"Was there a joke in your post I missed? I thought that someone on slashdot of all places would know that TiVo is a set top box that can be turned off and muted."
The Telescreen in George Orwell's "1984" was a two-way flatpanel device that was installed in every home, used to broadcast propaganda for the current party in power, as well as watch every citizen, through the use of a two-way video camera. You could turn the sound down, but you could never turn it all the way off.
Our current technology can easily implement this exact device.
High-speed digital cable lines have enough power and throughput to allow a video camera installed behind the glass of the TV screen (like all ATM machines have now, with the video camera behind the glass of the monitor you interact with), broadcasting back images of the owner's home.
With the Broadcast Flag, content providers can cause your television to ignore certain commands, like muting to 0% of volume. You might be allowed to go down to 5%, but you can never mute it all the way down.
Also with the broadcast flag, they can enforce that you can't change the channel during commercials, or if you do, your television can be forced into Picture-in-Picture mode, with the other channel in the window but the commercial broadcast at full-screen size.
With all analog signals being phased out in 2009, digital TV (DTV) will be "the norm", so this level of invasive technology is pushed even further forward.
We're only a short hop away from this right now, and its scary to think that a smallish collaboration of vendors would be able to do this within weeks rather than years.
While HPUX gets a bit "long-in-the-tooth", there are still quite a few other Unix communities that have user-centric forums and websites dedicated to their support.
One of my favorites is UserBlue, focused on IBM and AIX solutions. They're hosting mailing lists, webcasts, conferences (with speakers needed in some cases), and lots of other resources where you can tie into other developers, users and solutions involving AIX.
UserBlue is run BY USERS, not by IBM, and that tends to help its buoyency quite a bit, without any specific agenda to the discussions.
I'm not sure what Sun has in this space, so I can't comment there, but their developer community and internal developer blogs are busy lately.
If you're an ex-Interex user, consider hopping on over to UserBlue and continue to share your knowledge and experience with other Unix users and developers.
Your choice of employers? Seriously, what right does your boss have to know where you are? If they implemented that where I work, I'd never take my laptop home.
But how would you know, unless you disassembled your laptop and all of the software running on it?
There are in-keyboard, in-laptop keystroke loggers now that corporations are considering putting in their laptops and desktop keyboards, which sends the data back up the pipe at regular intervals when connected. Companies are using this stuffTODAY.
Granted, its not GPS, but that'll eventually be a part of it as well. With Always-On devices becoming the standard, there's nothing to stop them from including a bit of firmware that simply stores your coordinates every 5 minutes and when you're connected polling your mail or whatever, sends that back upstream. Were you in a meeting for the last hour? Or down the road at the coffee shop? They'll know.
1. GPS built-in to laptops. So you can use mapping software more easily on the go.
Yet another feature for employers and others to use to track you and invade your privacy further. I can see uses for this (LoJack for laptops?), but I can see it being abused right out of the gate. "Sorry, in order for you to connect to the corporate LAN, your GPS needs to be enabled."
2. digital clock on laptops. I'd love to have an external LCD display showing the time, even when the machine's not on. hell, that'd even be useful on a desktop machine.
Someone has figured out how to write software that displays on the LCD touchpad of some of the recent laptops (a penguin of course). Perhaps you could use that... but if your lid is already open so you can see the touchpad, why not just have a clock on the screen? I use osd_clock and osd_cat to keep 6 different timezones in the corner of my screen, so I know what time it is where my colleagues are.
3. touchpad on the side of a laptop. Sometimes I'm holding my powerbook in my arm and I wish there was a way to control the mouse from there. One idea I had was like an inverted optical mouse with the laser sensor that would detect thumb movements. That'd even work for the side of a PDA for scrolling
4. how about an integrated mouse in a laptop? it could snap on/off and you could use it on the side, then just have the cord retract and it would re-attach to the machine.
The Toshiba Librettos had a very slick little mouse device on the lid of the laptop, which worked surprisingly well. You can see an image of it here.
Basically your thumb sits on the grey "dot" on the lower-right, and your first finger and middle finger "pinch" the lid there, and where your fingers rest behind the lid, are your left and right mouse buttons. It was amazingly intuitive.
But back on point, IBM has a foldaway mouse that fits in their UltraBay slot. I Googled but couldn't find a good image of that.
The technology exists, but the motivation to produce it does not. Vendors are too busy producing garbage that they THINK we'll buy, instead of listening to our needs and producing what we WILL buy.
Seems like it might correct itself, though. It might affect food, clothing, and novelty sales. That stuff is probably more significant than admission prices, and this stuff can play out dramatically as turf wars between business units.
Then it makes sense to ALLOW Day Pass Borrowing, not restrict it.
Case in point: I go to the park with my family, and I buy them all flags, t-shirts, pins, whatever... park schwag. I'm all done outfitting my family with Disney Dreck, therefore I'm no longer providing value to the park.
But if I loan my pass to a friend who lives nearby for the next day, he can take HIS family to the park, buy THEM all kinds of t-shirts and schwag, and make the park more money.
