Geez, 200+ posts so far and nobody has even discussed the algorithm described in the story's link. Conspiracy theories are nice and all, but what do you all think about the idea of basing the spam detection on the receivers' reputations?
I think it sounds interesting but there may be some hole in it that I don't see.
Is it really a good idea to be sending laptops to children with no electricity?
Well, one has to assume that the OLPC people and the Peruvian government aren't complete idiots, and that they will send the OLPCs to places where electricity is available (or perhaps send solar panels along with the OLPCs when sending them to places where electricity isn't available)
Apart from Wikipedia, there's no magic library full of free textbooks and reading materials available to OLPC users that the rest of us somehow don't know about
Well, there is this little facility called "the World Wide Web" that contains all kinds of useful information. You'd be surprised at all the stuff that's out there, especially when you consider that much of it is not in English and therefore presumably not on our mental map of the Internet at all. And above and beyond information, there's also access to think about -- when you're stuck in the middle of nowhere, it can be a real God-send to be able to send/receive email with your friends and relatives, buy and sell products on line, etc.
Of course the monkeys have better memory skills than the humans. Monkeys still depend on memorization to get things done; humans, OTOH, don't bother to memorize anything anymore since it's easier to just look everything up on Google. We're completely out of practice.
I'm not trying to crap on your parade, it just seems like ever since the.com boom people have been saying it more and more and I just don't see it as being a good idea.
I agree with you 100% for home use. For offices, OTOH, thin clients may be a good idea. You shouldn't have any expectations of privacy on your office machine anyway (it is the company's machine, after all) and you definitely shouldn't be keeping your intimate videos there:^). The office servers should definitely be owned and operated by the company (or at least by someone the company feels they can trust 100%)
That would be my first thought except that I didn't have ANY problems under tiger. I have also run a stress test on the RAM and didn't find any problems.
Funny you should mention that; I upgraded my mom's Mini to Leopard this last weekend. Two days after I did the upgrade, the mini's RAM completely failed (the computer wouldn't even boot, it just gave three beeps on startup, aka "no RAM installed"). Okay yes, I had installed 3rd party RAM, but that RAM had been working fine for 3 months and the Leopard upgrade was software only (okay, and adding an external firewire drive for Time Machine to use).
Eventually I just took the mini to the Apple Store and paid the $300 to replace the RAM with "real" Apple RAM, and now everything works fine again... but it still seems suspicious that the RAM would die so soon after the Leopard upgrade. I can't think of how a software change could cause a hardware failure, though.
Speaking of landscape destruction... Have you ever driven the interstate through Palm Springs, CA? It is just like driving through an industrial wasteland.
That's your opinion, of course. I think they are quite beautiful, like driving through a kinetic sculpture. But even if for the sake of argument we agree that they are ugly to some people, they are still much less ugly than, say, an oil refinery, or mountaintop removal coal mining.
If you don't trust your flac-giving buddy, why take anything he gives you at all?
Your flac-giving buddy doesn't have to be malicious. The percentage of people who are qualified to recognize a virus-bearing FLAC vs a correct FLAC is approximately zero. So if you're going to refrain from accepting files from people who are "untrustworthy", then you are essentially not going to be able to accept files from anyone.
The point is that "flac" cannot compromise your system, only your data. Unless you play the file as root.
Or unless there is also an escalation bug in your OS that allows someone with non-root access to get root access. And chances are quite good that there is.
Twenty years ago, they probably would have been laughed out of the market and/or sued into the ground for selling the stuff they call software these days..
Nah, twenty years ago it wouldn't have mattered, because there wasn't enough Internet around to make botnets practical.
That's utter horseshit. You're basically saying that not only does capitalism not work, but its dangerous as well.
I think he's saying that capitalism doesn't work reliably enough. Remember Enron? Remember Bhopal? Remember the Exxon Valdez? etc.
One problem with capitalism is that its main goal is maximizing profits (and often short-term profits at that). Capitalizsm sees safety at best as a means to that end, and at worst as a obstacle to be subverted. But with nuclear power, you really need to have "safety first".
