The same thing occurred to me. And the location of my USB ports would make for an uncomfortable posture (my midi tower's on the floor, with some USBs in the front panel).
He can always copy the stuff he wants to use from his USB to the HDD, unmount, get to work, and at the end of the day, give his box the finger again (or however many times he wants to update). If it does come off, then it's different, of course. I just checked the pics on the blog, and it looked to me like it wouldn't easily be removed.
I'd still rather keep my fingers where they belong, and my USBs in my pocket... My father's fingers had been pruned somewhat, and it didn't slow him too much, but some things were a little difficult.
Although I understand why he went for it. For geek points.
This guy probably knows the devious plans Steve Ballmer has...
Anyhow, with DoD and DoJ experience in those capacities, it seems likely he knows a lot about privacy issues.
OTOH, Microsoft using phrases like "trustworthy infrastructure" and "trustful computing" in chilling. Just whom am I supposed to trust? M$?
Don't get me wrong. I use XP Pro on some stuff that's just easier to do with it (I know, laziness on my part, maybe) and it's doing it's thing. And after all, it's quite often cheaper to buy a desktop with Win than without (and I'm poor). But as an antimonopolist, I avoid it on principle.
In my native Finland, I was surprised to see how easy it was to break the monopoly that the government monopoly had on long-distance calls both national and international. But then we always had small, local, privately owned phone companies (or co-ops) handle local telephone business (in densely populated areas, that is). We never had a Ma Bell.
Then when the Internet arose, all comers were welcomed to the field, which gave us one of the best connectivity rates in the world (relative to demographic factors like population density). VoIP took phone carriers by surprise in a way, but mobile phones (and the deregulation of that market) had already destroyed their major cash cow, so they were seemingly happy to have more of an excuse to sell broadband lines.
Of course, I am no industry insider, so there may be more than meets the eye there, but I have never heard a complaint about VoIP traffic. P2P sometimes, not VoIP. The local companies are in the mobile business, too, as an alliance (there has been some consolidation, too), and we have had the highest rate of mobile penetration here until recently.
To hearing "the call to the number you have requested can not be completed at this time" or "the number you have dialed is out of network or turned off".
Whoever wrote this "news" story is a f#@**ng idiot...
If you think for a moment about people, who read the Sun as a source of news, it becomes obvious, that the whoever is certainly meeting expectations... very low, that is...
Selling illegal copies of copyrighted material and having a division of labor (somebody methodically produces the copies for someone else to sell) is by definition organized crime (IANAL, but still, it's criminal and it's organized), so I suppose there's no contest there. No matter what one thinks of copyright law (I'm no great fan of DMCA).
But it's quite true, that you could take a lot of cold-war era propaganda material, do a "find and replace" to replace "communism"/"communist" with "terrorism"/"terrorist"; then update references to obsolete technologies - and get what's coming out of the official propaganda machine right now.
The angle, brought up in these comments, that P2P doesn't fill the coffers of mafia or al Qaida, is interesting.
That said, I am all for letting an artist/writer stipulate the conditions for using the material she/he produces. My son-in-law is an artist, who is counting on making a living by teaching people to play different instruments. He does believe, though, that if people want to hear music he makes, they will be willing to honor his modest requests for compensation. He's not dreaming of retiring as a gazillionaire at 35.
Again, that said, I know that the members of RIAA/MPAA (and their counterparts in other OECD countries) are out there only to make money for their owners, and have no compunction over bleeding struggling artists who are desperate for exposure.
IE is still needed. At least on XP, and the same seems still to be the case with Vista SP1:
There are some updates that do not get installed unless you fire up IE and go to windows update site.
Plus, there must be a way for someone installing Windows to download a browser, and for most people the command-line ftp that's the only out-of the box alternative to a browser for that purpose (where would Joe Sixpack point the ftp? - of course, he shouldn't be installing OS on a computer in the first place).
Of course, Microsoft could be forced to do with browsers what they do with search engines for IE (namely, you can add others to IE search box and make some other than Live Search the default). You could have, say, an Internet connection wizard that would ask you which browser you'd like to download - or whatever. But it would have to be a step of the installation process.
