I keep hearing this, but what do you plan on replacing traditional news with? You may not have noticed, but all the bloggers and sites like Slashdot or Reddit? They're all aggregators. They don't investigate news in any traditional sense. They troll around newspaper and news sites and read stuff. If they're a full on aggregator like/. then they just post links to the stuff they read (or that people submitted to them). If they're a blogger then they write an opinion piece and share the info out. When a liberal or conservative blogger "breaks a story" it just means that they read it in some local newspaper. They were the first nationally read source to break the story, but mostly they didn't actually create it. With a very, very small number of exceptions (usually where some source calls a blogger and gives them info), these guys don't produce news. They consume it and regurgitate it at you (Which sounds really gross, I didn't necessarily mean that in a bad way).
If traditional news sources disappear, there will be no revolution where "new media" wanks will take over and do thing better and more accurately. They will have nothing to comment on. There will be no news for them to "break". Real investigative news requires a staff and a budget. You can't fly to Afghanistan to report on the ongoing war effort using the money you got from Google ad-sense this month. You can't run a month long investigate effort into discovering that the local government is embezzling the city retirement fund when you have to produce a new blog entry twice a day to pay the bandwidth bill.
Apple is no longer making their own Java implementation. Oracle will have to do the work. This is not scary or evil. Java on the Mac will now work like Java on almost every other platform. You'll go get the JVM/JDK from the Sun-Oracle website and a background updater will inform you of your daily "ZOMG, we found another critical security bug" update. Whether Oracle asked Apple to do this, Apple did it on their own because of concerns about Oracle's recent litigious streak, they did it to screw Oracle, or they just didn't feel like maintaining their own JVM anymore is pretty much an open question; but there will still be Java on Macs.
Or they looked at the Android lawsuit and said "Hmm, I don't *think* we're breaking any laws, but why take chances?" Oracle is playing a different game with Java than Sun did and personally I'd want to stay out of it as much as possible. There's lots of reasons they may have done this and with ~8 months notice Oracle has plenty of time to build their own JVM.
More to the point it's asking for trouble. "Gosh, I wonder what's in this giant encrypted blob on this guys hard drive?" Just zip all your porn into a file, and rename it to something innocuous and approximately appropriate in size. Anything over about 600 MB you could probably just rename "RedHatLinux.iso" or something. You think they're doing deep inspections of every lap top that comes in through customs? They probably do a search for some subsection of the normal graphic and video file extensions then browse the thumbnails for anything that looks wrong. Anything more than that would slow down the inspections to crawl.
You're not dealing with an MIT forensics teams here, these guy have been taught a very simplistic procedure and will follow it to the letter. Most likely they don't even *care* if you have porn, they just have to check every 5th laptop to keep the boss happy.
Bad analogy: That's not baseless [linuxtoday.com]. In addition, there's already DRM in the standard Linux kernel [freedesktop.org]
It's baseless because I didn't know about it and made it up off the top of my head. A broken clock being right twice a day doesn't make it fixed:-).
Not exactly. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and later is already capable of checking the signature of an executable to know whether elevated privileges granted to an old version of an app should propagate to the new version of the same app. (See Code Signing Guide [apple.com].) Currently, it works on a key continuity management basis: privileges from one version of an app propagate to another version if and only if they are signed with the same key. But this infrastructure could easily implement a policy to deny execution if the CA chain doesn't go up to Apple.
Except that kind of scheme only works if the developers "opt in". The OS provides the APIs to do this, but you have to use them. I suppose it might be possible to set up the libraries so that they require you use these APIs, but there's tons of issues with existing software not working, questions about using the systems in a disconnected mode, blah blah blah.
It would also be relatively easy to work around as root. Taking away root would create all kind of administrative headaches. I don't see how they could do it without a major rewrite. It took them years to make the transition from Classic to OSX because all the legacy software had to be rewritten. Classic compatibility mode remained part of the OS till what, Panther? Tiger? They're not going to put themselves through that again for the modicum of extra control and profits an "app store only" model will bring.
Then what would you buy instead? I'm a fan of small form factor; what make and model of PC running Windows or Linux do you recommend to replace a Mac mini?
I don't know. I'm not in the market for a new computer (Mac or otherwise) right now. I know Dell and HP both make small form factor systems, though they aren't as sexy as the Mini. I really don't see this happening, so I'm not really bothered to worry about it. At a minimum it's another OS revision away, which means 2-3 years... I'll worry about it then if the problem actually exists.
No, because a comment can have a "Score: #, Underrated" It's a mod like anything else. You would have to have more Troll mods than any other mod type, but still have been rated up to 5. Which means you'd have to spread the upmods all over the possible choices.
I think Linus will include DRM in the next kernel. See. I can make completely baseless and off the wall accusations too. I also think Richard Stallman secretly works for Microsoft and had been paid for the last 30 years to act as a buffoonish fake "competitor" so that Microsoft looks sane in comparison. Hey, this is fun.