These microbes will be forced to work nonstop on Hydrogen production from the moment they are born to the moment they are finally literally worked to death
Relax, dude. We've fixed them up with an excellent simulation of their society at the peak of its development. They'll go happily about their simulated lives, and never know they are just sitting in a vat generating power for us.
If we have reason to believe someone's intent is to do us harm, you nip that problem in the bud and save a lot of lives on both sides in the process.
That only works if you are correct in your assessments, both of the risk of taking action and of the risk of doing nothing. If you are wrong, it backfires -- as we have seen in Iraq. The Iraq war didn't save any lives, because the WMDs it was supposed to save us from were imaginary. To the contrary, it has destroyed 4,000+ American lives (more than 9/11), caused tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and cost us trillions of dollars and our reputation as a country of honor. So it's equally absurd to act as if starting a "preemptive war" carries no risks, as it is something that should be done lightly without a sober and impartial review of the all of the evidence.
Feel free to make the argument that Iraq (or Iran) isn't one of those cases, but don't even try to sell an idea that we should wait naively to be attacked before we defend ourselves. As much as you may hate Bush, that position is absolutely indefensible.
The above sounds quite reasonable -- the problem is that Bush wasn't defending us from a threat. He was actively manufacturing a threat as an excuse to start a war that he had already decided he wanted to start. In a perfect world, our government would only start a war when it was genuinely necessary to defend the country. In the world we actually live in, however, there is a clear temptation for governments to start wars for reasons other than national defense, and this was one of those cases. "National defense" was a fig leaf for Iraq, not a genuine motivation. So again, if "national defense" means doing what Bush did in Iraq, we're against it. If the WMDs (or even credible evidence of WMDs) had existed in Iraq in 2003, you might have a point, but they didn't.
That's nonsense unless you are making the statement that everyone on "the left" is opposed to national defense.
How is invading a foreign country "defense"? It's offense. Defense would have been stopping the Iraqi army from invading US territory.
I refuse to believe that 100% of "the left" agreed that Iraq was not a threat.
Ignoring the fact that in a group of millions of people you can always find someone with any outlying opinion you want and then pretend that that person's views somehow represent the majority.... it's perfectly possible for someone to believe that Iraq was "a threat" (whatever that means) and still be against invading Iraq. Not all problems are best dealt with through military force. For many, military force makes them worse.
Unless, of course, you answer the first sentence with "Yes, the left is opposed to national defense." Because if that's the case, that's something the public needs to know. It's often been suspected but concrete proof would be great.
If the Iraq war is what you mean by "national defense", then hell yes we're against "national defense". If you wanted to redefine the phrase "fluffy kitten" to mean "unjustified invasion of a foreign coutnry", then I supposed we'd be against fluffy kittens also. But that's merely due to your deliberate Orwellian misuse of the term, as the public by now is well aware.
That all said, it think it's far fetch to call Cheney and Bush "liers" as that would imply they actively knew this information was bogus in the first place.
Actually, the truth is worse than that: they didn't know whether the information was true or not, and they didn't care to find out. The man told them what they wanted to hear, and that was good enough for them to base their war on. They wanted a war, and Curveball's testimony was a handy excuse.
But between us, I'm glad we got rid of Hussein. That bastard deserved to be hung!
Hussein was a bastard. The situation we have now is much worse. I don't see what's to be glad about trading a small problem for a big one.
Really, it just boils down to the Left's basic principles. [...] They backed this war in 2002, because they thought it would be over soon and they'd have brownie points for being for "national defense".
The above might be accurate if you were talking about Democrats, but as a card-carrying member of "The Left", I can assure that we were, are, and always have been 100% against the war in Iraq. Remember all of the protest marches, candlelight vigils, meetings with congressmen, etc? (No, you probably don't, because you were watching media outlets that didn't cover that sort of thing.... it would have undercut their ceaseless hyping of the war) So please save your commentary on our "lack of principles" until after you become aware of what actually happened.