Seamonkey is the only browser with identical rendering across every platform.
There's your problem...
... everything isn't going to look identical across every platform... a lot less stress if you can get your management and/or clients to understand and accept this as well.
To continue quoting you: There's your problem. People come to your site and go OH NO! This looks different! I mean, my wife insists on booting the machine to XP, b/c Firefox *looks* a little different on Linux/Gnome (although I put the Strata XP-lookalike theme on her FF). I try to tell her that's another couple of minutes wasted in rebooting, when she just wants to visit the bank's site to pay a bill. Not to mention the somewhat shorter time that I waste when I boot back to Linux.
Non-technical people tend to go apoplectic when their UI looks different, even when you try to explain, that in the new menu/dialog structure most of the tasks can be done with fewer clicks. All you have to do is look around and read what the menu says.
Safari 4 makes better use of the Bookmarks toolbar, allowing you to not only add individual bookmarks, but category folders as well.
Do they mean they haven't noticed that Firefox 3.0.X can do the same (and if my memory isn't completely shot, so did v. 2)? Or were they just comparing to Safari 3?
But I was one of those poor people assigned to make sure that our site worked with "most" browsers. Can you say "standard compliant"? Neither can Bill Gates.
Of course, including images in HTML documents was an innovation in itself, that launched the browser wars. My first HTML Interned experiences were text-only pages w/ a text-only "browser" (it wasn't even called a "browser" then, was it?).
We are both way offtopic (or maybe not!), but God didn't make stupidity. I am religious, but I don't believe in a God, who existed in nothingness, and then, out of that nothing, created everything by snapping his fingers.
No, God can not completely save us from our own stupidity, because, as heretical as it may sound, he didn't invent the rules, he follows them, and that is what gives him his power. We have to learn by experience. But this is not a discussion board about religion, so I'll stand down now...
You are right, that people shouldn't consume at levels they can't afford.
But if your mother passed a gene to you, that causes you to develop breast cancer in your early 30s, should you be left to die, suffering with terrible pain, because your mother couldn't afford to put you through Harvard or Stanford so you could afford the cost of getting treated?
At some point, primary care physicians should be put on fixed salaries, sufficiently high in order to make taking kickbacks from marketers of pharmaceuticals or providers of specialist services. As of now, they put you through CT or MRI scans or a battery of blood tests in order to avoid malpractice suits, sure, but also, because they usually get a cut of the fees for the prescribed procedures.
Of course, on top of the fixed salary, there should be an incentive system for keeping up with current medicine (your MD from 1970s could have some quaint notions, if he has not followed his field).
And somebody should come up with a way of rewarding doctors for good care. Now there are some incentive systems, which punish a doctor for patients' death, for example. At first, it may sound good, but when it leads to doctors turning away the patients, who have the worst disorders, it just denies treatment for those, who need it most.
The thing is not that IE and Safari developers can see FF source. It's that IE developers can see Windows source and Safari developers can see OS X source. It is well known that M$ has left unpublished API calls in Win that M$ and partner apps can use to gain an integration advantage. (This may or may not be remedied in newer versions of the OS.)
Everyone here seems to be acting as if consumers don't understand how to download, install or use some alternative program.
That's because they don't. Most consumers buy preinstalled PCs they use with default settings. If Windows update is turned on, they may let it do its things, otherwise no. They don't understand what a "browser" is. It's a major feat of education to get them to understand what double-clicking an icon means. They don't understand what an OS is.
I am living with one, and I've been trying to educate her for quite some time. She's not stupid (she does CAD design, graduated with top honors), just not interested in knowing stuff like that. Without me she'd be running her machine with out-of-the-box settings till it crashes from a HD failure or virus disaster and then look for a good deal for a new one, perhaps a little miffed about all the stuff that was lost.
P.S. The people buying the programs for video game consoles are the young, interested, technically-oriented people, who became software or hardware designers, tech support people etc. The Muggles are still blind to what's going on.
In fact, Windows, Fedora and Ubuntu in their latest incarnations are about equal as to the simplicity of the installation process. I have done all of them within last 3 weeks. All you need is to accept the defaults and set the time zone by clicking on a map in Fedora 10, for example.