In the highly unlikely even that you are correct (they would literally have to rewrite OSX from the ground up to make it into the kind of locked sown system you're talking about) then I won't buy it. Problem solved. I know that i won't be the only one. They would gut their market. It won't happen. If (big if) it did. Again no problem. I'll buy a Windows box or a Linux box.
Ah. Looks like it was from Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations (at any rate that what comes up when I Google the terms, I didn't reread the whole thing to verify). A more amusing book, but less instructive in general.
Hmm... coulda sworn that was from Lies. Now I'll have to figure out where it came from. Anyway, the point remains valid, it's a common tactic on both sides. I was trying to be pretty even handed in my post, but I have my biases too. I have personally watched Glenn Beck do this twice (which encompasses nearly every time I've watched Glenn Beck).
You can actually get +5 Troll, but it would require some really weird mods.
Post with a Karma bonus score: 2 Mod Troll score: 1, Troll Mod Troll score: 0, Troll Mod Troll score: -1, Troll
Suddenly people realize that you are being oppressed
Mod Interesting score: 0, Troll (it uses whatever you have the most mods for) Mod Informative score: 1, Troll Mod Underrated score 2, Troll Mod Insightful score 3, Troll Mod Informative score 4, Troll Mod Interesting score 5, Troll (Your total mod counts are Troll: 3, Informative: 2, Interesting: 2, Insightful: 1, Underrated: 1)
As an aside, everyone, liberal or conservative, should read Al Franken's Lies, and the Lying Liars that Tell Them. Before you scream, yes he's a flaming liberal demagogue, yes he's as bad in his own way as Limbaugh or Beck, and yes he's probably guilty of the things he accuses other of in this book. I understand that, and I'm not asking you to agree with his point of view. What's interesting in the book is the tactics he points out. They're tactics used by both sides in the culture war, so whether you're a liberal or a conservative you've probably been a victim of them, but right now they're especially associated with conservative talking heads like Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity.
One of the most popular of these techniques is the one I'm responding to above. Whether the poster is actually engaging in the tactic or simply parroting something he heard or read I don't know, but it's very common. You take a story about something perfectly reasonable or maybe a little crazy, but not serious (like the one above, where the ACLU probably was a little out of line, but not nearly as seriously as it sounds like from the post), and leave out context and details so it sounds much worse than it is. Then you scream about the horrible things that [liberals:conservatives] are doing this week and use the story as an example.
The classic for this (and one of the ones Franken uses in the book) was a story that Rush Limbaugh broke about a teacher in California being forced to take down a poster of the Declaration of Independence because some fringe left wing group thought it violated the separation of church and state (might have even been the ACLU, I don't remember). Rush wailed and gnashed his teeth for most of an episode on this incident, and on the face the face of it it seems like liberalism run amok. Hell I'm a Pagan, and a strong supporter of the separation wall; and even I think this story (as told) is a travesty against American Civics.
As it happens it's only vaguely true. A teacher in California was forced to remove a poster containing lines from the Declaration of Independence from his wall by some separation organization or other. It wasn't simply the text of the Declaration though. It was a poster attempting to prove that the United States is a "Christian Nation" by cherry picking quotes from a number of documents throughout American history, including the Declaration. Rush didn't lie, he just left out a lot of important details.
They were trying to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions to save the life of the mother, if the hospitals accept federal money in the form of medicaid and medicare. Which is quite a bit more limited in scope then your claim. Personally I think that particular little stunt was more of a "solution searching for a problem" situation since most Catholic Hospitals *will* perform abortions when it's clear that the life of the mother is in severe danger from the pregnancy, but assuming there was a Catholic Hospital that was willing to let a woman die rather than perform an abortion, I could see how that might threaten their right to federal money.
You see how context matters? In your post it seems like the ACLU is trying to force all Catholic Hospitals to perform any and all abortions, or risk being shut down and (I supposed) their staff being arrested. In actual fact, they wanted to clarify that Catholic Hospitals should do what most of them do already, and that if they don't they lose access to some federal funds. Most of the articles I skimmed it seemed that the Catholic Hospitals were more annoyed that they were being misrepresented as not doing this already, than they were worried about being force into anything.
So yeah, this does seem like a bit of pointless grand standing about a non-issue on the ACLU's part, but it hardly seems like forcing a professional to perform an action against their own ethics.
The problem, as I point out, is that the Internet is not just a method for people to make one-one connections with their friends, and IP addresses are a lot harder to memorize than phone numbers. IPv6 is on the horizon. Are you seriously advocating a system that would require me to memorize a 32 digit hexadecimal address everytime I see a site I might want to look at later?
Not to mention pain of coding for such a thing. Every address you code into a network enabled piece of software would have to be hard coded, you could never rely on the remote computer (the one using your software) to have the addresses you want to use in their hosts file. Oh, wait, you want to change ISPs? New address space. Every network aware piece of software will have to be audited to see what hard coded addresses need to change.
