why cybercrooks keep writing new ones) if you set them to scan all removable drives and you plug in your 1Gb USB HDD you will be in for a long wait. Like the massive security hole that ActiveX became, Microsoft has no foresight.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
No one ever said what Google was doing is illegal. They're too bright for that, and the law hasn't caught up with them. Two hundred years ago if you wanted a private conversation you went behind the barn. These days there are snooping and roving eyes, ears and message drops everywhere. The same law that says nothing about Google snooping at your Wifi, would throw the book at them if they tapped your cellular (GoogleConversation(TM)! Hear what people are saying on their phone! Now in Beta!) The difference there is the law has caught up.
BTW do you see a pattern in these mea culpas for those incidents?
Facebook: Everyone within the company understands our success is inextricably linked with people's trust in the company and the service we provide.
Google's Chief Engineer Akan Eustace: 'Maintaining people's trust is crucial to everything we do, and in this case we fell short.'
See? Try it, and if you're caught apologize (and don't get caught next time!;-)
Zuckenberg's strategy on privacy has long been to do something, see what the reaction is, then peddle backwards or forwards as appropriate. Then do it again. Creeping forward while they're not looking has worked brilliantly for Google. I hate the idea of their recording my search history and scanning my e-mail, but slowly I've learned (unwisely?) to trust them and so while those things bother me still, they don't bother me so much as they used to.
We shot the messenger when Scott McNeally said we had no privacy - get over it, but he knew what we didn't: Never stand between a corporation and a pot of money.
Anti-Streisand: They announce something I never even knew was there is going away, and now that I've heard about it I want it: Inverse-publicity is still publicity.
But Business-wise this is still smart, and Intel have done the same thing before: Get into a market proving to others it's there, then step back to your core competency. It's an arguably longer term strategy than Apple's, which is to own everything. Even if that's working well for the iPhone, I seem to remember a certain Macintosh computer whose market share dwindled under the same strategy.
Google as a company makes money by giving away information. In order to get that information, we selectively let them collect information on us. Our privacy has value to us, so we want to keep it private. But not trading information is against Google's very nature. They make money by disseminating information.
This is why Google can be so careless as they were with Buzz. You could see that lack of regard reflected in Jim Clark's (Google CIO) comments about Buzz. All that valuable private information won't make money so long as it's locked up. If your intimate details are revealed to the web, you might lose sleep over it but Google can only make money out of it.
This works so long as we trust Google, and mostly they've kept that trust. But in Buzz and with Doubleclick they're skirting close to the edge. They want to see how far they can push us, and that's proving a moving target. But even if they do push us too far, look at Yahoo! Even after the revelation they were ratting out their Chinese users to the Chinese government, many people continue to have a Yahoo email account anyway. The same applies to the recent leaking of Microsoft documents showing they will sell info on you to 'law enforcement' (for a fee), but most people still use Windows.
Don't trust Privacy Law to protect you. In many countries its a feel-good toothless tiger. Take Australia's. Here's a feel-good FAQ with a feel-good quiz, but what it doesn't mention is that if someone violates your privacy you have no legal recourse. The worst the Privacy Commissioner can do is issue a non-binding finding that has no financial, civil or criminal penalty.
Distributed computing was around for years. Someone decides to call it "Grid computing". Nope.. Not sexy enough. Someone calls it "Cloud" and it takes off.
According to this hottie (see link) black and brown are natural colors produced by pigments; usually red, oranges and yellows are the carotenoids which animals get from foods, and blues and greens (in birds) come from microstructure rather than actual color. (Obviously a green caterpillar gets the color from the diet. A bit different for animals, since I've never seen a green cow.)
She also says that horizontal gene transfer is very common, and that 90% of our DNA is viral. The viruses we hear about are the ones that make us sick. The ones that have no ill effects we don't notice so much; these are also called viruses or jumping genes.
BTW noticed someone modded my post as a 'Troll'. Come on Slashdot. You really need to crack down on people who mod down anyone they don't agree with. In this case the mod didn't even do rudimentary research.
It does this automatically. I kept noticing that shortcuts (to oft got places deep in my filesystem) I'd put on my desktop kept vanishing without warning. After some googling I found out it was a new "feature" of Windows 7. Where as XP used to tell you, Windows 7 assumes the user is too stupid to comprehend and blunders off to do it without so much as a warning.