It seems to me that if it's truly an "open architecture" phone, it won't matter all that much what they "plan to do". You can buy your new gPhone, overwrite the pre-installed crapware with your favorite Gentoo Mobile distribution (or whatever), and then you'll have the behavior you like, not the behavior the Marketing Overlords like.
And if it turns out that it's not really a open architecture (e.g. it comes with spyware that can't be removed), then it's just business as usual and there's nothing to see here. Back to OpenMoko....
At most you have a beef with Ubuntu, not Linux itself.
Sure. But nobody uses a kernel alone; to get useful work done you need the entire package. And that was my point: that Apple ships a complete product that is a well-known quantity, whereas Linux is not. When someone buys a Mac, it's a Mac, and it "just works". There are only a few versions of the software and hardware in existence, and they all work well. When someone is running Linux, that could mean any of hundreds of different things and we end up running around in circles trying to work around problems (or, less productively, arguing about what is or is not "Linux"). This uses up time and energy that could be better spent on productive work.
To sum up: if we had chosen a Mac for our server, we would not be having this discussion because we would not have encountered this problem. (and I say that as someone who uses Linux as his primary OS, 8+ hours per day, so it's not that I don't like Linux; I just know from experience that Apple's combination of technical excellence and monocultural coherence does provide some advantages in the field)
That's unfortunate that you have a customer who is dumb.
No, we have a customer that would like to use the bog-standard equipment they paid for. That's not a lot to ask.
Tho, it's *native* resolution is 1600x1200? Talk about cruisin for a bruisin. You sure the videocard even supports that video mode? Sure it, should, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it didn't.
Why is 1600x1200 such a difficult requirement in 2007? As far as whether the video card supports it, the same hardware was working fine at 1600x1200 under SUSE 10.x several months ago, then we decided (for various unrelated reasons) to upgrade to Ubuntu, and now we have this problem.
I stand by my statement, though. Getting a monitor to work at high res on a server should be waayyyyyat the bottom of the "things that matter in any way whatsoever" list, since any reasonably smart admin is going to be utilizing a remote connnection anyway.
This server won't have a "reasonably smart admin" available, that is the point. The server will not be connected to the Internet for security reasons (it controls audio at a theme park), so any administration will be done by the customer, possibly with our tech people answering questions over the phone. If the server was an Apple machine, our job would have been done several days ago because everything would have "just worked" out of the box. It doesn't much matter whether YOU think it's important or not, it's important in this application and while Linux should be able to do handle this application easily, it's currently not doing so.
What's the point of caring if a rackmount server runs 1600x1200?
Well, since several people have asked, I'll answer: in this case, it's connected to an LCD monitor with 1600x1200 native revolution, and the customer wishes to be able to administer the server via GUI on that monitor. Currently the monitor is allowing 1024x768 resolution only, which is really ugly and unprofessional looking.
Of course, the other point is: does it really matter why the users want the system to work right? The system needs to work as advertised, period -- not just "sort of work as long as you don't care about certain less important features like graphics". It's not like local 2D graphics are some kind of esoteric rocket science -- this is the sort of thing thing that ought to "just work" in a modern OS.
Seriously, what does an apple server offer over linux? Are there any advantages?
I can think of several possible advantages:
Apple's GUIs are (thought to be) better quality and easier to use than those of Linux. People who are uncomfortable running/admining a Linux box (read: don't want to RTFM) are often more familiar with MacOS/X.
Apple's hardware is of good quality, and just as importantly it is a known quantity -- when you get an Apple box, you can be sure that it will have all the necessary audio/video/network drivers installed and working. If you buy a generic PC and install Linux on it, you sometimes run into trouble getting the networking to work, or the video drivers to display your preferred screenmode, or the audio hardware to be recognized, or etc. This isn't due to any inherent superiority on Apple's part, it's merely because Apple's OS people work together with Apple's hardware people more closely than the Linux people work together with the various PC hardware manufacturers. That said, it saves a lot of hassle. (yes, even in 2007 -- as I type, our tech support guy is spending a lot of time and effort trying to convince Ubuntu Feisty Faun to display 1600x1200 graphics on a rackmount PC with an Intel graphics chipset... you'd think this stuff would have been worked out by now, but apparently not)
Like many other large companies, Apple still has to learn that one good way to make money is to sell customers something they want, rather than trying to ram something down people's throats.