And then there's the problem of the hosts files themselves. Flat text files aren't exactly well designed for rapid searching. They scale well enough to hundreds, probably even thousands, of addresses, but if I start indexing every single site I visit I'd be willing to be my hosts file would reach tens or even hundreds of thousands of entries. My hosts file would also betray me. I read "XKCD" every other day. So I put "XKCD.com" in my hosts file. Randall gets a new hosting service. XKCD moves. Now I have no idea where it is and when I try to use my hosts entry I get a "connection refused". I either have to contact Randall personally (Which may be impossible if his e-mail server also moved) or I can't read XKCD any more.
There's a reason DNS was invented. People began to realize that at a few thousand machines the Internet was far to large to document manually. It's currently at a few *billion* machines. The old method has not suddenly become massively more scalable.
As sibling says "Citation needed". The ACLU defended Rush Limbaugh. They've defended both the KKK *and* the Anti-Defamation league. Show me an instance of them turning down a legitimate freedom of expression case. You've been told that they only defend lunatic left wing causes, but so far as I've ever seen it's simply not true. A lot of their cases defend people with extremely liberal views, but that's mostly because right now the country itself, on the whole, is rather conservative. Most of the people asking the ACLU for help are left leaning, because they are most likely to both a) trust the ACLU and b) have need of the ACLU.
That's an interesting take on Net Neutrality I've never seen before. Are you planning to replace it with something? Or just make everyone remember every IP address they want to visit? That should be especially entertaining when IPV6 eventually gets implemented. I can just see the billboards now "Eat at Joes! And visit our website at: 2001:db8:1f70::999:de8:7648:6e80/index.html!" (IP address stolen from example in Wikipedia entry on IPv6. I have no idea where, if anywhere it goes)
I often find it ironic how conservative talking heads bash the ACLU as defending "commies and left wing nuts", but when *they* want free expression they're happy to get the ACLU involved to help. The ACLU is a one issue group. They think you have a right to say... whatever stupid, crazy, brilliant, inspired, idiotic, hateful, useful, useless, or wonderful thing you want to say. Period. No matter where you fall on the political spectrum. I can respect that.
How so? So far as I can see, assuming you ignore the openness of the code, OSX offers more "choices" than Windows all things being equal. AppleScript, a fully functional Unix terminal app, a free SDK and compiler (not preinstalled, granted, but it's on the DVD that comes in the box), all the normal Unix scripting tools, Windows doesn't have any of that by default. I admit to loving that Windows 7 has PowerShell built in, and that's *huge* step forward, but it still has nothing on a Unix terminal.
I never said otherwise. I hesitate to think I have to provide citations for a guess. The point is that lots of OSX *is* open source which is a damn site more than Windows can say. As a relative thing, OSX is much more open than Windows. The core of the OS is OSS, and many of the user space tool are. I wouldn't bitch if Apple opened the rest, but it is undeniably true that comparatively speaking it's already "better".
I never quite got why so many people are allergic to command lines.
I love command lines, which is why I love the OSX terminal. Two sentences on from the line you quote I mention that as an advantage. It's great that I can script stuff in Bash and Perl when the GUI tools seem too limited. Note that in most (nearly all) cases though, when I open the terminal to do something, I *could* have done it in the GUI. It was just quicker or more elegant to use the CLI. That's critical because most people wouldn't know how to do it in the CLI.
The one instance I've *ever* encountered on a Mac (sibling mentions another, but I've not encountered that particular issue) where I absolutely *had* to use the CLI was manually upgrading the virus definition file in McAfee for Mac. This situation was incredibly edge case. The system was Classified so it couldn't be connected to the Internet, but also needed up to date virus definitions (Yay for pointless regulation, completely isolated systems get viruses all the time amirite?). I had to use the command line to change the McAfee config file from binary to XML, edit the line that pointed at the current definitions files, then change it back to binary and restart the scanner. Not something a "normal" user is *ever* likely to have to do. Also this was a third party software issue, not an actual "Mac" issue.
Linux systems today are also auto-configuring to such a large extent I seldom have to configure anything at all. I still remember when I had to manually generate the X11 configuration. Today X11 automatically detects everything on startup, from your keyboard, to your graphics card, to your monitor. It also manages to do this with a much wider spectrum of hardware then the small sample MacOS X needs to deal with.
Hardly ever is not never. Don't get me wrong, GUI tools and automatic systems on Linux have come a *long* way. It remains the case though that they still fail in a non-trivial number of instances. Just a week or two ago I discovered that you have to manually edit xorg.conf to get dual Display Port monitors working, at least in Red Hat. They do work fine, which is awful nice (and a huge improvement in itself, I still remember when every hardware purchase had to vetted against what worked, what didn't work, and what might work with tweaking), but not without some manual tweaks.