It just doesn't make financial sense that they'd prohibit this.. I"m buying admission to the park; 1 body (or family) per-pass. Handing that pass to someone else doesn't break that rule. If I lend my pass to someone else, I can no longer enter the park until I get the pass back. Either way, Disney is assured that a human body is taking up space in their cash register somewhere.
"Here's your 'rectal approximation'. Look at the entry for the GPL. 45,000+ projects - far more than any other OSI-approved license. Rectal enough?"
I missed the part where the OP cross-referenced that with the survey he/she took that took into account the original statement about "..without thinking due to ignorance". I anxiously await those results as well. Of those 45,000 projects, how many (in real numbers) chose the GPL "without thinking"? A 2-dimensional matrix of these datasets will do.
An opportunity comes around later that is complicated because there's already a version of the code out there under the GPL, even though they're the copyright holders.
And they, as copyright holders, are free to change the license of that GPL project to whatever they wish, to BSD, GPL, freeware or otherwise. Of course as you mention, it doesn't take effect retroactively...
Most projects on sourceforge just use the GPL without thinking due to ignorance. This causes problems for corporate developers.
Besides you making a completely wild 'rectal approximation' about the nature of choices made by thousands of developers who put projects on Sourceforge..
How do you figure that the choice of a license "causes problems for corporate developers"? Did those corporate developers not read the instructions when they put their code on Sourceforge? Did those corporate developers forget that they can re-edit their Sourceforge project and change the license at any time? I'm missing your point here.
Unless of course you're trying to say that the projects on Sourceforge should exist solely to benefit corporate developers. See, corporate developers are paid to... wait for it... "develop" code. This means writing code, not searching Sourceforge for projects that they can pick and choose code out of to solve their corporate goals.
And lastly, the needs and desires have absolutely no weight on the choice a developer makes for his license. They're not writing their code to help you, they're writing it to help themselves.
Yes, I too upgraded to X.org, specifically to get the DynamicCLocks feature working on my Thinkpad T42p to increase battery life and reduce heat on the GPU.
Unfortunately, installing X.org, and JUST X.org, required the removal of 526 packages from my system (yes, exactly 547 packages, which you can see here, sorted alphabetically).
This included all of GNOME, themes, widgets, applets, all of KDE and related packages, pose (the Palm OS Emulator) and its foundation lib FLTK, abiword, OpenOffice.org, and hundreds of other packages.
After installing X.org back on, I was able to install about 100 of those packages back onboard, but now there's a nice diversion between the two xlib versions. I can't install Abiword for example, without pulling out gaim, gedit, gnome-core, and a few other libraries. Its like this with about 300 of the packages I had onboard before. pose won't install because it requires libfltk, and libfltk requires htmldoc. Installing htmldoc requires libfltk (another circular dependency).
This reminds me of the pain we went through with the libc5 => libc6 migration, except now we have the gcc4 ABI change and X.org breaking everything that uses a colored pixel.
Nice... it'll be a few months before its all sorted out, no-doubt.
Since I can't take the risk of one of my users choosing a weak password, I've simply locked sshd down. Easy to do, and keeps things sane.
One of my friends had his box broken into because a user on his machine had a weak default password. The maliscious person got in, replaced sshd, and started capturing all failed login attempts. Since most of us had authorized_keys set up, when we tried to log in and were prompted for a password, we got suspiscious. Other users would try their password several times and give up. Those passwords were being sent back off to some site in Russia or Slovenia or something.
The other interesting prong of this attack was that the users who failed to log in and "handed" their password to the attackers, had their ~/.ssh/known_hosts scanned for external hosts they've connected to, and the username + password they just used was attempted on those other hosts, propagating the attack further.
The following short script firewalls off port 22 for unknown hosts. Simply add the IPs of your users or netblocks you connect from, and you're done.
#!/bin/bash sshhosts="127.0.0.1 10.0.1.0/24 1.2.3.4 5.6.7.0/24"; for sshhost in $sshhosts; do iptables -A INPUT -j ACCEPT -p tcp -s $sshhost --dport 22 done iptables -A INPUT -j DROP -p tcp --dport 22
Errr.. but the government can and should set limitations on what data companies can or cannot collect about us.
That's precisely the problem... the government IS setting limits on what corporations can and cannot collect, and those limits are astronomically high. That is what we're afraid of... especially with our current administration's overuse of the word "terror" in every sentence.
Are we afraid that terrorists would have too much fun at our theme parks? Are we afraid that they'd somehow enjoy themselves more than they should, being "terrorists" and all.
Who cares if they hand their day pass to someone else. They can walk into a mall with a backpack and kill 700 people, or a theme park with a stroller full of C4 and kill the same number of people. Having their fingerprints on file doesn't stop that behavior at all.
As with all of these "anti-terror" fantasies concocted by our current adminstration, they serve no purpose other than to persecute the innocent and continue to erode our basic freedoms as guaranteed to us by the Constitution.
Although it is clearly not fingerprints now, it makes me think like this is just a lead-up to actual fingerprinting. They get everyone use to the idea of biometrics at the park, well at the same time trying to keep privacy advocates slightly less angry.
More to the point.. they could just replace the scanners they're using today which are "broken", with ones that are much more accurate AND store the fingerprints as well as geometry. To the park visitors, they'd just think that Disney "fixed" their scanners.