Eventually I found there was an undocumented (and confusingly named) service I could disable to stop this from happening.
What would posses Microsoft's programmers to do this? Presumably the same thing that possesses them to delete system restores. Really, Microsoft is so made of fail.
The performance of the Intel Atom has been very disappointing. It's fit for a cellular phone, but nothing more. The same price point AMD Athlon 64 whips it ass. About time Intel got with it. In this day and age there's no excuse for such a weak chip.
Well, it was already dead. Although we loved PGP at the time because it was encryption when no one was allowed to have it, the product itself was very badly designed. The user interface was hostile (Trust? Invalid? Implicit? WTF?), and although they provided E-mail plugs for Eudora and Outlook they never supplied one for Mozilla/Thunderbird. You had to copy paste through the clipboard which was a huge pain.
Then there were compatability problems over RSA keys (dropped thanks to those ratbags Rivest, Shamir and Adleman) and the now-thankfully-dead IDEA (why didn't they choose an unencumbered algorithm?) so you couldn't guarantee someone sent PGP mail could actually read it. You couldn't even be sure you could look at your own e-mail with an older version.
Add all this together, and little wonder it tanked.
PGP never got with the times and gave us a nice fluid GUI. Instead their GUI mimiced the CLI. The McAfee / Network Associates take over made it worse; they made parts of payware (so suddenly PGPDisk you were using was no longer available unless you paid CASH) and stopped releasing the source. Phil (creator of PGP) complained they were neglecting it, but McAfee didn't care.
PGP with its confusing interface remained sadly stuck in the world of DOS. Sadly GNU PgP (GPG) copied the same cryptic command line interface, so never improved. There are plug-ins for Thunderbird now, but they're not smoothly integrated and the horse has long bolted.
My friends and I who were all PGP mad gave up and now exchange e-mail plaintext via Gmail. As Scott McNeally said, "You have no privacy. Get over it." He was wrong, but I guess we did.
Whoa Slashdot! Why are you running stories like this? Do you want to get this site *BANNED* in Australia? Better tone it down. I suggest the only Aussie news you consider running are positive stories about the Rudd Government:
Submitted this next story to Firehose but it never ran:
"Stephen Conroy's Internet Filter has received an unexpected boost from the Australian Opposition. Instead of voting down the Filter in the Senate, the Opposition Party Leader Tony Abbot refused to articulate a definitive position on the Filter saying he would "await the final legislation and seek technical assurances from the government on the operations of the filter". Both Tony Abbot and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy who is implementing the Filter have affirmed their strong Christian faith, overwhelming anti-censorship moderates. This raises the question for those opposed to the filter: How can a Democracy work if the only two viable parties both offer the same thing? http://www.smh.com.au/technology/web-filter-splits-opposition-20100406-rpf7.html
All that would do is give Disney and large corporations copyright in perpetuity. That is, forever. They would love this even more.
Compare that to an artist who can't afford the filing fees, or simply forgets, or a photographer who isn't going to file extension applications for 10,000 photos. They lose. Disney wins.
Corporations are Supercitizens. They live forever. People don't. People have moral and civic obligations. Corporations can instead argue they're "looking after their shareholders." Copyright laws need to be adjusted to recognise that supercitizens don't deserve copyright above and beyond that of normal citizens.
Troll my ass. It's a completely legitimate take. This is why Slashdot should bump moderators who can't tell the difference between a troll and an alternate point of view.
> Dutch IT consultant Hans Schoenmakers, 49, proudly declared himself the first person from the Netherlands to own the shiny gadget: "It's better than I thought. I will use it for email while on the couch -- and Internet and reading books."
Ok. Let's go to work:
> "It's better than I thought. By buying this, I feel affirmation as an Apple consumer. I will use it for email while on the couch - though I shall spurn any application - communictaions or otherwise - offered by third-party developers like Google unless they have the blessing of Cupertino -- and Internet -- something I could never before -- and reading books -- approved by Cupertino - purchased at an approved iStore with all the necessary DRM. Truth is, I'm lousy at choice so I appreciate Cupertino doing all the hard work for me."