The other problem with Linux admin tools is that they tend to be written as what they are: front ends to a CLI interface. Open the network tool on a Mac and a Linux box. They do mostly the same things, but the Mac tool talks in terms of what the user wants to do. It gives you obvious interface names like "Wireless", "Bluetooth", and "Firewire" (assuming your Mac is oldish like mine). The Linux tools talks in terms that make sense to someone who usually does this stuff on the command line. Interfaces are listed by eth number and you have to know whether eth0 is your wireless card or your wired card. Now if you look at the command line, Mac interfaces look just like Linux interfaces (cme# instead of eth#, but whatever), and ifconfig works the same way, but for the "normal" users the Mac GUI is designed better.
Oh FFS leave the antenna alone already. First, it seems the problems is hardly limited to iPhones, other phones demonstrate the same problems, they just don't have to hype and hate built up to make seem like such an issue. Second, there was a relatively straightforward fix within a week or two. Third, point me at a company that hasn't released a product with an engineering flaw. The devices were tested with cases on them, because they didn't them being leaked (lot of good that did). Was it a mistake? Of course. Was it an understandable mistake? Yes. It happens. Apple's initial reaction could have been handled better, but in the end it there was a reasonably painless resolution and they won't make the same mistake again.
No one is saying Apple is perfect. All they're saying is that Apple tends to fit engineering to the design rather than vice versa. It's bit them before (I think is was called the X-cube? Back about 8-9 years ago used to crack at all its joints?) it'll bite them again. It's generally been successful though, and I'd venture a guess that they've had no more engineering disasters than any other major tech manufacturer.
If anything OSX is more open than Windows; the guts are open source (Darwin). It's just higher levels that are closed. On top of that Apple uses and contributes to a number of F/OSS projects to provide things like printing (CUPS), remote file system access (SAMBA), remote shell access (OpenSSH) and lots of others. I'd venture to say that more than 50% of of OSX is F/OSS code and Apple has generally been quite good about working with the projects they use. Apparently there's been some friction with the FSF a few times, but given that Stallman and Jobs are like oil and water...
Say what you want about the closed nature of the iDevices (and personally I like my iPhone, but think the iPad might be to limited ), but the Mac itself is way more open than Windows. It also represents, as another poster pointed out, what I've always really wanted. A reliable, Unix based, workstation with a good user interface, decent library of available commercial software, and capability to use pretty much all the F/OSS stuff I need.
If you want to see what Linux on the Desktop should look like, look no further than OSX. Not the design per se, though I like it well enough, but the way the OS works from a user point of view. In OSX you have a consumer OS. You never, ever have to go to the command line. You do anything you need to configure the computer in any way you need from simple easy to understand GUI tools. You can run all your software without hiccups, dependency issues, or driver headaches. BUT if you want to, and you know how to, you can quickly and easily open a command prompt, use the all the standard Unix tools, script to your heart's content, even install a Linux style package manager and use all the tools available to any of the free *nixes.
I don't know how much this will matter unless there's a compelling reason to buy the Linux version. Windows has the software library, the name recognition, and the comfort factor of using what you're used to going for it. Apple has the smaller but still extensive software library, the name recognition, and the (created by advertising perhaps, but there none-the-less) reputation for service, premium hardware, and stability going for it. What would this new "Diamond Computer" have to make it the choice?
There's little name recognition for Linux. It wouldn't really be much cheaper (let's fact it, the "Microsoft Tax" is actually a fairly small amount of money, OEMs pay $20-30 for their licenses). You have an extensive software library of software most people have never heard of. Why should I buy this thing instead of spending a couple bucks more and getting a Windows computer like everyone else? Or a couple hundred bucks more to get a Mac with fancier hardware and a lot of momentum?
Oh, hey, look... An article. I just sort of watched the embedded video and assumed that was the whole thing. That answers more of my questions, and also tells me that this isn't quite what I was looking for. What I really want is an iPad style device with a full OS on it. I want the full OS to have UI optimized for the small screen real estate (which it looks like this Ubuntu WM is). This is definitely getting there, but I want a different form factor and a much larger gesture library. Maybe in a year or so then...
Portables != Desktop. The article you're referring to also makes a point of pointing out how *well* Linux is doing on portables. This device is more closely related to an iPad than a desktop. That said I have several questions the video doesn't answer. Does this device have a physical keyboard or a virtual one. If it's got a physical KB then they did a fantastic job of hiding the thing while it wasn't being used. If it's got a virtual keyboard I'd really like to see it up as part of the video. Just to get an idea for how much screen real estate it uses and such.
I've been considering an iPad. Honestly this looks nicer (at any rate more open, which is more important to me on a tablet than a phone), but I'd want to see a lot more than a couple muti-touch gestures to be sold. He really only demonstrates two gestures, mostly he spends the whole video using a single finger to simulate a left-click on static objects. Hardly revolutionary. Can it do pinch zoom? Two finger scrolling or one finger? Will two fingers simulate a right-click? (It's a mostly desktop OS, so unlike in iOS right clicking is probably pretty useful). I'm sure I could find out the answers, but if you're going to make a promo video for "multi-touch" show me some "multi-touching".