"Oh, just put your hand on the thing there, its just checking your finger's length and stuff for a match, most of the time they don't even work."
"Oh neat, I guess they fixed it."
Meanwhile your fingerprints were taken without you knowing about it, because for all you knew, it was just checking finger geometry with the "broken" scanners.
Its like banner ads. Eventually your brain tunes them out as noise and ignores them. Eventually people will just get used to using their hand to scan into everything, and they'll forget that some scanners are actually being used for information storage and gathering purposes, and not just for "comparison".
Mod parent up. The problem lies in that this is something that benefits them, not the public. You will not have a choice. And personally, I do not believe in the mayority to uphold my privacy.
I just had a thought after reading your reply... What are the two largest venues to capture as many people as possible for the purposes of "monitoring" or gathering personal information about them?
Airline travel
Theme parks
Without a doubt, these are the two quickest ways to get as much information (fingerprints, credit history, verifyable location, etc.) from as many people as possible in the least obtrusive way.
Now all they have to do is figure out how to get the rest of us to willfully hand over our freedoms and personal information to put into their big national DNA/tracking/"anti-terrorism" database, and they're done.
First, it IS THEIR park, THEY OWN it, THEY DECIDE who gets in and HOW.
What if they required that you stand naked in front of a camera for full frontal photographs, in order to enter? Anyone between the ages of 16 and 65 have to be photographed nude to enter... after all, its their park adn their rules, right?
Wrong. What if they required your social security number, home address and credit card number before allowing entry?
Secondly, they are not collecting fingerprints, they are checking something personally identifiable, that is the geometery of the hand, of the owner of the passes and tickets. No different than using a hand scanner at a business to control access to a sensitive area as far as I'm concerned. Don't like it, don't go there.
Ok, so it would be ok for me to fill in my fingerprints with some gel and putty on that day then, right? Since they're checking "geometry" and not the actual fingerprints, they shouldn't have a problem with this, right?
Wrong. They're using two fingers and not to check the geometry of the hand.
What if it was a blood sample? What if it was more than that? How intrusive does it have to get to be admitted in there. We're PAYING them for their service, and when we leave, the services are terminated.
Can I guarantee that when I leave, all of my personal information collected is permanently destroyed? No, I very much doubt it.
Or disable the use of xmlrpc, which we had to do in several cases, because the modules we use are not ported over to 4.6.2 yet, and we'd lose quite a bit of the database schema by upgrading, which would eat some data we require.
In our case, an upgrade isn't possible without a dump, clean reinstall and mostly-manual reload of the data by hand. No thanks, not yet anyway. When we migrate to a new server in a few months or years, we'll consider an upgrade, but right now, losing data is unacceptable.
YMMV of course, if you use a "basic" Drupal instance.
Replying to myself here... I just did a quick check and we've served up 25,502,515,260 bytes over http for one of those files (plucker_desktop, Windows build) THIS MONTH on the primary server.
Since we round-robin across 3 mirrors, that could potentially be 75GiB for this month alone for that one single download (10,241,974 byte file).
Its massive, and that's the primary reason we started moving to BitTorrent to help distribute those downloads.
We're not having any trouble serving lots of torrent files from the same instance of the server. To the tune of over 109GiB of Plucker torrent downloads this year.
That doesn't count the downloads over http, rsync, and through our mirrors. Probably another 200GiB there, rough estimate.
I use bttrack and point it to the torrent directory (locked with --allowed_dir of course), and it works great.
I run a separate server on a separate port for various projects, to separate the torrents per-project. No issues at all.
"We can't even skip past the commercials on DVDs now."
Really? I can. It's not difficult at all if you put the slightest effort into it.
Actually, you can't. Its not a matter of effort, its a matter of the DVD itself disabling the 'Menu', 'Chapter', 'Forward', and other buttons on 5 players we have here, until you've watched the full intro commercials (which in some cases is up to 15 minutes). I haven't found a portable player yet that ignores these instructions, and neither have about 7,000 of my closest friends who also watch and enjoy rented movies. Its a huge (and growing) problem.
If the answer to this is to rip the DVD to my laptop, encode it there, then burn it back to a DVD-RW so I can watch it commercial-free, that's unacceptable. I don't have 3 days to wait to watch a 2 hour movie I might not even enjoy.
Also, to correct your original reply, this mandate isn't for HDTV, its for DTV. By 2009, all ANALOG signals will be phased out. If you are still using services or devices which accept analog signals, you will need a converter or new equipment.
I choose not to pay all of those costs to upgrade my equipment, just so I can still see the same programming on the same set (or a new set), with no added benefit. Why would I care to see my favorite shows like Law & Order or CSI in DTV, when they work perfectly fine right now?
Your opinion of the changes might matter in your circle of influence, but this hasn't changed my mind. There is no reason to upgrade, there is no benefit, and I'm going to be saving lots of money by simply cancelling our services instead, and I'm definitely not alone in this choice either.
Only when the government mandates that you leave your TV on all day will we have a problem (a la 1984.)
[...]
Television is still a business that derives its income from viewers, albeit indirectly. If people stop watching, then the advertisers stop paying.
[...]
The market is still driven by the consumer.