Thanks. Due to Time Zones and all it nearly got me!
But yeah: I wonder if NoSQL's success isn't due to people who think SQL is too hard to learn, much like Extreme Programming's success is due to people who want to code but not do the boring test and documentation part.
Slashdot Mirror
So Google's WiFi snooping and logging was a perfectly-understandable inadvertent accident *and* was done by a rogue programmer. Get your story straight, Google! http://www.techeye.net/internet/google-blames-engineer-for-street-view-snooping
> if you can keep Chrome 6 alive — Windows users have reported frequent crashes, and Google has temporarily suspended the update progress to find out what is going on.
I've experienced Chrome crashes too - more frequently than IE or Firefox. And that's a big problem with Chrome: You can't turn off Automatic updates(*). You will find several hundred meg vanishing from your download quota. I guess the Google developers with their top-of-the-line hardware forget that us regular folks care about things like bandwidth, disk space (it leaves the downloaded files sitting on your hard drive - multiple versions) and quotas (because I don't want to go over my peak quota because some punk program won't take directions). It also jumps up and starts downloading and installing even if you're in the middle of something.
I'd rather schedule my own updates to fit my own schedule - I don't want some program stuffing up when I'm in the middle of something. Chrome has some nice features - it's fast and it doesn't waste the screen space or have the memory bloat that Firefox or IE do, but Chrome crashes a lot and in the end I figured Firefox was best because it at least gives you some control over your PC. Chrome doesn't.
* = Google do provide a way for Enterprise users to modify the groups policy because (as described in their faq) 'enterprises should be able to schedule their own updates'. But Joe Public doesn't get that luxury, and there's no checkbox to turn it up like every other software is decent enough to provide. BTW don't try the REGEDITS; they don't work. Google know about all this because there are many posts complaining about it (search for 'disable chrome automatic updates'), but in the usual corporate arrogance won't even acknowledge the problem: pesky customers! Google think they know what's best.
http://www.google.com/search?q=disable+chrome+automatic+updates
Posters are ripping into JB Hi-Fi, but they have a very good reputation in Australia. They're #1 on the corporate reputation score:
http://bigpondnews.com/articles/Finance/2010/05/04/JB_Hi-Fi_has_best_reputation_in_country_458400.html
Now look at the Weasel words from Apple:
> The practice is not sanctioned by Apple either. An Apple spokeswoman said while she could not comment on company policy, “consumers could buy iPads directly from us” without any add-ons.
That first sentence I think was added since the article was posted. Note the spokesweasel won't "comment on company policy." LOLWOT? She only says you don't have to buy add-ons if you buy straight from Apple. She didn't deny that Apple was behind forcing retailers this. Plus JB is an authorised Apple reseller. If it weren't true you would think Apple would be ripping them a new one. I hope the ACCC gives Apple (and JB) a good bollocksing to get to the bottom of who was behind this.
McAfee are going in for the hardsell. At work our enterprise uses McAfee Anti-virus products. They've had add-ons to IE and Firefox for some time, but the latest automatic updates were ridiculous. They've added a McAfee toolbar WHICH TAKES UP AN ENTIRE LINE of screen space just to list a little red/green McAfee button. Firefox already lists McAfee as a "problematic extension" but doesn't mention the wasted space problem: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions
It doesn't affect Chrome. Ironically one of Chrome's selling points it makes maximum use of available screen space. McAfee now makes that even more true!
Rudd has to call an election soon, but what a choice it will be: Either Conservative-Christian Kevin Rudd or his opponent Conservative-Christian Tony Abbott. Abbott has refused to speak out against the net filter. Secretly, I would say he quite likes it and will go along with it.
> "I think that it makes sense to try to ensure that the homes of Australia aren't invaded with pornography via the internet," said Abbott. "On the other hand I don't want to see wider censorship and I don't want to see the internet destroyed as a tool for people's education or as a tool for people's businesses." Talk about fence sitting.