The people in Apple's target market want a computer that "just works", is easy to use, and looks pretty. As it happens, that is exactly what Apple sells, and that is why Apple is doing quite well. So it's not very clear what your point is.
Because the Internet would be flooded with people saying "I tried MacOS/X, it sucks, it's horribly slow and crashes all the time", and of course they wouldn't mention that they were trying to run it on their 486/66 with 16MB of RAM...
FWIW in my experience Mac minis are "decent hardware". Well, perhaps not for gaming, but for everything else they are reliable, quiet, fast, and cheap.
The flip side is that if they didn't require Mac hardware for their OS, they'd have a ready-made base of how many millions of people who are just about fed up with Windows but not technically-minded enough to scrap it and go to some Linux varient?
Those people aren't technically confident enough to be comfortable installing a new operating system, so they won't do it at any price. Instead, when they get fed up enough with the old computer, they will simply buy a new one. At that point, Apple will sell them a Mac (well, that's the hope anyway), they will have a painless upgrade experience, and Apple will get more money and generate fewer support costs than if it was just selling OS software alone.
Best way is to build in a Bluetooth interface with encryption, then swallow the memory module. (small grappling hooks will secure it to the lining of your small intestine). That way if the bad guys want your private information, they'll have to (quite literally) go through you to get it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it sounds interesting but there may be some hole in it that I don't see.
Well, one has to assume that the OLPC people and the Peruvian government aren't complete idiots, and that they will send the OLPCs to places where electricity is available (or perhaps send solar panels along with the OLPCs when sending them to places where electricity isn't available)
Apart from Wikipedia, there's no magic library full of free textbooks and reading materials available to OLPC users that the rest of us somehow don't know about
Well, there is this little facility called "the World Wide Web" that contains all kinds of useful information. You'd be surprised at all the stuff that's out there, especially when you consider that much of it is not in English and therefore presumably not on our mental map of the Internet at all. And above and beyond information, there's also access to think about -- when you're stuck in the middle of nowhere, it can be a real God-send to be able to send/receive email with your friends and relatives, buy and sell products on line, etc.
Of course the monkeys have better memory skills than the humans. Monkeys still depend on memorization to get things done; humans, OTOH, don't bother to memorize anything anymore since it's easier to just look everything up on Google. We're completely out of practice.
I agree with you 100% for home use. For offices, OTOH, thin clients may be a good idea. You shouldn't have any expectations of privacy on your office machine anyway (it is the company's machine, after all) and you definitely shouldn't be keeping your intimate videos there
Funny you should mention that; I upgraded my mom's Mini to Leopard this last weekend. Two days after I did the upgrade, the mini's RAM completely failed (the computer wouldn't even boot, it just gave three beeps on startup, aka "no RAM installed"). Okay yes, I had installed 3rd party RAM, but that RAM had been working fine for 3 months and the Leopard upgrade was software only (okay, and adding an external firewire drive for Time Machine to use).
Eventually I just took the mini to the Apple Store and paid the $300 to replace the RAM with "real" Apple RAM, and now everything works fine again... but it still seems suspicious that the RAM would die so soon after the Leopard upgrade. I can't think of how a software change could cause a hardware failure, though.
That's your opinion, of course. I think they are quite beautiful, like driving through a kinetic sculpture. But even if for the sake of argument we agree that they are ugly to some people, they are still much less ugly than, say, an oil refinery, or mountaintop removal coal mining.
Your flac-giving buddy doesn't have to be malicious. The percentage of people who are qualified to recognize a virus-bearing FLAC vs a correct FLAC is approximately zero. So if you're going to refrain from accepting files from people who are "untrustworthy", then you are essentially not going to be able to accept files from anyone.