The market is changing, and we're already being taxed on media services that we don't even take advantage of ourselves. Look at this 2009 DTV mandate.. 15% of the cost we're already paying into it is going to pay for converters for people who can't afford to upgrade their sets to DTV-compatible sets. If I'm not going to be using DTV in 2009, why should I pay a tax just so my neighbor can, when he can't even afford the upgrade?
Companies are making more money through litigation in some cases than actual product revenue. Advertisers are making money by buying lists of names of people who will likely buy one of their other products, not necessarily from the media itself. When everything goes pay-per-view, you can bet there'll still be ads on the bottom of every television show.
If I pay for a program, I expect it to be commercial-free, ad-free, and I expect it to play on my player of choice. Once any of those rights are removed, it is no longer useful to me, and I just won't pay for it.
Speaking of the on-screen ads, what the fsck is up with these 1/3-of-the-screen-height advertisements for the NEXT show, while I'm watching my current show? Why do I care that "The Krall Show" is on at 11:45pm, when I'm watching CSI at 7pm?
The animation and annoying distraction of these ads is simply unacceptable (not to mention, is probably going to cause ADD in my daughter if she sees them over and over). When I pay for cable television, I expect to see the programs I'm paying for, not ads. Period.
But back on point.. soon we'll see television being paid for without direct customer input. We're already seeing it in many other technology markets. Sony did a customer survey to see what features people wanted in an mp3 player... and they promptly ignored them ALL, because they insisted that the one thing users wanted most, was to NOT be able to play standard mp3s on their Sony mp3 player, and instead, play proprietary format audio files instead. Suuuure. Companies are just producing crap, without a single care for what the customer wants. (I ranted about something very similar and related on my blog a few days ago, regarding headphones).
Note, I consistently use the word "customer" in my vernacular. We are not "consumers", we do not "consume" technology products. We do not "consume" media. Continuing to use this term belies the exact problem we're trying to solve with these companies. We don't belly up and eat at the "trough" of technology.
All we need on top of DTV + Broadcast Flag is a 2-way video camera (1-way cameras already exist in many devices [phones, laptops, etc.]), and George Orwell's future is our present. Don't believe me?
Look at the recent article a few days ago about how teachers in Arizona are going to be using complete electronic curriculum, no printed books. Who is to say that they can't change a sentence or two and basically "rewrite" history? The Ministry of Truth would be proud of our current state of affairs.
Its happening in bits and pieces everywhere, and nobody who has the power to change it seems to care. Its scary.
Now I know exactly when to throw out the old TV, cancel our cable television service and drop the NetFlix subscription... that should save us about $100/month in subscription fees alone. We could use the extra $1,200/year to put into our other projects.
January 2009, check. Thank you for the reminder.
My daughter will be 4, and that's just enough time for me to educate her about the corruption in mass media and broadcast television.
With the broadcast flag being fully entrenched by that time (whether passed via a rider on some unrelated bill or otherwise), and media being contorted to represent the "Truth" as given by the current administration in power (can you say "Al Jazeera"?), there really is no point to watching TV.
We can't control our media (even media we've bought in the store, er, I mean "rented"). We can't even skip past the commercials on DVDs now. How long before we can't skip past commercials on television too?
Will the broadcast flag enforce that too? Maybe we can change channels, but it will force our sets into Picture-in-Picture mode, with the second channel playing in the little window in the corner, with volume dedicated to the commercial.
Will mute even work for commercials?
What about time-shifting television programs?
Will the new sets allow programs not "authenticated" for playing at a different time work?
Will all media just become "pay-per-view" like it is in the hotels?
The best HD reality shows lie right outside my front door.
"But it flat out doesn't work at all in IE. Doesn't even come close. Does this matter? No, not at all. Because the people I'm developing this for don't care what browser they're using. As far as they're concerned, they double-click on the Firefox icon to run this application, and that's all that matters."
And instead of spending the time making it work with standards and standards-compliant browsers, you're going to have to add per-browser hacks, fixes, and possibly rewrite the whole thing over when/if a new browser comes out that doesn't work like the one you've coded your application specifically to work with.
Using standards, you can make sure your site or application is working today, and will remain future compatible, without any per-browser hacks, useragent detection, or anything of the sort.
It takes a little more time up front, but you save LOTS of time by not having to chase down little bugs in other browsers.
What if your company decides to move to all OSX machines, and your site doesn't work on Safari? Do you recode the site to work on Safari? What if you just broke it in Mozilla? What if your employer opens the site up to a new partner, which only uses MSIE? What now?
Granted, lots of "What-Ifs", but they matter when you do it right.. or do it wrong.
"They are increasing usability at the expense of accessibility."
Unfortunately, accessiblility is going to win this one out, thanks to web services and RSS and many other things. Eye-candy is great, but without a viable fallback, it will die off. That is the nature of evolution, and this will go the same route.
"The vast majority of users are sighted and on a PC. I don't think the solution is to code down to the lowest common denominator, but to build up the other dumber clients of web apps."
How do you know the vast majority of users are sighted on a PC? There are literally thousands upon thousands of users who are using a PC, who are legally blind or entirely blind. One of my colleagues uses 25+ point fonts because he can't see anything smaller than that, and he reads 8" from the screen.