> What it came down to was a question of whether it was technically feasible, according to Abbott. Yet he wasn't willing to air his thoughts on the matter. "I just don't know enough about it at this stage to have an opinion on that," he said.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/abbott-drawn-into-filter-debate-339300089.htm
Given his conservative position on everything else he ever talks about, I'd say he *does* have an opinion on it... but he wants to cash in on the Rudd protest vote. At the end of the day we get to choose between two political parties... near identical... both headed by conservatives who like the idea of a net filter to stop the unwashed masses looking at boobs and bottoms, and to get them back into church. Pic related:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2010/03/31/tony-abbott-and-political-catholicism/
http://www.abc.net.au/compass/s1362997.htm
http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=19151
Think twice, New Zealand. If the aliens start beaming you back porn, then Australia will have to filter your radio telescopes.
Who is really to blame in this is Microsoft. Some fool of a Microsoftie decided that, by default, whenever media (CDs, USBs) was inserted into a removable drive it should run AUTORUN on that drive. It can be disabled with TweakUI (link below) but you need to be a geek to think to do it and must do it on all your machines (and possibly all accounts on your machines) and if you forget, like I did, once, whamo! You're infected. A virus scanner can help, but they won't catch the latest viruses/horses (which is exactly why cybercrooks keep writing new ones) if you set them to scan all removable drives and you plug in your 1Gb USB HDD you will be in for a long wait. Like the massive security hole that ActiveX became, Microsoft has no foresight. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
No one ever said what Google was doing is illegal. They're too bright for that, and the law hasn't caught up with them. Two hundred years ago if you wanted a private conversation you went behind the barn. These days there are snooping and roving eyes, ears and message drops everywhere. The same law that says nothing about Google snooping at your Wifi, would throw the book at them if they tapped your cellular (GoogleConversation(TM)! Hear what people are saying on their phone! Now in Beta!) The difference there is the law has caught up.
BTW do you see a pattern in these mea culpas for those incidents?
Facebook: Everyone within the company understands our success is inextricably linked with people's trust in the company and the service we provide.
Google's Chief Engineer Akan Eustace: 'Maintaining people's trust is crucial to everything we do, and in this case we fell short.'
See? Try it, and if you're caught apologize (and don't get caught next time! ;-)
Zuckenberg's strategy on privacy has long been to do something, see what the reaction is, then peddle backwards or forwards as appropriate. Then do it again. Creeping forward while they're not looking has worked brilliantly for Google. I hate the idea of their recording my search history and scanning my e-mail, but slowly I've learned (unwisely?) to trust them and so while those things bother me still, they don't bother me so much as they used to.
Look at Google's recent scanning of Wireless networks from the Streetview cars. Supposedly this was an accident. Oh LOL. But if they do it again in a few years maybe by then people won't mind. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/13/2898947.htm?section=business In most countries we even accept Google peeping over our fences, literally! When this news broke I remember some people (who presumably weren't employed by Google) vigorously defending Google's rights to do this: the public screaming for less privacy. http://www.smh.com.au/technology/biz-tech/google-to-reshoot-japanese-street-view-images-20090615-c9f1.html
We shot the messenger when Scott McNeally said we had no privacy - get over it, but he knew what we didn't: Never stand between a corporation and a pot of money.
Anti-Streisand: They announce something I never even knew was there is going away, and now that I've heard about it I want it: Inverse-publicity is still publicity.
But Business-wise this is still smart, and Intel have done the same thing before: Get into a market proving to others it's there, then step back to your core competency. It's an arguably longer term strategy than Apple's, which is to own everything. Even if that's working well for the iPhone, I seem to remember a certain Macintosh computer whose market share dwindled under the same strategy.
Google as a company makes money by giving away information. In order to get that information, we selectively let them collect information on us. Our privacy has value to us, so we want to keep it private. But not trading information is against Google's very nature. They make money by disseminating information.
This is why Google can be so careless as they were with Buzz. You could see that lack of regard reflected in Jim Clark's (Google CIO) comments about Buzz. All that valuable private information won't make money so long as it's locked up. If your intimate details are revealed to the web, you might lose sleep over it but Google can only make money out of it.