Slashdot Mirror
I keep hearing this, but what do you plan on replacing traditional news with? You may not have noticed, but all the bloggers and sites like Slashdot or Reddit? They're all aggregators. They don't investigate news in any traditional sense. They troll around newspaper and news sites and read stuff. If they're a full on aggregator like /. then they just post links to the stuff they read (or that people submitted to them). If they're a blogger then they write an opinion piece and share the info out. When a liberal or conservative blogger "breaks a story" it just means that they read it in some local newspaper. They were the first nationally read source to break the story, but mostly they didn't actually create it. With a very, very small number of exceptions (usually where some source calls a blogger and gives them info), these guys don't produce news. They consume it and regurgitate it at you (Which sounds really gross, I didn't necessarily mean that in a bad way).
If traditional news sources disappear, there will be no revolution where "new media" wanks will take over and do thing better and more accurately. They will have nothing to comment on. There will be no news for them to "break". Real investigative news requires a staff and a budget. You can't fly to Afghanistan to report on the ongoing war effort using the money you got from Google ad-sense this month. You can't run a month long investigate effort into discovering that the local government is embezzling the city retirement fund when you have to produce a new blog entry twice a day to pay the bandwidth bill.
Apple is no longer making their own Java implementation. Oracle will have to do the work. This is not scary or evil. Java on the Mac will now work like Java on almost every other platform. You'll go get the JVM/JDK from the Sun-Oracle website and a background updater will inform you of your daily "ZOMG, we found another critical security bug" update. Whether Oracle asked Apple to do this, Apple did it on their own because of concerns about Oracle's recent litigious streak, they did it to screw Oracle, or they just didn't feel like maintaining their own JVM anymore is pretty much an open question; but there will still be Java on Macs.
Or they looked at the Android lawsuit and said "Hmm, I don't *think* we're breaking any laws, but why take chances?" Oracle is playing a different game with Java than Sun did and personally I'd want to stay out of it as much as possible. There's lots of reasons they may have done this and with ~8 months notice Oracle has plenty of time to build their own JVM.
OK, so realistically I was thinking it wouldn't get much bigger than 4 GB or so. I think I forgot where I was.
More to the point it's asking for trouble. "Gosh, I wonder what's in this giant encrypted blob on this guys hard drive?" Just zip all your porn into a file, and rename it to something innocuous and approximately appropriate in size. Anything over about 600 MB you could probably just rename "RedHatLinux.iso" or something. You think they're doing deep inspections of every lap top that comes in through customs? They probably do a search for some subsection of the normal graphic and video file extensions then browse the thumbnails for anything that looks wrong. Anything more than that would slow down the inspections to crawl.
You're not dealing with an MIT forensics teams here, these guy have been taught a very simplistic procedure and will follow it to the letter. Most likely they don't even *care* if you have porn, they just have to check every 5th laptop to keep the boss happy.
Bad analogy: That's not baseless [linuxtoday.com]. In addition, there's already DRM in the standard Linux kernel [freedesktop.org]
It's baseless because I didn't know about it and made it up off the top of my head. A broken clock being right twice a day doesn't make it fixed :-).
Not exactly. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and later is already capable of checking the signature of an executable to know whether elevated privileges granted to an old version of an app should propagate to the new version of the same app. (See Code Signing Guide [apple.com].) Currently, it works on a key continuity management basis: privileges from one version of an app propagate to another version if and only if they are signed with the same key. But this infrastructure could easily implement a policy to deny execution if the CA chain doesn't go up to Apple.
Except that kind of scheme only works if the developers "opt in". The OS provides the APIs to do this, but you have to use them. I suppose it might be possible to set up the libraries so that they require you use these APIs, but there's tons of issues with existing software not working, questions about using the systems in a disconnected mode, blah blah blah.
It would also be relatively easy to work around as root. Taking away root would create all kind of administrative headaches. I don't see how they could do it without a major rewrite. It took them years to make the transition from Classic to OSX because all the legacy software had to be rewritten. Classic compatibility mode remained part of the OS till what, Panther? Tiger? They're not going to put themselves through that again for the modicum of extra control and profits an "app store only" model will bring.
Then what would you buy instead? I'm a fan of small form factor; what make and model of PC running Windows or Linux do you recommend to replace a Mac mini?
I don't know. I'm not in the market for a new computer (Mac or otherwise) right now. I know Dell and HP both make small form factor systems, though they aren't as sexy as the Mini. I really don't see this happening, so I'm not really bothered to worry about it. At a minimum it's another OS revision away, which means 2-3 years... I'll worry about it then if the problem actually exists.
No, because a comment can have a "Score: #, Underrated" It's a mod like anything else. You would have to have more Troll mods than any other mod type, but still have been rated up to 5. Which means you'd have to spread the upmods all over the possible choices.
I think Linus will include DRM in the next kernel. See. I can make completely baseless and off the wall accusations too. I also think Richard Stallman secretly works for Microsoft and had been paid for the last 30 years to act as a buffoonish fake "competitor" so that Microsoft looks sane in comparison. Hey, this is fun.