The advent of the Internet is enabling people with disabilities to meet and join other communities of disabled people (visually, aurally and otherwise), and those communities are strong and growing. Elderly people are getting on the Internet, and many of them can't legally drive because of their sight.
While your own personal userbase might be fully-sighted, don't assume that your demographic expands to the rest of the world... it doesn't.
If the most-important part of your website is the presentation and not the content, you're doing something wrong. Yes, presentation makes the content look better (in some cases), but the users who are there won't be buying your product because you have pretty fonts or a spiffy intro in Flash. They'll be buying it because of what it DOES for them.
"There is nothing more annoying than browsing to a site from a machine which doesn't have flash installed (don't want it) and realizing the site was written in such a way as to not be able to get past the into animation without flash."
I'll give you some more fuel to pour on that fire:
Can't change contrast (for those who might be colorblind and can't see light grey text on a white background. Who taught these kids color theory anyway? Barney the dinosaur?)
Can't change font size (whaddya mean you can't see my 6 point fonts, what are you, blind?)
No ability to search the text of a flash page using standard browser "Find" functions (yes, some search engines can index Flash now, with the proper hooks into the Macromedia Flash SDK, but its not exposed on the user end)
No fallback for non-Flash browsers, built into the Flash itself
It irritates me too, so I just don't use it, or recommend sites that do. Let's just make our entire site in PostScript, or better yet an OpenOffice.org.sxw or an OpenDocument.odp file format.
"Why not? You don't have the right plugin? Oh, too bad... get with the times!"
</sarcasm>
"People who make web-sites which can't be operated without flash need beatings."
People just need beatings anyway, just to let them know they can be beaten by anyone for any reason. This whole "Gimme" generation and the new business model of "Don't have a viable business plan? Sue someone! Profit!" needs to stop.
I'm going to have to start a new campaign called "Slap the Stupid out of Everyone" that does just that. Can't count change in the drive-thru? Find a new job, you're fired. Can't figure out how to answer questions about your product in the store? You're fired. Parking like an idiot? Towed.
I'm tired of just ignoring and tolerating stupidity and ineptitude and excuses. It has to stop.
"Yet, people wear their xhtml compliant gif's like medals of honor."
And most, if not all of those XHTML compliant buttons on websites are incorrect, since they are sending the content as text/html, which is not an XML application, as XHTML was designed for.
If your XHTML isn't being sent as application/xhtml+xml, then it isn't XHTML, period. Yes, I'm a purist like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you missed the joke.
The Telescreen in George Orwell's "1984" was a two-way flatpanel device that was installed in every home, used to broadcast propaganda for the current party in power, as well as watch every citizen, through the use of a two-way video camera. You could turn the sound down, but you could never turn it all the way off.
Our current technology can easily implement this exact device.
We're only a short hop away from this right now, and its scary to think that a smallish collaboration of vendors would be able to do this within weeks rather than years.
While HPUX gets a bit "long-in-the-tooth", there are still quite a few other Unix communities that have user-centric forums and websites dedicated to their support.
One of my favorites is UserBlue , focused on IBM and AIX solutions. They're hosting mailing lists, webcasts, conferences (with speakers needed in some cases), and lots of other resources where you can tie into other developers, users and solutions involving AIX.
UserBlue is run BY USERS, not by IBM, and that tends to help its buoyency quite a bit, without any specific agenda to the discussions.
I'm not sure what Sun has in this space, so I can't comment there, but their developer community and internal developer blogs are busy lately.
If you're an ex-Interex user, consider hopping on over to UserBlue and continue to share your knowledge and experience with other Unix users and developers.
My only question is... can you turn the Telescreen^WTiVo Screen volume all the way off? Or can you just turn it down?
But how would you know, unless you disassembled your laptop and all of the software running on it?
There are in-keyboard, in-laptop keystroke loggers now that corporations are considering putting in their laptops and desktop keyboards, which sends the data back up the pipe at regular intervals when connected. Companies are using this stuff TODAY.
Granted, its not GPS, but that'll eventually be a part of it as well. With Always-On devices becoming the standard, there's nothing to stop them from including a bit of firmware that simply stores your coordinates every 5 minutes and when you're connected polling your mail or whatever, sends that back upstream. Were you in a meeting for the last hour? Or down the road at the coffee shop? They'll know.
Yet another feature for employers and others to use to track you and invade your privacy further. I can see uses for this (LoJack for laptops?), but I can see it being abused right out of the gate. "Sorry, in order for you to connect to the corporate LAN, your GPS needs to be enabled."
Someone has figured out how to write software that displays on the LCD touchpad of some of the recent laptops (a penguin of course). Perhaps you could use that... but if your lid is already open so you can see the touchpad, why not just have a clock on the screen? I use osd_clock and osd_cat to keep 6 different timezones in the corner of my screen, so I know what time it is where my colleagues are.
The Toshiba Librettos had a very slick little mouse device on the lid of the laptop, which worked surprisingly well. You can see an image of it here.
Basically your thumb sits on the grey "dot" on the lower-right, and your first finger and middle finger "pinch" the lid there, and where your fingers rest behind the lid, are your left and right mouse buttons. It was amazingly intuitive.