The point is that "flac" cannot compromise your system, only your data. Unless you play the file as root.
Or unless there is also an escalation bug in your OS that allows someone with non-root access to get root access. And chances are quite good that there is.
Nah, twenty years ago it wouldn't have mattered, because there wasn't enough Internet around to make botnets practical.
I think he's saying that capitalism doesn't work reliably enough. Remember Enron? Remember Bhopal? Remember the Exxon Valdez? etc.
One problem with capitalism is that its main goal is maximizing profits (and often short-term profits at that). Capitalizsm sees safety at best as a means to that end, and at worst as a obstacle to be subverted. But with nuclear power, you really need to have "safety first".
How can we CENSOR your idea when you didn't even post one? ("I wish enviros would go away" doesn't count as an idea, btw)
Relax, dude. We've fixed them up with an excellent simulation of their society at the peak of its development. They'll go happily about their simulated lives, and never know they are just sitting in a vat generating power for us.
That only works if you are correct in your assessments, both of the risk of taking action and of the risk of doing nothing. If you are wrong, it backfires -- as we have seen in Iraq. The Iraq war didn't save any lives, because the WMDs it was supposed to save us from were imaginary. To the contrary, it has destroyed 4,000+ American lives (more than 9/11), caused tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and cost us trillions of dollars and our reputation as a country of honor. So it's equally absurd to act as if starting a "preemptive war" carries no risks, as it is something that should be done lightly without a sober and impartial review of the all of the evidence.
Feel free to make the argument that Iraq (or Iran) isn't one of those cases, but don't even try to sell an idea that we should wait naively to be attacked before we defend ourselves. As much as you may hate Bush, that position is absolutely indefensible.
The above sounds quite reasonable -- the problem is that Bush wasn't defending us from a threat. He was actively manufacturing a threat as an excuse to start a war that he had already decided he wanted to start. In a perfect world, our government would only start a war when it was genuinely necessary to defend the country. In the world we actually live in, however, there is a clear temptation for governments to start wars for reasons other than national defense, and this was one of those cases. "National defense" was a fig leaf for Iraq, not a genuine motivation. So again, if "national defense" means doing what Bush did in Iraq, we're against it. If the WMDs (or even credible evidence of WMDs) had existed in Iraq in 2003, you might have a point, but they didn't.
How is invading a foreign country "defense"? It's offense. Defense would have been stopping the Iraqi army from invading US territory.
I refuse to believe that 100% of "the left" agreed that Iraq was not a threat.
Ignoring the fact that in a group of millions of people you can always find someone with any outlying opinion you want and then pretend that that person's views somehow represent the majority.... it's perfectly possible for someone to believe that Iraq was "a threat" (whatever that means) and still be against invading Iraq. Not all problems are best dealt with through military force. For many, military force makes them worse.
Unless, of course, you answer the first sentence with "Yes, the left is opposed to national defense." Because if that's the case, that's something the public needs to know. It's often been suspected but concrete proof would be great.
If the Iraq war is what you mean by "national defense", then hell yes we're against "national defense". If you wanted to redefine the phrase "fluffy kitten" to mean "unjustified invasion of a foreign coutnry", then I supposed we'd be against fluffy kittens also. But that's merely due to your deliberate Orwellian misuse of the term, as the public by now is well aware.
Actually, the truth is worse than that: they didn't know whether the information was true or not, and they didn't care to find out. The man told them what they wanted to hear, and that was good enough for them to base their war on. They wanted a war, and Curveball's testimony was a handy excuse.
But between us, I'm glad we got rid of Hussein. That bastard deserved to be hung!
Hussein was a bastard. The situation we have now is much worse. I don't see what's to be glad about trading a small problem for a big one.
The above might be accurate if you were talking about Democrats, but as a card-carrying member of "The Left", I can assure that we were, are, and always have been 100% against the war in Iraq. Remember all of the protest marches, candlelight vigils, meetings with congressmen, etc? (No, you probably don't, because you were watching media outlets that didn't cover that sort of thing.... it would have undercut their ceaseless hyping of the war) So please save your commentary on our "lack of principles" until after you become aware of what actually happened.