In the highly unlikely even that you are correct (they would literally have to rewrite OSX from the ground up to make it into the kind of locked sown system you're talking about) then I won't buy it. Problem solved. I know that i won't be the only one. They would gut their market. It won't happen. If (big if) it did. Again no problem. I'll buy a Windows box or a Linux box.
Ah. Looks like it was from Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations (at any rate that what comes up when I Google the terms, I didn't reread the whole thing to verify). A more amusing book, but less instructive in general.
Hmm... coulda sworn that was from Lies. Now I'll have to figure out where it came from. Anyway, the point remains valid, it's a common tactic on both sides. I was trying to be pretty even handed in my post, but I have my biases too. I have personally watched Glenn Beck do this twice (which encompasses nearly every time I've watched Glenn Beck).
You can actually get +5 Troll, but it would require some really weird mods.
Post with a Karma bonus score: 2
Mod Troll score: 1, Troll
Mod Troll score: 0, Troll
Mod Troll score: -1, Troll
Suddenly people realize that you are being oppressed
Mod Interesting score: 0, Troll (it uses whatever you have the most mods for)
Mod Informative score: 1, Troll
Mod Underrated score 2, Troll
Mod Insightful score 3, Troll
Mod Informative score 4, Troll
Mod Interesting score 5, Troll (Your total mod counts are Troll: 3, Informative: 2, Interesting: 2, Insightful: 1, Underrated: 1)
Extremely unlikely, but technically possible.
As an aside, everyone, liberal or conservative, should read Al Franken's Lies, and the Lying Liars that Tell Them. Before you scream, yes he's a flaming liberal demagogue, yes he's as bad in his own way as Limbaugh or Beck, and yes he's probably guilty of the things he accuses other of in this book. I understand that, and I'm not asking you to agree with his point of view. What's interesting in the book is the tactics he points out. They're tactics used by both sides in the culture war, so whether you're a liberal or a conservative you've probably been a victim of them, but right now they're especially associated with conservative talking heads like Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity.
One of the most popular of these techniques is the one I'm responding to above. Whether the poster is actually engaging in the tactic or simply parroting something he heard or read I don't know, but it's very common. You take a story about something perfectly reasonable or maybe a little crazy, but not serious (like the one above, where the ACLU probably was a little out of line, but not nearly as seriously as it sounds like from the post), and leave out context and details so it sounds much worse than it is. Then you scream about the horrible things that [liberals:conservatives] are doing this week and use the story as an example.
The classic for this (and one of the ones Franken uses in the book) was a story that Rush Limbaugh broke about a teacher in California being forced to take down a poster of the Declaration of Independence because some fringe left wing group thought it violated the separation of church and state (might have even been the ACLU, I don't remember). Rush wailed and gnashed his teeth for most of an episode on this incident, and on the face the face of it it seems like liberalism run amok. Hell I'm a Pagan, and a strong supporter of the separation wall; and even I think this story (as told) is a travesty against American Civics.
As it happens it's only vaguely true. A teacher in California was forced to remove a poster containing lines from the Declaration of Independence from his wall by some separation organization or other. It wasn't simply the text of the Declaration though. It was a poster attempting to prove that the United States is a "Christian Nation" by cherry picking quotes from a number of documents throughout American history, including the Declaration. Rush didn't lie, he just left out a lot of important details.
They were trying to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions to save the life of the mother, if the hospitals accept federal money in the form of medicaid and medicare. Which is quite a bit more limited in scope then your claim. Personally I think that particular little stunt was more of a "solution searching for a problem" situation since most Catholic Hospitals *will* perform abortions when it's clear that the life of the mother is in severe danger from the pregnancy, but assuming there was a Catholic Hospital that was willing to let a woman die rather than perform an abortion, I could see how that might threaten their right to federal money.
You see how context matters? In your post it seems like the ACLU is trying to force all Catholic Hospitals to perform any and all abortions, or risk being shut down and (I supposed) their staff being arrested. In actual fact, they wanted to clarify that Catholic Hospitals should do what most of them do already, and that if they don't they lose access to some federal funds. Most of the articles I skimmed it seemed that the Catholic Hospitals were more annoyed that they were being misrepresented as not doing this already, than they were worried about being force into anything.
So yeah, this does seem like a bit of pointless grand standing about a non-issue on the ACLU's part, but it hardly seems like forcing a professional to perform an action against their own ethics.
The problem, as I point out, is that the Internet is not just a method for people to make one-one connections with their friends, and IP addresses are a lot harder to memorize than phone numbers. IPv6 is on the horizon. Are you seriously advocating a system that would require me to memorize a 32 digit hexadecimal address everytime I see a site I might want to look at later?
Not to mention pain of coding for such a thing. Every address you code into a network enabled piece of software would have to be hard coded, you could never rely on the remote computer (the one using your software) to have the addresses you want to use in their hosts file. Oh, wait, you want to change ISPs? New address space. Every network aware piece of software will have to be audited to see what hard coded addresses need to change.