But back on point, IBM has a foldaway mouse that fits in their UltraBay slot. I Googled but couldn't find a good image of that.
The technology exists, but the motivation to produce it does not. Vendors are too busy producing garbage that they THINK we'll buy, instead of listening to our needs and producing what we WILL buy.
Then it makes sense to ALLOW Day Pass Borrowing, not restrict it.
Case in point: I go to the park with my family, and I buy them all flags, t-shirts, pins, whatever... park schwag. I'm all done outfitting my family with Disney Dreck, therefore I'm no longer providing value to the park.
But if I loan my pass to a friend who lives nearby for the next day, he can take HIS family to the park, buy THEM all kinds of t-shirts and schwag, and make the park more money.
It just doesn't make financial sense that they'd prohibit this.. I"m buying admission to the park; 1 body (or family) per-pass. Handing that pass to someone else doesn't break that rule. If I lend my pass to someone else, I can no longer enter the park until I get the pass back. Either way, Disney is assured that a human body is taking up space in their cash register somewhere.
I missed the part where the OP cross-referenced that with the survey he/she took that took into account the original statement about "..without thinking due to ignorance". I anxiously await those results as well. Of those 45,000 projects, how many (in real numbers) chose the GPL "without thinking"? A 2-dimensional matrix of these datasets will do.
And they, as copyright holders, are free to change the license of that GPL project to whatever they wish, to BSD, GPL, freeware or otherwise. Of course as you mention, it doesn't take effect retroactively...
Besides you making a completely wild 'rectal approximation' about the nature of choices made by thousands of developers who put projects on Sourceforge..
How do you figure that the choice of a license "causes problems for corporate developers"? Did those corporate developers not read the instructions when they put their code on Sourceforge? Did those corporate developers forget that they can re-edit their Sourceforge project and change the license at any time? I'm missing your point here.
Unless of course you're trying to say that the projects on Sourceforge should exist solely to benefit corporate developers. See, corporate developers are paid to... wait for it... "develop" code. This means writing code, not searching Sourceforge for projects that they can pick and choose code out of to solve their corporate goals.
And lastly, the needs and desires have absolutely no weight on the choice a developer makes for his license. They're not writing their code to help you, they're writing it to help themselves.
Yes, I too upgraded to X.org, specifically to get the DynamicCLocks feature working on my Thinkpad T42p to increase battery life and reduce heat on the GPU.
Unfortunately, installing X.org, and JUST X.org, required the removal of 526 packages from my system (yes, exactly 547 packages, which you can see here, sorted alphabetically).
This included all of GNOME, themes, widgets, applets, all of KDE and related packages, pose (the Palm OS Emulator) and its foundation lib FLTK, abiword, OpenOffice.org, and hundreds of other packages.
After installing X.org back on, I was able to install about 100 of those packages back onboard, but now there's a nice diversion between the two xlib versions. I can't install Abiword for example, without pulling out gaim, gedit, gnome-core, and a few other libraries. Its like this with about 300 of the packages I had onboard before. pose won't install because it requires libfltk, and libfltk requires htmldoc. Installing htmldoc requires libfltk (another circular dependency).
This reminds me of the pain we went through with the libc5 => libc6 migration, except now we have the gcc4 ABI change and X.org breaking everything that uses a colored pixel.
Nice... it'll be a few months before its all sorted out, no-doubt.
Since I can't take the risk of one of my users choosing a weak password, I've simply locked sshd down. Easy to do, and keeps things sane.
One of my friends had his box broken into because a user on his machine had a weak default password. The maliscious person got in, replaced sshd, and started capturing all failed login attempts. Since most of us had authorized_keys set up, when we tried to log in and were prompted for a password, we got suspiscious. Other users would try their password several times and give up. Those passwords were being sent back off to some site in Russia or Slovenia or something.
The other interesting prong of this attack was that the users who failed to log in and "handed" their password to the attackers, had their ~/.ssh/known_hosts scanned for external hosts they've connected to, and the username + password they just used was attempted on those other hosts, propagating the attack further.
The following short script firewalls off port 22 for unknown hosts. Simply add the IPs of your users or netblocks you connect from, and you're done.
That's precisely the problem... the government IS setting limits on what corporations can and cannot collect, and those limits are astronomically high. That is what we're afraid of... especially with our current administration's overuse of the word "terror" in every sentence.
Are we afraid that terrorists would have too much fun at our theme parks? Are we afraid that they'd somehow enjoy themselves more than they should, being "terrorists" and all.
Who cares if they hand their day pass to someone else. They can walk into a mall with a backpack and kill 700 people, or a theme park with a stroller full of C4 and kill the same number of people. Having their fingerprints on file doesn't stop that behavior at all.
As with all of these "anti-terror" fantasies concocted by our current adminstration, they serve no purpose other than to persecute the innocent and continue to erode our basic freedoms as guaranteed to us by the Constitution.
More to the point.. they could just replace the scanners they're using today which are "broken", with ones that are much more accurate AND store the fingerprints as well as geometry. To the park visitors, they'd just think that Disney "fixed" their scanners.
"Oh, just put your hand on the thing there, its just checking your finger's length and stuff for a match, most of the time they don't even work."