A bigger problem is, that people buy these "bundled" PC's with crappy adware bundled with their OS (like a 30-day "trial" of Norton Antivirus - if you don't want to continue with it good luck getting rid of it without expert knowledge!).
A valid point, and deserves a higher score than 1.
I was thinking, reading this discussion, how can you make sure that people have up-to-date browsers? What if instead of forcing M$ to bundle other browsers (which ones?), they were forced to set up a "Welcome" page that opens up when IE is first started, that gives you links to downloading other browsers. These links would be on the M$ site, and they'd be required to keep them updated so that when new browsers come out, they'd be on the page, and people could just click and be shown how to do it.
Then, it would be up to Mozilla and others to make sure that the stuff behind those links is up to date, relevant and simple enough for Joe Blow.
A case in point, I was helping at a church library last night, and they still have an early Firefox 2 (and an unpatched XP Pro) despite me telling them to update their stuff when I last checked their system. Nothing protects people from their own stupidity!
I don't know as much about TCP/IP as I'd like to, but I thought that IPv6 had the idea of setting new security standards, so that your system wouldn't be open for everyone by default.
One just has to treat the Web as a huge marketplace, where trust must be earned by *eveyone*, who wants to be trusted.
So no, we really don't need a gated community as much as we need to educate people - and give them options. The Microsoft stragegy ("Trustful" Computing) means everything is fine, as long as you implicitly trust M$ to handle everything.
...is to have a listserv that uses the same address for Sender and Reply-To fields. Then some bright bulb goes on vacation and assigns his email to send an "I'm on vacation..." reply to all emails. You can imagine that creating an endless loop...
The listserv issue got fixed in a hurry. The guy who administers it is pretty savvy, but he is busy making a living, so it hadn't hit him yet how bad that could be.
Slashdot Mirror
The same thing occurred to me. And the location of my USB ports would make for an uncomfortable posture (my midi tower's on the floor, with some USBs in the front panel).
He can always copy the stuff he wants to use from his USB to the HDD, unmount, get to work, and at the end of the day, give his box the finger again (or however many times he wants to update). If it does come off, then it's different, of course. I just checked the pics on the blog, and it looked to me like it wouldn't easily be removed.
I'd still rather keep my fingers where they belong, and my USBs in my pocket... My father's fingers had been pruned somewhat, and it didn't slow him too much, but some things were a little difficult.
Although I understand why he went for it. For geek points.
This guy probably knows the devious plans Steve Ballmer has...
Anyhow, with DoD and DoJ experience in those capacities, it seems likely he knows a lot about privacy issues.
OTOH, Microsoft using phrases like "trustworthy infrastructure" and "trustful computing" in chilling. Just whom am I supposed to trust? M$?
Don't get me wrong. I use XP Pro on some stuff that's just easier to do with it (I know, laziness on my part, maybe) and it's doing it's thing. And after all, it's quite often cheaper to buy a desktop with Win than without (and I'm poor). But as an antimonopolist, I avoid it on principle.
In my native Finland, I was surprised to see how easy it was to break the monopoly that the government monopoly had on long-distance calls both national and international. But then we always had small, local, privately owned phone companies (or co-ops) handle local telephone business (in densely populated areas, that is). We never had a Ma Bell.
Then when the Internet arose, all comers were welcomed to the field, which gave us one of the best connectivity rates in the world (relative to demographic factors like population density). VoIP took phone carriers by surprise in a way, but mobile phones (and the deregulation of that market) had already destroyed their major cash cow, so they were seemingly happy to have more of an excuse to sell broadband lines.
Of course, I am no industry insider, so there may be more than meets the eye there, but I have never heard a complaint about VoIP traffic. P2P sometimes, not VoIP. The local companies are in the mobile business, too, as an alliance (there has been some consolidation, too), and we have had the highest rate of mobile penetration here until recently.
To hearing "the call to the number you have requested can not be completed at this time" or "the number you have dialed is out of network or turned off".
Whoever wrote this "news" story is a f#@**ng idiot...
If you think for a moment about people, who read the Sun as a source of news, it becomes obvious, that the whoever is certainly meeting expectations... very low, that is...