And then there's the problem of the hosts files themselves. Flat text files aren't exactly well designed for rapid searching. They scale well enough to hundreds, probably even thousands, of addresses, but if I start indexing every single site I visit I'd be willing to be my hosts file would reach tens or even hundreds of thousands of entries. My hosts file would also betray me. I read "XKCD" every other day. So I put "XKCD.com" in my hosts file. Randall gets a new hosting service. XKCD moves. Now I have no idea where it is and when I try to use my hosts entry I get a "connection refused". I either have to contact Randall personally (Which may be impossible if his e-mail server also moved) or I can't read XKCD any more.
There's a reason DNS was invented. People began to realize that at a few thousand machines the Internet was far to large to document manually. It's currently at a few *billion* machines. The old method has not suddenly become massively more scalable.
As sibling says "Citation needed". The ACLU defended Rush Limbaugh. They've defended both the KKK *and* the Anti-Defamation league. Show me an instance of them turning down a legitimate freedom of expression case. You've been told that they only defend lunatic left wing causes, but so far as I've ever seen it's simply not true. A lot of their cases defend people with extremely liberal views, but that's mostly because right now the country itself, on the whole, is rather conservative. Most of the people asking the ACLU for help are left leaning, because they are most likely to both a) trust the ACLU and b) have need of the ACLU.
And DNS has to go away.
That's an interesting take on Net Neutrality I've never seen before. Are you planning to replace it with something? Or just make everyone remember every IP address they want to visit? That should be especially entertaining when IPV6 eventually gets implemented. I can just see the billboards now "Eat at Joes! And visit our website at: 2001:db8:1f70::999:de8:7648:6e80/index.html!" (IP address stolen from example in Wikipedia entry on IPv6. I have no idea where, if anywhere it goes)
I often find it ironic how conservative talking heads bash the ACLU as defending "commies and left wing nuts", but when *they* want free expression they're happy to get the ACLU involved to help. The ACLU is a one issue group. They think you have a right to say... whatever stupid, crazy, brilliant, inspired, idiotic, hateful, useful, useless, or wonderful thing you want to say. Period. No matter where you fall on the political spectrum. I can respect that.
How so? So far as I can see, assuming you ignore the openness of the code, OSX offers more "choices" than Windows all things being equal. AppleScript, a fully functional Unix terminal app, a free SDK and compiler (not preinstalled, granted, but it's on the DVD that comes in the box), all the normal Unix scripting tools, Windows doesn't have any of that by default. I admit to loving that Windows 7 has PowerShell built in, and that's *huge* step forward, but it still has nothing on a Unix terminal.
I never said otherwise. I hesitate to think I have to provide citations for a guess. The point is that lots of OSX *is* open source which is a damn site more than Windows can say. As a relative thing, OSX is much more open than Windows. The core of the OS is OSS, and many of the user space tool are. I wouldn't bitch if Apple opened the rest, but it is undeniably true that comparatively speaking it's already "better".
I never quite got why so many people are allergic to command lines.
I love command lines, which is why I love the OSX terminal. Two sentences on from the line you quote I mention that as an advantage. It's great that I can script stuff in Bash and Perl when the GUI tools seem too limited. Note that in most (nearly all) cases though, when I open the terminal to do something, I *could* have done it in the GUI. It was just quicker or more elegant to use the CLI. That's critical because most people wouldn't know how to do it in the CLI.
The one instance I've *ever* encountered on a Mac (sibling mentions another, but I've not encountered that particular issue) where I absolutely *had* to use the CLI was manually upgrading the virus definition file in McAfee for Mac. This situation was incredibly edge case. The system was Classified so it couldn't be connected to the Internet, but also needed up to date virus definitions (Yay for pointless regulation, completely isolated systems get viruses all the time amirite?). I had to use the command line to change the McAfee config file from binary to XML, edit the line that pointed at the current definitions files, then change it back to binary and restart the scanner. Not something a "normal" user is *ever* likely to have to do. Also this was a third party software issue, not an actual "Mac" issue.
Linux systems today are also auto-configuring to such a large extent I seldom have to configure anything at all. I still remember when I had to manually generate the X11 configuration. Today X11 automatically detects everything on startup, from your keyboard, to your graphics card, to your monitor. It also manages to do this with a much wider spectrum of hardware then the small sample MacOS X needs to deal with.
Hardly ever is not never. Don't get me wrong, GUI tools and automatic systems on Linux have come a *long* way. It remains the case though that they still fail in a non-trivial number of instances. Just a week or two ago I discovered that you have to manually edit xorg.conf to get dual Display Port monitors working, at least in Red Hat. They do work fine, which is awful nice (and a huge improvement in itself, I still remember when every hardware purchase had to vetted against what worked, what didn't work, and what might work with tweaking), but not without some manual tweaks.