"Oh neat, I guess they fixed it."
Meanwhile your fingerprints were taken without you knowing about it, because for all you knew, it was just checking finger geometry with the "broken" scanners.
Its like banner ads. Eventually your brain tunes them out as noise and ignores them. Eventually people will just get used to using their hand to scan into everything, and they'll forget that some scanners are actually being used for information storage and gathering purposes, and not just for "comparison".
I just had a thought after reading your reply... What are the two largest venues to capture as many people as possible for the purposes of "monitoring" or gathering personal information about them?
Without a doubt, these are the two quickest ways to get as much information (fingerprints, credit history, verifyable location, etc.) from as many people as possible in the least obtrusive way.
Now all they have to do is figure out how to get the rest of us to willfully hand over our freedoms and personal information to put into their big national DNA/tracking/"anti-terrorism" database, and they're done.
What if they required that you stand naked in front of a camera for full frontal photographs, in order to enter? Anyone between the ages of 16 and 65 have to be photographed nude to enter... after all, its their park adn their rules, right?
Wrong. What if they required your social security number, home address and credit card number before allowing entry?
Ok, so it would be ok for me to fill in my fingerprints with some gel and putty on that day then, right? Since they're checking "geometry" and not the actual fingerprints, they shouldn't have a problem with this, right?
Wrong. They're using two fingers and not to check the geometry of the hand.
What if it was a blood sample? What if it was more than that? How intrusive does it have to get to be admitted in there. We're PAYING them for their service, and when we leave, the services are terminated.
Can I guarantee that when I leave, all of my personal information collected is permanently destroyed? No, I very much doubt it.
Or disable the use of xmlrpc, which we had to do in several cases, because the modules we use are not ported over to 4.6.2 yet, and we'd lose quite a bit of the database schema by upgrading, which would eat some data we require.
In our case, an upgrade isn't possible without a dump, clean reinstall and mostly-manual reload of the data by hand. No thanks, not yet anyway. When we migrate to a new server in a few months or years, we'll consider an upgrade, but right now, losing data is unacceptable.
YMMV of course, if you use a "basic" Drupal instance.
Replying to myself here... I just did a quick check and we've served up 25,502,515,260 bytes over http for one of those files (plucker_desktop, Windows build) THIS MONTH on the primary server.
Since we round-robin across 3 mirrors, that could potentially be 75GiB for this month alone for that one single download (10,241,974 byte file).
Its massive, and that's the primary reason we started moving to BitTorrent to help distribute those downloads.
We're not having any trouble serving lots of torrent files from the same instance of the server. To the tune of over 109GiB of Plucker torrent downloads this year.
That doesn't count the downloads over http, rsync, and through our mirrors. Probably another 200GiB there, rough estimate.
I use bttrack and point it to the torrent directory (locked with --allowed_dir of course), and it works great.
I run a separate server on a separate port for various projects, to separate the torrents per-project. No issues at all.
Actually, you can't. Its not a matter of effort, its a matter of the DVD itself disabling the 'Menu', 'Chapter', 'Forward', and other buttons on 5 players we have here, until you've watched the full intro commercials (which in some cases is up to 15 minutes). I haven't found a portable player yet that ignores these instructions, and neither have about 7,000 of my closest friends who also watch and enjoy rented movies. Its a huge (and growing) problem.
If the answer to this is to rip the DVD to my laptop, encode it there, then burn it back to a DVD-RW so I can watch it commercial-free, that's unacceptable. I don't have 3 days to wait to watch a 2 hour movie I might not even enjoy.
Also, to correct your original reply, this mandate isn't for HDTV, its for DTV. By 2009, all ANALOG signals will be phased out. If you are still using services or devices which accept analog signals, you will need a converter or new equipment.
I choose not to pay all of those costs to upgrade my equipment, just so I can still see the same programming on the same set (or a new set), with no added benefit. Why would I care to see my favorite shows like Law & Order or CSI in DTV, when they work perfectly fine right now?
Your opinion of the changes might matter in your circle of influence, but this hasn't changed my mind. There is no reason to upgrade, there is no benefit, and I'm going to be saving lots of money by simply cancelling our services instead, and I'm definitely not alone in this choice either.
Problem solved.
The market is changing, and we're already being taxed on media services that we don't even take advantage of ourselves. Look at this 2009 DTV mandate.. 15% of the cost we're already paying into it is going to pay for converters for people who can't afford to upgrade their sets to DTV-compatible sets. If I'm not going to be using DTV in 2009, why should I pay a tax just so my neighbor can, when he can't even afford the upgrade?
Companies are making more money through litigation in some cases than actual product revenue. Advertisers are making money by buying lists of names of people who will likely buy one of their other products, not necessarily from the media itself. When everything goes pay-per-view, you can bet there'll still be ads on the bottom of every television show.
If I pay for a program, I expect it to be commercial-free, ad-free, and I expect it to play on my player of choice. Once any of those rights are removed, it is no longer useful to me, and I just won't pay for it.
Speaking of the on-screen ads, what the fsck is up with these 1/3-of-the-screen-height advertisements for the NEXT show, while I'm watching my current show? Why do I care that "The Krall Show" is on at 11:45pm, when I'm watching CSI at 7pm?