Selling illegal copies of copyrighted material and having a division of labor (somebody methodically produces the copies for someone else to sell) is by definition organized crime (IANAL, but still, it's criminal and it's organized), so I suppose there's no contest there. No matter what one thinks of copyright law (I'm no great fan of DMCA).
But it's quite true, that you could take a lot of cold-war era propaganda material, do a "find and replace" to replace "communism"/"communist" with "terrorism"/"terrorist"; then update references to obsolete technologies - and get what's coming out of the official propaganda machine right now.
The angle, brought up in these comments, that P2P doesn't fill the coffers of mafia or al Qaida, is interesting.
That said, I am all for letting an artist/writer stipulate the conditions for using the material she/he produces. My son-in-law is an artist, who is counting on making a living by teaching people to play different instruments. He does believe, though, that if people want to hear music he makes, they will be willing to honor his modest requests for compensation. He's not dreaming of retiring as a gazillionaire at 35.
Again, that said, I know that the members of RIAA/MPAA (and their counterparts in other OECD countries) are out there only to make money for their owners, and have no compunction over bleeding struggling artists who are desperate for exposure.
Has anyone been addressing the licensing cost of Blu-Ray? I mean, Sony gets a nice royalty for every Blu-ray capable device of any class, AFAIK...
Do we have another monopoly coming up or have I been fed a line?
IE is still needed. At least on XP, and the same seems still to be the case with Vista SP1:
There are some updates that do not get installed unless you fire up IE and go to windows update site.
Plus, there must be a way for someone installing Windows to download a browser, and for most people the command-line ftp that's the only out-of the box alternative to a browser for that purpose (where would Joe Sixpack point the ftp? - of course, he shouldn't be installing OS on a computer in the first place).
Of course, Microsoft could be forced to do with browsers what they do with search engines for IE (namely, you can add others to IE search box and make some other than Live Search the default). You could have, say, an Internet connection wizard that would ask you which browser you'd like to download - or whatever. But it would have to be a step of the installation process.
But that's a problem that is not for me to solve.
There's your problem...
... everything isn't going to look identical across every platform ... a lot less stress if you can get your management and/or clients to understand and accept this as well.
To continue quoting you: There's your problem. People come to your site and go OH NO! This looks different! I mean, my wife insists on booting the machine to XP, b/c Firefox *looks* a little different on Linux/Gnome (although I put the Strata XP-lookalike theme on her FF). I try to tell her that's another couple of minutes wasted in rebooting, when she just wants to visit the bank's site to pay a bill. Not to mention the somewhat shorter time that I waste when I boot back to Linux.
Non-technical people tend to go apoplectic when their UI looks different, even when you try to explain, that in the new menu/dialog structure most of the tasks can be done with fewer clicks. All you have to do is look around and read what the menu says.
I know, beating a dead horse...
Quote from the article:
Safari 4 makes better use of the Bookmarks toolbar, allowing you to not only add individual bookmarks, but category folders as well.
Do they mean they haven't noticed that Firefox 3.0.X can do the same (and if my memory isn't completely shot, so did v. 2)? Or were they just comparing to Safari 3?
Go figure.
You may be right about the cost of M$'s monopoly.
But I was one of those poor people assigned to make sure that our site worked with "most" browsers. Can you say "standard compliant"? Neither can Bill Gates.
Of course, including images in HTML documents was an innovation in itself, that launched the browser wars. My first HTML Interned experiences were text-only pages w/ a text-only "browser" (it wasn't even called a "browser" then, was it?).
We are both way offtopic (or maybe not!), but God didn't make stupidity. I am religious, but I don't believe in a God, who existed in nothingness, and then, out of that nothing, created everything by snapping his fingers.
No, God can not completely save us from our own stupidity, because, as heretical as it may sound, he didn't invent the rules, he follows them, and that is what gives him his power. We have to learn by experience. But this is not a discussion board about religion, so I'll stand down now...
You are right, that people shouldn't consume at levels they can't afford.
But if your mother passed a gene to you, that causes you to develop breast cancer in your early 30s, should you be left to die, suffering with terrible pain, because your mother couldn't afford to put you through Harvard or Stanford so you could afford the cost of getting treated?