The other problem with Linux admin tools is that they tend to be written as what they are: front ends to a CLI interface. Open the network tool on a Mac and a Linux box. They do mostly the same things, but the Mac tool talks in terms of what the user wants to do. It gives you obvious interface names like "Wireless", "Bluetooth", and "Firewire" (assuming your Mac is oldish like mine). The Linux tools talks in terms that make sense to someone who usually does this stuff on the command line. Interfaces are listed by eth number and you have to know whether eth0 is your wireless card or your wired card. Now if you look at the command line, Mac interfaces look just like Linux interfaces (cme# instead of eth#, but whatever), and ifconfig works the same way, but for the "normal" users the Mac GUI is designed better.
Oh FFS leave the antenna alone already. First, it seems the problems is hardly limited to iPhones, other phones demonstrate the same problems, they just don't have to hype and hate built up to make seem like such an issue. Second, there was a relatively straightforward fix within a week or two. Third, point me at a company that hasn't released a product with an engineering flaw. The devices were tested with cases on them, because they didn't them being leaked (lot of good that did). Was it a mistake? Of course. Was it an understandable mistake? Yes. It happens. Apple's initial reaction could have been handled better, but in the end it there was a reasonably painless resolution and they won't make the same mistake again.
No one is saying Apple is perfect. All they're saying is that Apple tends to fit engineering to the design rather than vice versa. It's bit them before (I think is was called the X-cube? Back about 8-9 years ago used to crack at all its joints?) it'll bite them again. It's generally been successful though, and I'd venture a guess that they've had no more engineering disasters than any other major tech manufacturer.
If anything OSX is more open than Windows; the guts are open source (Darwin). It's just higher levels that are closed. On top of that Apple uses and contributes to a number of F/OSS projects to provide things like printing (CUPS), remote file system access (SAMBA), remote shell access (OpenSSH) and lots of others. I'd venture to say that more than 50% of of OSX is F/OSS code and Apple has generally been quite good about working with the projects they use. Apparently there's been some friction with the FSF a few times, but given that Stallman and Jobs are like oil and water...
Say what you want about the closed nature of the iDevices (and personally I like my iPhone, but think the iPad might be to limited ), but the Mac itself is way more open than Windows. It also represents, as another poster pointed out, what I've always really wanted. A reliable, Unix based, workstation with a good user interface, decent library of available commercial software, and capability to use pretty much all the F/OSS stuff I need.
If you want to see what Linux on the Desktop should look like, look no further than OSX. Not the design per se, though I like it well enough, but the way the OS works from a user point of view. In OSX you have a consumer OS. You never, ever have to go to the command line. You do anything you need to configure the computer in any way you need from simple easy to understand GUI tools. You can run all your software without hiccups, dependency issues, or driver headaches. BUT if you want to, and you know how to, you can quickly and easily open a command prompt, use the all the standard Unix tools, script to your heart's content, even install a Linux style package manager and use all the tools available to any of the free *nixes.
I don't know how much this will matter unless there's a compelling reason to buy the Linux version. Windows has the software library, the name recognition, and the comfort factor of using what you're used to going for it. Apple has the smaller but still extensive software library, the name recognition, and the (created by advertising perhaps, but there none-the-less) reputation for service, premium hardware, and stability going for it. What would this new "Diamond Computer" have to make it the choice?
There's little name recognition for Linux. It wouldn't really be much cheaper (let's fact it, the "Microsoft Tax" is actually a fairly small amount of money, OEMs pay $20-30 for their licenses). You have an extensive software library of software most people have never heard of. Why should I buy this thing instead of spending a couple bucks more and getting a Windows computer like everyone else? Or a couple hundred bucks more to get a Mac with fancier hardware and a lot of momentum?
Oh, hey, look... An article. I just sort of watched the embedded video and assumed that was the whole thing. That answers more of my questions, and also tells me that this isn't quite what I was looking for. What I really want is an iPad style device with a full OS on it. I want the full OS to have UI optimized for the small screen real estate (which it looks like this Ubuntu WM is). This is definitely getting there, but I want a different form factor and a much larger gesture library. Maybe in a year or so then...
Portables != Desktop. The article you're referring to also makes a point of pointing out how *well* Linux is doing on portables. This device is more closely related to an iPad than a desktop. That said I have several questions the video doesn't answer. Does this device have a physical keyboard or a virtual one. If it's got a physical KB then they did a fantastic job of hiding the thing while it wasn't being used. If it's got a virtual keyboard I'd really like to see it up as part of the video. Just to get an idea for how much screen real estate it uses and such.
I've been considering an iPad. Honestly this looks nicer (at any rate more open, which is more important to me on a tablet than a phone), but I'd want to see a lot more than a couple muti-touch gestures to be sold. He really only demonstrates two gestures, mostly he spends the whole video using a single finger to simulate a left-click on static objects. Hardly revolutionary. Can it do pinch zoom? Two finger scrolling or one finger? Will two fingers simulate a right-click? (It's a mostly desktop OS, so unlike in iOS right clicking is probably pretty useful). I'm sure I could find out the answers, but if you're going to make a promo video for "multi-touch" show me some "multi-touching".