The animation and annoying distraction of these ads is simply unacceptable (not to mention, is probably going to cause ADD in my daughter if she sees them over and over). When I pay for cable television, I expect to see the programs I'm paying for, not ads. Period.
But back on point.. soon we'll see television being paid for without direct customer input. We're already seeing it in many other technology markets. Sony did a customer survey to see what features people wanted in an mp3 player... and they promptly ignored them ALL, because they insisted that the one thing users wanted most, was to NOT be able to play standard mp3s on their Sony mp3 player, and instead, play proprietary format audio files instead. Suuuure. Companies are just producing crap, without a single care for what the customer wants. (I ranted about something very similar and related on my blog a few days ago, regarding headphones).
Note, I consistently use the word "customer" in my vernacular. We are not "consumers", we do not "consume" technology products. We do not "consume" media. Continuing to use this term belies the exact problem we're trying to solve with these companies. We don't belly up and eat at the "trough" of technology.
All we need on top of DTV + Broadcast Flag is a 2-way video camera (1-way cameras already exist in many devices [phones, laptops, etc.]), and George Orwell's future is our present. Don't believe me?
Look at the recent article a few days ago about how teachers in Arizona are going to be using complete electronic curriculum, no printed books. Who is to say that they can't change a sentence or two and basically "rewrite" history? The Ministry of Truth would be proud of our current state of affairs.
Its happening in bits and pieces everywhere, and nobody who has the power to change it seems to care. Its scary.
Now I know exactly when to throw out the old TV, cancel our cable television service and drop the NetFlix subscription... that should save us about $100/month in subscription fees alone. We could use the extra $1,200/year to put into our other projects.
January 2009, check. Thank you for the reminder.
My daughter will be 4, and that's just enough time for me to educate her about the corruption in mass media and broadcast television.
With the broadcast flag being fully entrenched by that time (whether passed via a rider on some unrelated bill or otherwise), and media being contorted to represent the "Truth" as given by the current administration in power (can you say "Al Jazeera"?), there really is no point to watching TV.
We can't control our media (even media we've bought in the store, er, I mean "rented"). We can't even skip past the commercials on DVDs now. How long before we can't skip past commercials on television too?
The best HD reality shows lie right outside my front door.
And instead of spending the time making it work with standards and standards-compliant browsers, you're going to have to add per-browser hacks, fixes, and possibly rewrite the whole thing over when/if a new browser comes out that doesn't work like the one you've coded your application specifically to work with.
Using standards, you can make sure your site or application is working today, and will remain future compatible, without any per-browser hacks, useragent detection, or anything of the sort.
It takes a little more time up front, but you save LOTS of time by not having to chase down little bugs in other browsers.
What if your company decides to move to all OSX machines, and your site doesn't work on Safari? Do you recode the site to work on Safari? What if you just broke it in Mozilla? What if your employer opens the site up to a new partner, which only uses MSIE? What now?
Granted, lots of "What-Ifs", but they matter when you do it right.. or do it wrong.
You mustn't be talking to me, because the first thing I tried was using lynx and links2 -g... which worked fine.
I wonder who your reply was intended for.
Unfortunately, accessiblility is going to win this one out, thanks to web services and RSS and many other things. Eye-candy is great, but without a viable fallback, it will die off. That is the nature of evolution, and this will go the same route.
How do you know the vast majority of users are sighted on a PC? There are literally thousands upon thousands of users who are using a PC, who are legally blind or entirely blind. One of my colleagues uses 25+ point fonts because he can't see anything smaller than that, and he reads 8" from the screen.
The advent of the Internet is enabling people with disabilities to meet and join other communities of disabled people (visually, aurally and otherwise), and those communities are strong and growing. Elderly people are getting on the Internet, and many of them can't legally drive because of their sight.
While your own personal userbase might be fully-sighted, don't assume that your demographic expands to the rest of the world... it doesn't.
If the most-important part of your website is the presentation and not the content, you're doing something wrong. Yes, presentation makes the content look better (in some cases), but the users who are there won't be buying your product because you have pretty fonts or a spiffy intro in Flash. They'll be buying it because of what it DOES for them.
I'll give you some more fuel to pour on that fire:
It irritates me too, so I just don't use it, or recommend sites that do. Let's just make our entire site in PostScript, or better yet an OpenOffice.org .sxw or an OpenDocument .odp file format.
People just need beatings anyway, just to let them know they can be beaten by anyone for any reason. This whole "Gimme" generation and the new business model of "Don't have a viable business plan? Sue someone! Profit!" needs to stop.
I'm going to have to start a new campaign called "Slap the Stupid out of Everyone" that does just that. Can't count change in the drive-thru? Find a new job, you're fired. Can't figure out how to answer questions about your product in the store? You're fired. Parking like an idiot? Towed.
I'm tired of just ignoring and tolerating stupidity and ineptitude and excuses. It has to stop.
And most, if not all of those XHTML compliant buttons on websites are incorrect, since they are sending the content as text/html, which is not an XML application, as XHTML was designed for.
If your XHTML isn't being sent as application/xhtml+xml, then it isn't XHTML, period. Yes, I'm a purist like that.
See Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful for more detail on this.