At some point, primary care physicians should be put on fixed salaries, sufficiently high in order to make taking kickbacks from marketers of pharmaceuticals or providers of specialist services. As of now, they put you through CT or MRI scans or a battery of blood tests in order to avoid malpractice suits, sure, but also, because they usually get a cut of the fees for the prescribed procedures.
Of course, on top of the fixed salary, there should be an incentive system for keeping up with current medicine (your MD from 1970s could have some quaint notions, if he has not followed his field).
And somebody should come up with a way of rewarding doctors for good care. Now there are some incentive systems, which punish a doctor for patients' death, for example. At first, it may sound good, but when it leads to doctors turning away the patients, who have the worst disorders, it just denies treatment for those, who need it most.
I think that I should like to retain the right, as a creator of certain texts, to deny anyone else the right to claim them as their own.
Use without attribution? Fine. Call it your own and try to license it commercially? No, siree!
The thing is not that IE and Safari developers can see FF source. It's that IE developers can see Windows source and Safari developers can see OS X source. It is well known that M$ has left unpublished API calls in Win that M$ and partner apps can use to gain an integration advantage. (This may or may not be remedied in newer versions of the OS.)
Everyone here seems to be acting as if consumers don't understand how to download, install or use some alternative program.
That's because they don't. Most consumers buy preinstalled PCs they use with default settings. If Windows update is turned on, they may let it do its things, otherwise no. They don't understand what a "browser" is. It's a major feat of education to get them to understand what double-clicking an icon means. They don't understand what an OS is.
I am living with one, and I've been trying to educate her for quite some time. She's not stupid (she does CAD design, graduated with top honors), just not interested in knowing stuff like that. Without me she'd be running her machine with out-of-the-box settings till it crashes from a HD failure or virus disaster and then look for a good deal for a new one, perhaps a little miffed about all the stuff that was lost.
P.S. The people buying the programs for video game consoles are the young, interested, technically-oriented people, who became software or hardware designers, tech support people etc. The Muggles are still blind to what's going on.
In fact, Windows, Fedora and Ubuntu in their latest incarnations are about equal as to the simplicity of the installation process. I have done all of them within last 3 weeks. All you need is to accept the defaults and set the time zone by clicking on a map in Fedora 10, for example.
A bigger problem is, that people buy these "bundled" PC's with crappy adware bundled with their OS (like a 30-day "trial" of Norton Antivirus - if you don't want to continue with it good luck getting rid of it without expert knowledge!).
A valid point, and deserves a higher score than 1.
I was thinking, reading this discussion, how can you make sure that people have up-to-date browsers? What if instead of forcing M$ to bundle other browsers (which ones?), they were forced to set up a "Welcome" page that opens up when IE is first started, that gives you links to downloading other browsers. These links would be on the M$ site, and they'd be required to keep them updated so that when new browsers come out, they'd be on the page, and people could just click and be shown how to do it.
Then, it would be up to Mozilla and others to make sure that the stuff behind those links is up to date, relevant and simple enough for Joe Blow.
A case in point, I was helping at a church library last night, and they still have an early Firefox 2 (and an unpatched XP Pro) despite me telling them to update their stuff when I last checked their system. Nothing protects people from their own stupidity!
Do you know I?
Do you know he?
I loose it when people don't know the langwitch.
I don't know as much about TCP/IP as I'd like to, but I thought that IPv6 had the idea of setting new security standards, so that your system wouldn't be open for everyone by default.
One just has to treat the Web as a huge marketplace, where trust must be earned by *eveyone*, who wants to be trusted.
So no, we really don't need a gated community as much as we need to educate people - and give them options. The Microsoft stragegy ("Trustful" Computing) means everything is fine, as long as you implicitly trust M$ to handle everything.
...is to have a listserv that uses the same address for Sender and Reply-To fields. Then some bright bulb goes on vacation and assigns his email to send an "I'm on vacation..." reply to all emails. You can imagine that creating an endless loop... The listserv issue got fixed in a hurry. The guy who administers it is pretty savvy, but he is busy making a living, so it hadn't hit him yet how bad that could be.