This works so long as we trust Google, and mostly they've kept that trust. But in Buzz and with Doubleclick they're skirting close to the edge. They want to see how far they can push us, and that's proving a moving target. But even if they do push us too far, look at Yahoo! Even after the revelation they were ratting out their Chinese users to the Chinese government, many people continue to have a Yahoo email account anyway. The same applies to the recent leaking of Microsoft documents showing they will sell info on you to 'law enforcement' (for a fee), but most people still use Windows.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/technology/07yahoo.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10459676-38.html
Don't trust Privacy Law to protect you. In many countries its a feel-good toothless tiger. Take Australia's. Here's a feel-good FAQ with a feel-good quiz, but what it doesn't mention is that if someone violates your privacy you have no legal recourse. The worst the Privacy Commissioner can do is issue a non-binding finding that has no financial, civil or criminal penalty.
http://www.privacy.gov.au/faq/individuals
Distributed computing was around for years. Someone decides to call it "Grid computing". Nope.. Not sexy enough. Someone calls it "Cloud" and it takes off.
Winning definition from Stackoverflow was:
"Cloud Computing. n. Yet another buzzword for services on the internet to trigger silicon valley VC's 'NextBigThing(R)' reflex, thus attracting some money which otherwise be spent on a new yacht."
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1349894/difference-between-cloud-computing-and-distributed-computing
clouddot?
hmmm.....
According to this hottie (see link) black and brown are natural colors produced by pigments; usually red, oranges and yellows are the carotenoids which animals get from foods, and blues and greens (in birds) come from microstructure rather than actual color. (Obviously a green caterpillar gets the color from the diet. A bit different for animals, since I've never seen a green cow.)
http://www.learnoutloud.com/Catalog/Science/Biology/Basics-of-Genetics/31316
She also says that horizontal gene transfer is very common, and that 90% of our DNA is viral. The viruses we hear about are the ones that make us sick. The ones that have no ill effects we don't notice so much; these are also called viruses or jumping genes.
http://wheatoncollege.edu/quarterly/q2003fall/bacteria.html
Links:
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2010/03/stop-windows-7-from-deleting-your-desktop-shortcuts/
http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/9570-some-desktop-shortcuts-disappeared.html
http://www.ghacks.net/2010/03/30/fix-windows-7-desktop-shortcuts-disappearing/
BTW noticed someone modded my post as a 'Troll'. Come on Slashdot. You really need to crack down on people who mod down anyone they don't agree with. In this case the mod didn't even do rudimentary research.
It does this automatically. I kept noticing that shortcuts (to oft got places deep in my filesystem) I'd put on my desktop kept vanishing without warning. After some googling I found out it was a new "feature" of Windows 7. Where as XP used to tell you, Windows 7 assumes the user is too stupid to comprehend and blunders off to do it without so much as a warning.
Eventually I found there was an undocumented (and confusingly named) service I could disable to stop this from happening.
What would posses Microsoft's programmers to do this? Presumably the same thing that possesses them to delete system restores. Really, Microsoft is so made of fail.
The performance of the Intel Atom has been very disappointing. It's fit for a cellular phone, but nothing more. The same price point AMD Athlon 64 whips it ass. About time Intel got with it. In this day and age there's no excuse for such a weak chip.
Excellent! NASA can gets new corporate sponsors as Marlboro redefines itself as the 'Red cigarette on the Red Planet' and a generation of School Kids can be charmed by Joe Camel's new adventures on mars. http://scifi.about.com/b/2010/01/04/avatar-is-smoking-in-more-ways-than-one.htm
No one else is using it and that is the point
Once a comms product drops below critical mass it's dead.
PGP got taken over by McAfee / Network Associates years ago. Look here: http://www.openpgp.org/members/nai.shtml
They took it over and killed it.
Well, it was already dead. Although we loved PGP at the time because it was encryption when no one was allowed to have it, the product itself was very badly designed. The user interface was hostile (Trust? Invalid? Implicit? WTF?), and although they provided E-mail plugs for Eudora and Outlook they never supplied one for Mozilla/Thunderbird. You had to copy paste through the clipboard which was a huge pain.
Then there were compatability problems over RSA keys (dropped thanks to those ratbags Rivest, Shamir and Adleman) and the now-thankfully-dead IDEA (why didn't they choose an unencumbered algorithm?) so you couldn't guarantee someone sent PGP mail could actually read it. You couldn't even be sure you could look at your own e-mail with an older version.
Add all this together, and little wonder it tanked.