And if it turns out that it's not really a open architecture (e.g. it comes with spyware that can't be removed), then it's just business as usual and there's nothing to see here. Back to OpenMoko....
Sure. But nobody uses a kernel alone; to get useful work done you need the entire package. And that was my point: that Apple ships a complete product that is a well-known quantity, whereas Linux is not. When someone buys a Mac, it's a Mac, and it "just works". There are only a few versions of the software and hardware in existence, and they all work well. When someone is running Linux, that could mean any of hundreds of different things and we end up running around in circles trying to work around problems (or, less productively, arguing about what is or is not "Linux"). This uses up time and energy that could be better spent on productive work.
To sum up: if we had chosen a Mac for our server, we would not be having this discussion because we would not have encountered this problem. (and I say that as someone who uses Linux as his primary OS, 8+ hours per day, so it's not that I don't like Linux; I just know from experience that Apple's combination of technical excellence and monocultural coherence does provide some advantages in the field)
No, we have a customer that would like to use the bog-standard equipment they paid for. That's not a lot to ask.
Tho, it's *native* resolution is 1600x1200? Talk about cruisin for a bruisin. You sure the videocard even supports that video mode? Sure it, should, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it didn't.
Why is 1600x1200 such a difficult requirement in 2007? As far as whether the video card supports it, the same hardware was working fine at 1600x1200 under SUSE 10.x several months ago, then we decided (for various unrelated reasons) to upgrade to Ubuntu, and now we have this problem.
I stand by my statement, though. Getting a monitor to work at high res on a server should be waayyyyyat the bottom of the "things that matter in any way whatsoever" list, since any reasonably smart admin is going to be utilizing a remote connnection anyway.
This server won't have a "reasonably smart admin" available, that is the point. The server will not be connected to the Internet for security reasons (it controls audio at a theme park), so any administration will be done by the customer, possibly with our tech people answering questions over the phone. If the server was an Apple machine, our job would have been done several days ago because everything would have "just worked" out of the box. It doesn't much matter whether YOU think it's important or not, it's important in this application and while Linux should be able to do handle this application easily, it's currently not doing so.
Well, since several people have asked, I'll answer: in this case, it's connected to an LCD monitor with 1600x1200 native revolution, and the customer wishes to be able to administer the server via GUI on that monitor. Currently the monitor is allowing 1024x768 resolution only, which is really ugly and unprofessional looking.
Of course, the other point is: does it really matter why the users want the system to work right? The system needs to work as advertised, period -- not just "sort of work as long as you don't care about certain less important features like graphics". It's not like local 2D graphics are some kind of esoteric rocket science -- this is the sort of thing thing that ought to "just work" in a modern OS.
I can think of several possible advantages:
The people in Apple's target market want a computer that "just works", is easy to use, and looks pretty. As it happens, that is exactly what Apple sells, and that is why Apple is doing quite well. So it's not very clear what your point is.
Because the Internet would be flooded with people saying "I tried MacOS/X, it sucks, it's horribly slow and crashes all the time", and of course they wouldn't mention that they were trying to run it on their 486/66 with 16MB of RAM...
FWIW in my experience Mac minis are "decent hardware". Well, perhaps not for gaming, but for everything else they are reliable, quiet, fast, and cheap.
Those people aren't technically confident enough to be comfortable installing a new operating system, so they won't do it at any price. Instead, when they get fed up enough with the old computer, they will simply buy a new one. At that point, Apple will sell them a Mac (well, that's the hope anyway), they will have a painless upgrade experience, and Apple will get more money and generate fewer support costs than if it was just selling OS software alone.
Buy two, they're small.
how to secure it
Best way is to build in a Bluetooth interface with encryption, then swallow the memory module. (small grappling hooks will secure it to the lining of your small intestine). That way if the bad guys want your private information, they'll have to (quite literally) go through you to get it.