PGP never got with the times and gave us a nice fluid GUI. Instead their GUI mimiced the CLI. The McAfee / Network Associates take over made it worse; they made parts of payware (so suddenly PGPDisk you were using was no longer available unless you paid CASH) and stopped releasing the source. Phil (creator of PGP) complained they were neglecting it, but McAfee didn't care.
PGP with its confusing interface remained sadly stuck in the world of DOS. Sadly GNU PgP (GPG) copied the same cryptic command line interface, so never improved. There are plug-ins for Thunderbird now, but they're not smoothly integrated and the horse has long bolted.
My friends and I who were all PGP mad gave up and now exchange e-mail plaintext via Gmail. As Scott McNeally said, "You have no privacy. Get over it." He was wrong, but I guess we did.
My favourite line from an excellent old physics book called "From the Black Hole to the Infinite Universe".
"Yes, there are aliens but they don't want to talk to us. Have you tried communicating with ants lately?"
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Hole-Infinite-Universe/dp/0816233233
> They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today.
Damned brilliant article. Scary when you laugh at the funny man in the picture and then you realize it's you.
(LOL. I can't wait to update my Facebook about this!)
Whoa Slashdot! Why are you running stories like this? Do you want to get this site *BANNED* in Australia? Better tone it down. I suggest the only Aussie news you consider running are positive stories about the Rudd Government:
Like the one how Conroy gave a plum job for the Governent's Broadband network to Mike Kaiser, a Labor Party stooge who was previously convicted of electoral fraud. A $450K a year job without an interview for a guy who knows nothing about IT or comms and who should be sitting in a prison.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/politics/i-recommended-mike-kaiser-for-nbn-job-says-stephen-conroy/story-e6frgczf-1225827983520
Submitted this next story to Firehose but it never ran:
"Stephen Conroy's Internet Filter has received an unexpected boost from the Australian Opposition. Instead of voting down the Filter in the Senate, the Opposition Party Leader Tony Abbot refused to articulate a definitive position on the Filter saying he would "await the final legislation and seek technical assurances from the government on the operations of the filter". Both Tony Abbot and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy who is implementing the Filter have affirmed their strong Christian faith, overwhelming anti-censorship moderates. This raises the question for those opposed to the filter: How can a Democracy work if the only two viable parties both offer the same thing?
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/web-filter-splits-opposition-20100406-rpf7.html
At least Conroy recently got a taste of his own medicine when Trend Micro's parliamentary web filter blocked politicians from accessing news commentary and train timetables."
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/parliamentary-services-to-probe-trend-micro-filter/story-e6frgakx-1225850540731
All that would do is give Disney and large corporations copyright in perpetuity. That is, forever. They would love this even more. Compare that to an artist who can't afford the filing fees, or simply forgets, or a photographer who isn't going to file extension applications for 10,000 photos. They lose. Disney wins. Corporations are Supercitizens. They live forever. People don't. People have moral and civic obligations. Corporations can instead argue they're "looking after their shareholders." Copyright laws need to be adjusted to recognise that supercitizens don't deserve copyright above and beyond that of normal citizens.
Troll my ass. It's a completely legitimate take. This is why Slashdot should bump moderators who can't tell the difference between a troll and an alternate point of view.
> Dutch IT consultant Hans Schoenmakers, 49, proudly declared himself the first person from the Netherlands to own the shiny gadget: "It's better than I thought. I will use it for email while on the couch -- and Internet and reading books."
Ok. Let's go to work:
> "It's better than I thought. By buying this, I feel affirmation as an Apple consumer. I will use it for email while on the couch - though I shall spurn any application - communictaions or otherwise - offered by third-party developers like Google unless they have the blessing of Cupertino -- and Internet -- something I could never before -- and reading books -- approved by Cupertino - purchased at an approved iStore with all the necessary DRM. Truth is, I'm lousy at choice so I appreciate Cupertino doing all the hard work for me."
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/apples-ipad-hits-the-market-20100404-rl3x.html
> This is another 1st April joke.
Thanks. Due to Time Zones and all it nearly got me!
But yeah: I wonder if NoSQL's success isn't due to people who think SQL is too hard to learn, much like Extreme Programming's success is due to people who want to code but not do the boring test and documentation part.